CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

A cultist couldn’t accidentally make a wish, nor could they make the wrong wish. The system wasn’t cruel or ironic. It demanded strength of will and clarity of intent, saving many fools from regrettable impulses. Psychotropic drugs, heavy drinking, and strong sedatives disabled many inexperienced cultists entirely. If a wish was impossible or could only be granted partially, the gods ensured that the wisher knew their limitations, and they priced the wish accordingly.

The only uncertainty that crept into the system was designed. The gods never set a consistent price for anything. Except for a few very old, traditional wishes like the penny wish or speaking with the dead, a wish today under one circumstance might be vastly cheaper than a wish tomorrow under another. Subtlety and privacy led to discounts. If the wish could be explained by coincidence or freak occurrence, that was even better.

This inconsistent pricing allowed the gods to be flexible. Sometimes, they granted wishes that should’ve been slightly too expensive. Often, they demanded fatal debts for highly crafted, technically affordable wishes that would overtly change the course of history.

Nobody could ever wish for a series of coincidences and failures ending in a nuclear launch. The required changes would be small, but the intent would be too grand for any man to afford. Nevertheless, a fatal wish could be made, a suicide by prestige with no result.

Wishes were never granted for the dead—even if they died in the sanctuary, waiting through an impossible debt for the rest of their life.

Because wishes could change in value over time, they were only priced at the moment of the wish itself. One couldn’t plan ahead for a specific amount unless the goal was stable, like Piazzi’s wish to heal his leg. Then and only then, the cost was unlikely to change.

One of the most bizarre outcomes of this system was the close relationship between knowledge and prestige. When people were ignorant of the strength of a miracle, it was hardly a miracle at all. When people learned enough to recognize the impossible, even small changes could become truly astounding. This meant that belief affected the price of a wish through its relationship to coincidence and subtlety. Some tricks that used to be affordable were now impossibly expensive. Other outcomes, which had seemed impossible, were now slight modifications to an existing science. For this reason, the cults tended to value ambiguity over well-defined ideas and ignorance over knowledge. It was a deplorable attitude but understandable, for a dire discovery or two might behave like a Fall in its own right.

Despite the role that belief played in pricing wishes, the system of prestige didn’t operate on belief alone. The will to wish had to thrive below conscious thought. It had to be unshakeable like a zealot’s faith. A cultist had to know the gods were real and ready to intervene, just as they knew that the sun rose in the morning.

Only the Baron was an exception to this rule. He disbelieved in the gods, but he failed to believe so specifically and willfully, that the system itself was given a new rational framework in his mind. Once he’d lived long enough, this kind of connection had become inevitable. He could work the system without being a cultist.

#

The pressing question was, could Marco make a wish? The answer was almost certainly a resounding no, but the Baron hadn’t tested him for occult induction yet, and Phyllis would have to cooperate. She was the only one at hand with any available prestige.

The Baron was staring at his leather shoes, considering their resources and their limitations. There weren’t many options that didn’t forfeit the secrecy and security of their mission or leave Marco to the mercies of their enemies. There were hardly any options at all, now that CPUSA had boxed them in on the subway.

Phyllis was standing over the fare checker, arguing with him about the many things they could and couldn’t do. The Baron wasn’t paying much attention, but he thought the checker must be winning the argument.

The woman was red-faced with frustration. “We could kill you here, stop the train, and run back to Clark Street. What do you say to that?”

The checker replied promptly: “Clark Street will stay covered. We’ve got enough secular authority back there—”

“We could kill you under Manhattan, stop the train, and find a side tunnel.”

“What—you think it’s a maze all the way up to the banks of the East River? We’ve got enough men to blockade the tunnels. We’ll root you out.”

“We’ll break through them!”

The checker made a motorboat sound with his lips, breathy and bored. “Too many threats, lady. If you want to kill me, get it over with. When I don’t radio in, they’ll assume the worst, and you can add a city employee to your body count.” He sniffed and waited for her to respond. She just glared at him, an expression he actually shied away from by looking at the inset lights in the train’s ceiling.

“We have the invincible man,” Phyllis said, genuinely exasperated. “Don’t you understand that? You can’t win.”

The Baron didn’t like this direction, if only because it forced him to deploy the Zombie as an assassin. “We can’t just start murdering people,” he said quietly.

Phyllis swept around, all but shouting Benedict Arnold. “Why not?”

“I understand your frustration, but the Zombie is my nuclear weapon. People accept me because I’m with him and he’s with me, but if they think he’s no longer safe, or they think that I’m a threat to the peace, they’ll exile me. They might even kill me.” He looked over at the Zombie, who was swaying with the train, relaxed, trusting the Baron to come up with a plan. “It’s mutually assured destruction. If I ask him to tear the world to pieces, then I’ll be punished. Justifiably so.”

“So you’ll surrender?” the checker asked him.

The Baron scoffed. “Not to you. I’m talking about principles.”

“Tsch.” The checker took out a handkerchief and wiped his damp face. “I heard a bullet passed through you today. That true?”

“Maybe,” the Baron said.

“Jesus, everyone has so much goddamn prestige these days. You’ve got to be spent.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe, maybe,” the checker mocked. “You’re empty, or you’d have dodged already.”

That was mostly true, but easily solved with a quick word to Phyllis. The real reason they hadn’t dodged was simple—Marco probably wasn’t a full-blown cultist. He couldn’t wish and thus couldn’t dodge to a temple. Until he was fully inducted, Marco could only escape on foot.

Unfortunately for them, the average induction period was nearly a month. For someone with only a copy of Apostasy and a deep desire to make a wish, it might be upwards of a year. Marco had been listening to stories for a handful of hours, and even with the Cat in his belly, the Zombie at his side, and the sights and sounds of the occult fresh on his mind, it wasn’t enough. At absolute minimum, it’d take hours more to make him believe down to his bones.

Nevertheless, they were running out of options. “We have to try,” the Baron said to Phyllis.

“What’s that?” Phyllis asked him.

The Baron rose to his feet. “Would you mind staying where you are?” he asked the checker.

“I ain’t moving unless you try to leave.” The fare checker pointed towards the front of the subway car. “Lots of innocent civilians on the train. You can hide among them if you want a lot of bloodshed.”

“It’s nothing like that. If you’ll respect a little privacy?”

The checker snorted, then laughed briefly. “Whatever.”

The Baron rounded up everyone, and they huddled together at the rear end of the subway car, with Marco against the emergency door, still wrapped up in the Baron’s forest-green jacket. “Assume he can hear us,” the Baron whispered to the others.

“He’d wish for that?” the Zombie asked quietly.

“After enough time, yes. He’ll try to save his prestige, but we need to keep this brief or he might get nervous enough to listen in. Phyllis, I need you to give me a half-day of prestige. I’ve already got some coins in my pocket. Trust me, I’ll pay you back.”

Phyllis furrowed her brows. “What, are you planning to dodge without Marco?”

“Just trust me.”

Phyllis touched the Baron’s wrist. “I wish you had a half-day of my prestige. What now?”

The Baron felt the warm relief of new prestige settling at the back of his conscious mind. It wasn’t much, but the smallest dose felt rewarding when he’d held nothing beforehand. “Thank you. We’ll use this in an emergency.”

“What do you mean, an emergency?” She glanced over at Marco; she knew the same things the Baron did. “We can’t leave him here.”

“I know,” the Baron muttered. “The prestige might have other uses.”

“Like what? Buying into debt for something big?”

“Not that. We’ve tested it. I can’t ask for more than one week in debt.”

“Then what else?”

“If I’m made a hostage, dodging could let the Zombie off the hook. Honestly, I don’t know yet. This is precautionary.”

“Okay,” she said dismissively. “Fine.”

The Baron stole a glance at his watch. It was far past thirty-seconds since they began talking. “Okay, if he was listening in, he’s probably run out of time on his wish. Or I hope he has. Here’s the second step. Phyllis, I want you to pass a half-day to Marco.”

“Are you going to mule him?” She pinched the bridge of her nose. “He can’t use it.”

“It’s an experiment. I need to be sure he can’t make wishes.”

“How will I know?” Marco asked.

The Baron answered: “If you’re inducted, you can feel prestige. If you aren’t, you can’t. It’s like a drug, very addictive on your first try. You’ll know if this works. Phyllis, if you would?”

The Artemisian sighed but touched Marco on the shoulder. “I wish you had a half-day of my prestige.”

He looked at them questioningly. “Was that it?”

“I’ve lost the half-day,” Phyllis said grimly. “He’s muling it.”

“What does that mean?” Marco asked.

“Mule, like a pack animal. You’ve got prestige, but you can’t spend it or give it back until you’re a cultist. It’s an incredibly stupid way to hide prestige. Some very large pools were lost forever when they were handed over to someone who was too stubborn for induction.”

“Some people can’t be inducted?”

“More or less.” The Baron licked his lips. “Here’s the rub, Marco. We know you can’t dodge. We’ve got to come up with another plan to get you out of here.”

“Is anything coming to mind?” Phyllis asked.

“Not yet, no,” the Baron admitted.

“Not much time left!” the checker called. He was seated beside the doors that would open onto the train platform. He leaned over and rapped them with a knuckle. “Surrender, and you can just walk away. We’ll remove the Cat on the station floor, heal him up, and you can enjoy the rest of your lives.” He waited for them to respond.

They said nothing but cast dreary faces at him.

“Give it up, damn it,” the checker said. “I heard you talking. All of it!”

“Of course he did,” the Baron muttered.

“The boy can’t dodge!” the checker finished. “It’s over!”

“I’m a man!” Marco shouted.

“For Christ’s sake, this is your life!” The checker was sweating harder. He daubed his brow with the kerchief. “Do you think this is a gag? If you don’t surrender here, there’ll be hell to pay. There’s not a CPUSA member who won’t be ready to die—for their families, for their loved ones. If you give up, they all go home!”

The Baron turned towards the checker. “If we give up the Cat, the Soviet cult will change. You know that, don’t you?”

“I don’t care,” the checker replied.

“Stalin will have power, real occult power. There’ll be assassinations, inevitable secular bleedthrough, a war—maybe even the bomb someday, the end of the world.”

“Slippery slope bullshit! You don’t know any of that.”

The Baron marched up the car and met the checker face-to-face. “Do you know Denisov, the Orthodox representative in the States?”

“Of course I do.”

“Good. He believes that if I fail, this will end in nuclear war. Why should I doubt him? Why should I help Stalin?” A moment later, the Zombie took position in the Baron’s shadow, with Phyllis and Marco grabbing onto the standing pole just behind him.

The checker scowled. “Denisov would say anything for help.”

“Do you know what Langley’s primary goal is?” the Baron asked.

“You mean the CIA spooks? No.”

“They want to find a way to stop the bombs with prestige.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“You don’t understand. Only the Russian bombs, not the NATO warheads. That way, when they launch their arsenal, there’s no retaliation—no mutually assured destruction. They’re one step from going over the edge. Do you think the Bolsheviks are any different?”

“Screw off, man—”

“These aren’t cults looking for the afterlife. They’re looking to win the Cold War through any and all means.”

“It’s a good speech,” the checker said, “but I’ll take my chances that Stalin ain’t crazy enough to blow up the world. You don’t have a choice anyways. It’s surrender now, nice and neat, or surrender after killing men that just want to go home. Good men.”

The Baron stared carefully at the checker. “The Soviets must have a dossier on me that says I can be swayed by moral arguments. This is all too calculated.”

The checker shrugged. “So what? It’s true, ain’t it?”

“I try to do the right thing.”

“There you go. Doesn’t matter where I learned it. They have your number, chief.”

Phyllis shook the standing pole, which the Zombie had knocked loose with that earlier punch. “Zombie, can you break off a chunk of this?”

The invincible man chuckled. “Maybe.”

Phyllis stepped back from the steel pole. “Give it a try?”

“Ha! Sure.” The Zombie waved Marco and Phyllis aside. Then he turned his hand around backwards, grabbed the pole with an awkward grip, and said, “Hope I don’t fall.”

“Don’t you dare fall,” the Baron commanded.

Laughing, the Zombie threw his weight forward, a turn that would’ve torn tissues and sprained his wrist. Instead, a chunk of the metal pole twisted around until it snapped loose like a brittle straw, breaking far too easily. The Zombie threw one foot forward to catch his balance, and the entire car’s floor creaked uneasily beneath the stomp.

“Too close,” the Baron warned.

“Still got it,” the Zombie said, wiggling the broken pole like a baton in his hands.

Phyllis smiled pleasantly. “Thanks.”

The Zombie passed her the length of steel. “Break some faces. For me.”

“My pleasure.” Phyllis leveled it at an imaginary horizon, as if checking its length for the finer qualities of crooked metal piping. Once she seemed satisfied that it was heavy and blunt, she stepped in front of the checker and hefted the weapon’s weight in her right hand, up and down, up and down.

The checker’s eyes followed it. “What, going to hit me?”

With a sudden tight grip, she swung it underhand into the man’s shin. There was a hollow thunk, and the checker shouted, then covered his mouth to silence himself. His eyes bulged and watered over his hands before narrowing to a pained squint.

“Good. You’re quiet,” Phyllis said calmly. “Let’s get something straight. I’m the new dock boss in Red Hook. If he wasn’t the Baron d’Holbach, I’d be in charge here, and if you say another smug word, I’ll crack your kneecaps. Do you understand?”

The checker nodded, still holding his mouth shut.

“Don’t squeal on me either. I didn’t break anything—yet.”

The words leaked out between the checker’s fingers. “I wish it didn’t hurt so much.” Then he relaxed visibly, arms flopping against the seat, spine sagging. It was a narcotic reaction, far beyond any normal pain relief. He looked down at his pant leg lazily. “I think I’m bleeding,” he said, mostly to himself. “Jesus. That broke the skin.”

Phyllis ignored his commentary. “I’m not negotiating with a Commie,” she told the Baron. “Now, let’s come up with a way out of this mess. Any fresh ideas?”

The Baron shrugged. “We can’t face off against fifty people. It’s too much firepower and probably enough prestige to impede the Zombie. We’d need Meister Schuler, or an army.”

Phyllis frowned like she’d bitten into a lime coated in lye. “That man was terrifying.”

“Oh, I know. We’re on the same wavelength, but I can’t think of a better distraction, and I know CPUSA won’t be eager to tell New York about the Cat either.”

“Do you have some way to contact them?” she asked.

“No, but if we’re lucky, CPUSA’s setup will be sighted on the platform and reported to Tammany or Greenwich before we reach the station. They’re going to need serious hardware, and they can’t hide what they’re about to do.”

“Lucky. Your plan is to be lucky.”

“No, it’s just a possibility.”

Phyllis tapped her pipe against the backrest of the nearest seat. “This is a damn fine mess. When did it become reasonable to start a war over a rock?”

“You know the answer to that.”

“Yeah, it isn’t fucking reasonable. We can’t seriously rely on luck, Baron.”

“I know, I know.”

Marco sat down in a seat across from the fare checker, sagging listlessly in the oversized, forest-green suit jacket. “Are we going to be shot at?”

“Absolutely,” the Baron said. “We’ll need to stay low.” The train began to lean slightly, tilting over as it began going around a very long, very broad curve. “We’re turning north. Wall Street station should unload on the right hand side.”

“Can we break out to the left?” Phyllis speculated. “Maybe to another platform?”

“Just be a wall at your backs,” the checker slurred.

She pointed the pipe at the fare checker. “Shut up before I break your shins.”

“He’s right on that point,” the Baron noted. “The 2 is in a tight tunnel here. There’s not enough room on the left side to move around. Only on the right, same side as the station.”

“Then what, Baron?” Phyllis asked. “We need something.”

“Fine, you’re right,” the Baron said. In his heart, he finally made the undesirable choice—they’d have to use the Zombie to break out through enemy lines. But first… “Zombie, would you eat the man’s radio? This can’t go back to Malik.”

The Zombie waltzed over and grinned manically in front of the fare checker. When the wished-drugged man didn’t react, the Zombie leaned down and gingerly plucked the receiver off his lapel. A thin cable ran down to a belt-secured antenna and battery unit. The Zombie kneeled slowly and put the whole receiver in his mouth—nearly a fist-sized object—then closed his incisors over the cable. It snipped cleanly, like he’d run it through steel scissors.

“Fuck,” the checker muttered.

The Zombie closed his jaw, and the mic unit popped like a candy shell; then he opened his mouth again, chewing, and all the brown components wrapped in candy-colored bands disintegrated on his tongue and between his teeth. Some bright bits of electronics spilled out between the Zombie’s lips. He chewed messily, right in the checker’s face, grinding everything down to shards, slivers, and chunks. The checker didn’t say another word, but he started to shudder. The Zombie swallowed in one go and laughed.

“Thank you, friend,” the Baron said. “You’ll be breaking us out, but I want you to avoid killing anyone if possible. We need to minimize secular damage, or Phyllis and Marco won’t be able to remain in the country, let alone the city or state. Do you understand?”

“If anyone injures you,” the Zombie said, “they’ll die. No exceptions.”

“That’s your choice,” the Baron said. “Try to disable as many pieces of hardware as possible. Injure, break bones, make a ruckus. Remind them of the Pact, while I stick near Phyllis and Marco to keep them safe.”

The Zombie frowned. “Body shielding weakens the Pact.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll just be near them.”

The train began to straighten out. The curve was coming to an end.

“Next stop,” the checker murmured. “Wall Street.”

The Baron pointed to the Zombie. “Stick to the right-hand window. We’ll see an orange signal light on the approach and a red signal light to trigger the stop for the platform.” He waved Marco up and over to him. “Come.”

The teen moved slowly, but he didn’t refuse. “Yes, Baron?”

“Once we figure out the angle of their attack, I need you to put as much terrain between you and them as possible, then get down flat.”

“I’ll try,” Marco muttered, already exhausted.

The Baron patted his pants. Wallet, keys, coins—nothing else. “Cigar case and lighter?” he asked Marco.

The teen patted the inner pockets of the Baron’s jacket, found the cigar case and zippo, and passed them over. “Here. Are you smoking?”

“No. They’re just expensive.” The Baron pocketed them both, feeling more secure with a supply of nicotine at hand. It was a stupid addiction, but he wasn’t quitting today, and he’d need a smoke after this—assuming they escaped.

The Zombie watched this interaction thoughtfully. “It’s been a long day,” he observed. “Remind you of anything?”

The Baron grunted. “I don’t think the Napoleonic Wars were anything like this.” He gestured to Phyllis. “Do you have that revolver hidden away?”

“Still do.” She tapped a lump in her pants pocket.

The Baron nodded. “Hold onto it. Fire a shot only if we need a distraction. As far as they know, we’re unarmed and relying wholly on the Zombie’s invincibility.”

The Zombie grinned. “It always felt like this, just before the volley, or before the charge. Bursts of fighting after stretches of boredom. Blood and sweat, Baron. Stone, steel, brick, and dust. Oh, it’s good to be alive!”

The checker straightened in his seat and shuddered again. “That still smarts.” He pushed himself slowly to his feet. “You’re all assholes.”

“I will hit you again,” Phyllis reminded him.

He coughed and circled a finger in the air above, a signal to round up a crew. “Can I have your attention for a moment? There’s something you should know.”

“Make it brief,” the Baron said.

The checker nodded. “The braking system, the air brakes. Know how they work?”

“No,” the Baron admitted.

“Air brakes are failsafe. If you damage them, the brakes apply automatically.”

The Zombie was staring out the right-hand window. “Orange light!” he called.

“We’re out of time,” the Baron said.

“One thing!” the checker shouted. “If a single valve fractures, then the brake line vents, and the brakes lock. Instantly, the train stops!”

“I’m gonna hit you!” Phyllis shouted at the checker, raising the pipe.

The checker took one step back and wedged himself against the wall and a row of seats.  “I wish that happened now.”

The metal ping of a rupturing valve vanished beneath the screaming of the air brakes. The entire train lurched, yanking the floor out from under their collective feet. Everyone but the fare checker fell over at once; the Baron tumbled over his shoes with instinct, twisting over to catch himself with his arms. The Zombie flopped onto his chest, striking the floor with a metallic thud. Phyllis had caught herself by grabbing onto the remains of the standing pole.

The Baron raised his head, pushing up on his elbows to check on Marco.

The teen had fallen badly onto his right side, smacking the crown of his head across something solid. He was rolling onto his knees, wobbly, one hand touching a bloody tear across his scalp.

The fare checker was staggering towards Marco, reaching down into his baggy pants, down to the thigh of his hobbling, lame leg.

“Marco!” the Baron called, trying to rouse the boy to motion.

The checker jerked with a grunt of satisfaction—a sound like an adhesive bandage ripping out hair—and out of his baggy pants, he drew out a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun with two bands of sealing tape stuck to the stock. There wasn’t enough time to react.

“Zombie!” the Baron roared, even as the train lurched towards a complete stop.

The checker held the shotgun close to Marco’s back, cocked both hammers with his off hand, and pulled the right trigger. Everyone heard the first shot.

Marco’s lower back turned to a tight pit of hamburger surrounded by frayed tatters of the Baron’s jacket. He didn’t even scream, only collapsed.

Phyllis made an animal noise and struggled to pull the revolver out of her pocket.

The checker seemed unhappy with the results. He leaned in close, practically pushing the left barrel into an area over Marco’s left kidney, and fired a second shot. Thunder and lead churned a deep hole in Marco’s viscera, spraying bloodspatters up onto the shotgun, the checker’s hand, and his shirt sleeve.

There was a terrible moment of recognition as the train finally, mercifully rolled to a complete stop. Civvies were already screaming in nearby subway cars. Lights danced outside the windows, coming out of a parallel tunnel in the dark, a space far from the platform.

“The Cat is in here!” the checker roared, calling his allies to him.

Behind the Baron, a pistol barked twice; in front of him, the checker’s legs burst open, struck by two revolver rounds. Phyllis pulled the trigger a third time on an empty cylinder, while the checker fell over, howling in agony right until his face struck the floor.

Phyllis shot past the Baron, practically throwing herself onto the fallen checker, scrabbling on hands and knees. The man’s head came up half an inch, just in time for her to bring the pipe down on the back of his skull. Thunk.

No further motion. Unconscious? Dead?

Over a century ago, the Baron would’ve reacted to all of the violence with a series of traumatic appraisals, grappling with the enormity of the disaster in front of him. Even after all those years, adrenaline still ruled him. Yet the Baron didn’t subsume his thoughts into mere panic or even controlled aggression. A well-practiced reaction took hold, which he’d learned through an unpleasant amount of personal experience. Ignore casualties on all sides. Pay attention to everything, and look for the next threat, then the next.

That was why he looked up and away from Phyllis’s brutal violence, why he dismissed Marco’s damaged body, why he even ignored the readiness of the Zombie, rising to his feet. He looked along the train, saw the cowering civilians through the small inset windows in the connector doors, and then glanced outside the right-hand windows at the moving lights.

Those were flashlights, he realized, rushing along the only significant gap between the subway cars and the tunnel wall. Yards away and seconds out from contact, a squad of CPUSA was approaching their car, assailants in the dark.

The Baron was in the light. As were his allies.

“Threats, right side! Get down!” the Baron yelled, even as he threw himself to the right, trying to press his body beneath the lip of the puke-green seats. To her credit, Phyllis didn’t hesitate, instantly flattening herself beside the checker.

Only the Zombie remained on his feet, looking curiously out the right-side windows as black-clad figures rushed up to them, holding Thompson SMGs in firing positions.

“Do you recognize me?” the Zombie called to them.

There was a single heartbeat of hesitation—one of the mercs spoke into a radio handset, inaudible through the glass—and then the mercs answered all at once with an execution-style fusillade of firepower, ripping right through the windows.

Cubes of safety glass cascaded down over the Baron and Phyllis alike, while bullets rapidly scattered and splashed off the Zombie. They ricocheted into the walls, the floors, and even the plastic seat cushions, spraying little fiber threads like confetti.

The Zombie cast them a shark’s grin, and amongst the many rounds wasted against him, a single round shattered against his teeth, a momentary streak of shrapnel that deflected off and peppered the back wall. The Baron saw it happen; he wouldn’t easily forget.

The Zombie smiled even wider. CPUSA had declared war on the invincible man.

Author’s Note:

Thank you for reading! It means a great deal to me.

This chapter went up early due to functioning as a bonus Patreon chapter when I hit a Rising Stars run. If you’re seeing this much later, leave a comment about this dated artifact of the release process.

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

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July 23, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

Marco was awestruck. The Zombie’s enthusiasm for the Apostate and the end of the London cult was infectious. To the Zombie, all the world was a spectacle, and all these great and terrible things were stories to entertain—and the world deeply entertained him.

One could sense a love for life in him.

“Shit,” Marco said. “London was crazy.”

“Good riddance,” the Baron said.

“There was a lot of secular momentum then,” the Zombie explained. “The British Empire continued to expand until the end of the century, but the high water mark hit soon after. Without wishes for knowledge, they couldn’t maintain their holdings like they used to.”

“The world was a foul place before the Fall of Truth,” the Baron said. “No privacy in occult circles, and no escape. The largest cults had too much power.”

“It wasn’t always that bad,” Phyllis said. “London was something new, right? Knowledge was usually too expensive unless you were colonizing an empire.”

“The Fall of Trust made a big difference too,” the Zombie added. “Without conditional wishes, there was less to spend prestige on. Knowledge became the best route to power.”

“I was glad when it ended,” the Baron said. “My life got easier.”

Marco only had one question. “She really shot a guy and hacked his head off?”

“Yeah!” The word practically burst out of the Zombie. “Imagine this little woman in a fancy dress, and she grabbed this elephant gun some duke gave her after a safari and stoved in an assassin’s face! She didn’t even know about the Cat. She just saw the body kicking around and figured supernatural bullshit, better take his head, so she used a ceremonial machete to lop it off. Thock! She would’ve had his artifacts too, but the other assassins found her fast.”

“Jesus,” Marco said.

“Everyone used to treat her like a passive figure,” the Baron said, “but apparently she’d been studying up on previous London bankers and preparing for the inevitable breach of security. Very smart stuff. She understood her importance.”

“Think about all the colonies they lost,” the Zombie said gleefully. “She wished to answer one of the old, deep questions, and without her prestige, their intelligence was blind. She chose to give them up, to fuck every awful part of their empire, and that was before she knew that the gods would take their ball and go home. She wanted all that prestige to mean something.”

“It ended up changing the world,” the Baron said. “I hope she wanted it this way.”

The Zombie laughed. “I think she did. You’ve read Apostasy. She wanted change.”

“I’m glad she did it.” Phyllis was contemplative, eyes up on the tunnel ceiling. “I wouldn’t be a cultist otherwise. Soon, I’ll be able to wish for the afterlife.”

The Baron glanced back at her. “You have that much prestige?”

“For one purpose only,” she said.

“The afterlife,” the Baron replied. “Good. Don’t spend it on my behalf.”

“I won’t. It’s the only reason I became a cultist. I think it’s the only reason anyone who reads Apostasy becomes a cultist.” She smiled slightly. “If the Apostate knows the nature of the gods, and she believes the wish is good, I’ll trust her. Wouldn’t you?”

“I would.” Even though the Baron hadn’t met Elizabeth, he already trusted her. Her book evinced her benevolence. Her philosophy of prestige was one of personal cultivation.

The very last chapter of Apostasy was titled with a question. Why?

What was the point of prestige? What should people do with wishes?

She suggested two possible paths. The first was temporal health, wealth, and extended life. This mortal coil was a good place, she said. We shouldn’t rush to leave it, even if we sometimes couldn’t see beyond the veils of our misery. The second was the guarantee of eternity. She had nothing to say about the nature of death, but there was no greater comfort in life than the knowledge that you would survive its end. If a cultist desired nothing in this world, then they should labor for a seat in the next. Better that than selling your prestige for money.

Marco asked only a couple more questions on the walk through the New York underground. He wanted to know how long it took to save for the afterlife.

“A lifetime,” Phyllis answered, “and even then, it usually takes a little debt to meet your price. It’s a little different for everyone. Nobody knows why. Maybe the cost is arbitrary. Being good or bad doesn’t seem to make a difference.”

“I’ll get it someday,” Marco said. “I’ll meet dad there.”

Nobody reminded Marco that Federico Barilla hadn’t been assured the afterlife, that only some of the cultists in every generation went to the gods. There wasn’t enough prestige to go around otherwise, and while most cults had an informal insurance policy for veteran members, sometimes a person died alone or too quickly, before anyone could or would help.

Even if most people worked for the afterlife, it was a sad truth that only some of them would be guaranteed a place in the fortress of forever. It was fundamentally unfair, and the Baron suspected it was largely illusory, a kind of spiritual busywork.

He thought every “soul” was saved somewhere, but those who wished to go to the gods were allowed to participate in shaping this world after they died. For whatever reason, it wasn’t a lasting motivation for the dead, but it was still something sacred and strange.

To be dead and touch the world was almost holy. Almost.

The tunnel rose on the approach to the tidal strait. The actual subways crossing over into Manhattan were in the layer above. If they weren’t trying to avoid more CPUSA watchers, they would’ve just taken the 2 all the way back to Grand Central, but this line, the Biltmore, and Grand Central Station would be under heavy surveillance. Switching to the C train was still their best chance.

Around four-thirty, the Baron spotted a change in the tunnel. “End of the road.”

Someone had painted a white, five pointed star by a ladder leading up. Maybe twenty feet further down, at the edge of the lamplight, the paved tunnel walls ended. The bricks stopped in a jagged edge, and the dark bedrock, sucked into the shadows, appeared formless and void. It was as if the world ended there, a tube jutting into the abyss. This was the last stop on the smuggler’s path out of Crown Heights. All that lay beyond was raw stone, the bones of the Earth.

The Baron had Marco turn around for one more check up. The fatal wound was closing, becoming a pit of blood-red granulation tissue. He was growing back as fast as bamboo, about an inch of flesh an hour. Once the wound was filled, it’d be covered by a fresh lump of swollen, stringy scar tissue, and the bullet would dissipate. Only the most delicate organs would be fully restored, for the Cat paid no heed to beauty, only function. It left marks on the body like a reminder—here the bearer died once. Don’t forget it.

The Baron took off his nice fifty dollar jacket and gave it to Marco to cover his bloody clothes. The forest green wool would be ruined, and a nobleman’s vanity pestered him even as he reasoned that this was for Marco’s safety and for the success of their journey. Another suit could be bought, but it still pained him to willingly soil the work of a fine tailor.

Marco didn’t fill out the suit jacket. The shoulders slumped, and he was too skinny despite his athletic build. The Baron was a stronger, broader man. Anyone could tell at a glance that Marco was wearing a costume, but it was better than visible bloodstains.

The Baron set his lamp at the bottom of the ladder. The Zombie climbed ahead, carrying his handle in his teeth, mostly for fun. Once he was at the top, he shouted down for everyone to follow. The maintenance room the shaft ended in was empty and unlocked.

They climbed out and up, extinguishing the lamps and leaving them beside a locker, and they ascended into the station for the 2 and 3 lines at Clark Street. A couple of people saw them pass through a maintenance gate, but no alarms were raised, no questions were asked.

The Clark Street station was dimly soaked in orange light, shining weakly from older incandescent bulbs with carbon filaments. The place felt aged, even where tiling and paint had recently been replaced. It was as if the environment had a kind of visual inertia, holding back the advancement of technology and materials in order to remain as consistently bleak and dreary as an underexposed, sepia-toned photograph. Crime fit its darkness. The spirit of corruption lurked in the corners, and their inconsistent, ill-worn dress and haggard expressions matched the mood. Instinctually, onlookers knew trouble when they saw it and turned away. If they dared to look up, they saw the Baron’s searching eyes and the Zombie’s eager, almost bloodthirsty stare. They saw Marco looking down into memories of death.

Only Phyllis tried to smile and acknowledge others, as if nothing were wrong.

In the middle of the stairwell to the surface, she whispered to the rest, “We’re standing out. If the heat is on, we’ll be spotted immediately.”

“You think the cops will have someone watching the station?” the Baron asked.

“Absolutely.” She tapped the walkie-talkie, still hooked onto her waistline. “Malik was on here. You were right about the fifth column. They’ve got a real force, even in the NYPD.”

“Is that radio on?”

“I had it off because we were underground.”

“Switch it on low.”

She clicked the knob. “Done.”

“Zombie, how close do you think Malik had to be to talk to Red Hook?”

“Five miles. Ten maybe. Assuming he didn’t come in that car we saw. Or use prestige.”

“He might be in Brooklyn, maybe Manhattan then. It’s difficult to say.” The Baron pointed to Marco. “Stay near the Zombie. If they’ve got a watcher, they might try something.”

“Why aren’t they down here?” Marco asked.

“What’s that?”

“We were just at the train platform. We could’ve taken a train.”

“They aren’t watching then,” the Zombie guessed.

“I hope so. New York might’ve shut down any police response,” the Baron said.

They passed over a landing, halfway up the steps. There was a reflection of a reflection of blue light from the world above. The exit wasn’t in view, but they were two turns from spiraling up to the surface. The Baron was at the front of their group. He came around the corner and saw a pair of police officers at a Y-junction, where the stairs split left and right to reach the street. The cops’ bored gazes were cast up at the afternoon sky. Someone was yelling instructions down to them.

The Baron paused calmly, and the rest stopped behind him. He checked his watch and made a dramatic sigh. Then he turned around, arms dropping to his sides in submission to make-believe responsibilities, and he walked back around the corner. “Careful,” he whispered as he passed the others.

They followed him down into the station again.

They stopped on the nearest platform, recently vacated by the 3 train going back to Manhattan. “Police,” he told them quietly, once they were seated on benches. “They’re being directed to cover the station somehow. I don’t think they noticed me.”

“That’s why you were acting weird?” Phyllis asked.

“That’s why he was acting well,” the Zombie corrected.

The Baron grunted. “We need information. Are they here for us? If so, what do they know?”

“Does it matter?” Phyllis asked.

“They might not know enough to recognize us if we split up a bit.”

“I don’t like splitting up.” The Zombie always objected to leaving the Baron alone except under controlled circumstances.

“I understand, but it may be the best plan. Phyllis, which of us is least recognizable?”

“What do you mean?”

“Can any of us safely question the officers on the stairs?”

“I can,” she answered. “You know I can.”

The Baron smiled briefly. “If you’re sure, then I leave the decision to you.”

“Do you have a better plan?”

“We can’t make good plans without good intel.”

“Fine then, but I want the Zombie to follow me. I won’t be arrested. I’m too young to dodge on an afterlife wish, and I refuse to die today.”

“Fine. I’ll wait here with Marco,” the Baron said.

Phyllis got up, and the Zombie followed her. She dropped the radio by Marco, and they took the hall back to the stairwell. The Baron reached over and turned up the radio’s volume.

“If they come running,” the Baron said to the teen, “then we’ll head for the underground and double back for another station. Are you okay to run?”

Marco tipped his head to one side. “I’m feeling a lot better.”

“The Cat is a powerful artifact. You understand why we need to get it back to Orthodox hands. If they have this, they can’t be beaten by Stalin’s men.”

“The Russians are really fighting with each other?”

“It’s a civil cold war. The Bolshevik faction has been using the secular government to purge the Orthodox Church and threaten their secular leadership, but they haven’t been able to target their occult members directly. It’s mutually assured destruction that holds them back, like an occult nuclear standoff. While the secular government could annihilate the church, an assassin armed with the Cat, the Whistle, and a single Apple could probably eliminate the Communist Party’s inner circle in a single night. For a long time, Nagy was that assassin.”

“Nagy was the guy who died with the Cat last?”

“That’s right. He helped the Bolsheviks in exchange for the power to destroy them. It was a good balance of power until Nagy died on that ship in the harbor.”

“Why did Nagy die, anyways?”

“A man named Jacono killed him. I don’t know why he was trying to snipe a New York task though.”

Marco had a blank expression.

“Nevermind, you’ll have time to learn about this stuff some other day. If I ever figure it out.” The Baron had put a little thought towards it, but without asking Nagy’s boss or finding something like a shipping manifest for the SS John G Paines, he’d probably never know why Nagy had come to New York. He reached over and picked up the radio. “Not even a casual check-in on this channel,” the Baron added. “They must’ve switched away.”

Marco adjusted the Baron’s jacket, tightening it around himself for a bit of warmth. “Could you look for the channel they’re on?”

“If I had some prestige left, I could wish to set the channel.”

“You don’t have any?”

“I spent it. Had to survive. Everything else is just details.” He looked up at the dim carbon-filament lighting. “What a bleak place.”

“Yeah,” Marco muttered, adjusting the jacket again. “Cold too.”

After a couple more minutes, Phyllis came down with the Zombie close behind her. Her broad frown spoke volumes. “They’re covering all the stations,” she said. “They’re looking for an Asian man.”

“The Zombie?” the Baron asked.

“He’s a cop killer. Murdered a police captain by shooting him in the head.”

“That man was alive when we last saw him. They could’ve helped—” The Baron felt a cold lump tightening up in his gut. “Of course, they kill their own. They killed their own.”

“They’re trying to get the Zombie arrested,” she said. “Maybe they want to separate us.”

The Baron clenched his knees with his hands, thinking hard about the strategy. “They just want to find us. Removing the Zombie helps, but finding us is what matters, and the Zombie is the easiest to find. They wouldn’t have any pictures, but there’d be no missing a tall Asian man in ruined clothing.”

“So this is about using secular authority to pinpoint us?” Phyllis asked.

“Yeah, and CPUSA is probably fighting to keep Tammany Hall out of this as well. If the fight in Crown Heights was reported to New York, they might identify Cat from the story alone. This is about corralling us, then separating Marco from us. We both know that we can’t let New York find out, or the Cat is lost, an occult army takes to the streets, and Langley—”

“Oh, I don’t even want to think about the CIA getting involved,” Phyllis said.

“They already are. We had an agent pestering us yesterday. They definitely don’t know about the Cat though, or there’d be more than police looking for us.”

“It’d be interesting to fight the National Guard,” the Zombie said, “but today isn’t the day.”

“What did it look like up there?” the Baron asked Phyllis.

“They knew what you looked like, they knew what the Zombie looked like. Thank God he knew to stay out of view. I thought he was going to come around the corner and scare them.”

The Zombie grinned.

“They said you had two companions,” Phyllis continued, “and they were telling everyone there was a reward for any information leading to your capture and arrest. There were several other officers in view. I went up to the street for a moment, borrowed a cigarette, said I was going to smoke. There are squad cars everywhere. Ten men just at this station.”

“They’re sticking to the surface?” the Baron asked. “Why?”

“Mobility probably,” the Zombie answered, “and open terrain. It’d be hard to attack them, and they could respond if we showed up at another station nearby.”

“I agree,” Phyllis said. “They were a bit confused when I came back down so soon, but they didn’t stop me. We can’t stay here long though. They might come searching.”

The Baron nodded. “Nobody has noticed anyone strange down here?”

“Nothing suspicious,” Phyllis agreed. She took the radio back from the Baron. “Hear anything on this?”

“They aren’t on that channel anymore. Keep it for now though. If I get some spare prestige later, we can tune it to Malik’s frequency.”

“Right.” She turned it off with a click.

The Baron looked over the other three, thinking out loud. “They assume we’re going to head to the surface. Why? What do they expect?”

“Getting on the train is a bad idea. If they sight us, we’re trapped,” Phyllis said.

“Right. So, our best option is to get out of the tunnels, break out in a random direction, and find a cab. Once we’re in a car, we’re almost impossible to track.”

“So they’re watching for us before we break out,” the Zombie said. “Smart.”

The Baron hummed thoughtfully. “Malik doesn’t have infinite manpower. How many places could he cover?”

“Just the stuff around here?” Marco guessed.

“What’s your call?” Phyllis asked the Baron. “We can’t stay here.”

The Baron patted his knees, then stood up. “We get on the train and ride far. I’m talking to the terminal, past Grand Central. Then we hole up in a car and keep going. Even if they sight us at a stop in Manhattan, they can’t actually outrace us from station to station, and they can’t assault a train with the Zombie on it. That’d be suicide. We simply outride them to Upper Manhattan, then get out when we’re clear and take a cab.”

Phyllis looked vaguely upset by the simple plan, but there really weren’t any better ideas. They stood up and took the stairs down to the lowest platform. Many of the people who’d seen them rise from the depths were still waiting for an afternoon train, scheduled to arrive at ten to the hour. A yellowed wax-paper sign was printed with the schedule and hung high on the back wall. The row of old bulbs behind it vigilantly drove away moisture and cast an orange glow over the ticket counter. The Baron paid for four tickets in cash, sliding the money through a metal pit under a foggy sheet of glass. There were only a few minutes left before the train arrived.

They waited in calm silence. Moments like these were defined by fortune, and prayer seemed like the least appropriate response. The Baron watched the stairwell, remaining alert. If their fate was to face a fight here and now, he would see it coming and react in the moment. Otherwise, his sleeve was pulled back and his watch was ticking.

The train came on time. Two brief blasts of the horn signalled the stop. It rumbled into station, air brakes squealing, then hissing as brake valves opened.

The Baron stepped into the rear car, which stank of body odor and cigarettes, and took a seat on a puke-green plastic bench, patterned with carved initials. Marco joined him, followed by Phyllis. The Zombie entered and stood beside them, holding onto a standing bar in the center of the car.

On a late Sunday afternoon, the subway was nearly empty, and most of the people went towards the front, congregating to avoid casual crime like pickpocketing and verbal harassment. They were left alone with each other, and when the doors slid shut, it sounded like a sigh of relief.

Once the train was underway, dipping underneath the East River, the Baron said aloud, “The worst is yet to come. Tomorrow will be far more difficult.”

“We’re going to break into the UN,” the Zombie said dreamily.

“Mm. We’ll scout it first.”

“Shh!” Phyllis hissed. “Someone’s coming.”

Sure enough, someone was coming through the connectors. He was a fare checker, with a moderate, slightly saggy build that’d once been much thicker. His clothes were oversized, built for a man ten percent larger. His pants were held in place almost entirely with a belt cinched up to his belly button, and he was walking stiffly, like he had one unbending knee.

The checker stopped amidst them. “Lady, gentlemen, your tickets please.”

The Baron handed over the stack of four.

The fare checker ran through the set and nicked them each with a hole punch. He was heavily bearded and very tired, sweating a little despite the cool underground temperature. He rubbed the bags under his eyes, then handed the tickets back. “Thank you.”

The Baron watched the checker carefully.

The fare checker smiled and very carefully lowered himself into a seat across from them, keeping one leg half-straight. “Old injury,” he said by way of explanation. “You’re the last bunch.”

There was a small radio clipped over his chest pocket. He reached up and pressed a call button. “All passengers checked in. Over.”

“Roger. All passengers. Over and out,” the radio replied.

“The conductor,” the checker said. “I hope you don’t mind me sitting here.”

“We do,” Phyllis said.

The fare checker grinned broadly. “I’m afraid my knee isn’t good enough to stand that long. If you’ll indulge me for a bit—”

Phyllis stood. “I’ll help you up.”

The checker closed his eyes and shook his head wearily. “You know I’m not standing up.”

“We’ll go then,” Phyllis decided. “Everyone up. We’re moving.”

“Why would that do any good?” the checker asked.

The Baron scowled. So CPUSA had tracked them here. “How?” he asked.

“How what?” the checker queried.

The Zombie punched the standing bar with his fist. The screws on the floor plate popped out with a metal crack, and the bent bar rattled loosely from its mooring on the ceiling.

“I’m not playing coy,” the checker said. “Calm down you freak.”

Phyllis started pacing. “Fuck me.”

“How did you get on the same car as us?” the Baron asked the checker. “You weren’t on the platform. You must’ve already been on the train.”

“Does it matter if you know how?” the checker asked.

“It does.”

“Then I won’t tell you.”

“I’ll force your jaw closed over my fingers,” the Zombie said. “Your teeth will pop like corn in a kettle.”

The checker rolled his eyes and relaxed further, slouching. “They spotted the lady there on the surface. When she went back down, they figured you’d take one of the trains and radioed us at Borough Hall station. I got on the 2, the other man got on the 3. If you didn’t get on here at Clark Street, we’d get off and look for you.”

“So you found us,” the Baron said.

“Sure have.” The checker tapped the radio. “And we know where you are.” He shuddered and shook his head as if to clear it. “I’m glad this’ll be over soon.”

“What do you mean?” Phyllis asked.

“You ain’t going to kill me, right?”

Phyllis refused to answer. Nobody else spoke up. Marco stared only at his feet, unwilling to engage with the scenario that was unfolding around him.

The checker continued. “You don’t need to add any more bodies to the tally. You’re finished. There’ll be plenty of time for the rest of the old pinko party to get their ducks in a row. When you reach Wall Street, you’ll be surrounded. They’ll stop the train, break it if they have to, and then you’ll either have to make a mess right in Greenwich’s back yard or give up.”

“Alert New York and lose the Cat, or lose the Cat to you?” the Baron asked.

The checker shrugged. “Can you really afford to make another scene like the one you made off Sterling? You’re cop killers now. New York might sweep that up in a day or two, but they can’t hide the mess if it’s too big. Maybe Langley could—but do you want them to have the Cat?”

“You sound like you know what’s happening.”

“Eh. Only what scuttlebutt you pick up from old drinking buddies,” the checker said. “I’m almost done with this crap. I’ve been out of the party for years. All that’s left is for you to give it up, give that Russian bastard his artifact, and then we can go home.”

“You’re inducted,” the Baron guessed.

“Lots of us are cultists. The KGB trained us when we fought the Pinkertons.”

“You mean you fought with Langley-trained operatives.”

“Not the Langley folks themselves, but yeah. You fight fire with fire.” The checker scratched his beard, then straightened it with his palm. “Are you going to surrender?”

“Not to you,” the Baron said.

The checker shrugged. “That kid has the Cat, right? If he wants to live, you’ll need to hand him over and get him to surgery. You’ll have to surrender. We’re talking fifty men there. They won’t touch you, but they’ll just murder the boy and drag his corpse off.”

“I’m a man,” Marco said, finally looking up.

“That’s great,” the checker said wryly. He loosened his belt and relaxed a little more, squirming in his seat. “If you want to be an old man, tell the Baron you want to give up.”

“I can’t,” Marco said. “I won’t.”

“Suit yourself,” the checker said. “There’s a reason we wanted you on a train.”

Author’s Note:

So ends arc 11, wherein we learn some of the great myths that define the secret world. I really hope you enjoyed them.

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

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July 22, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

Marching through the diffuse orange sweeps of lantern light, Phyllis finished reciting the myth of the Zombie and the system of prestige.

A silence fell about them, interrupted only by the soft crunches of tunnel grit beneath shoes. The echoes of shuddering pipes, rumbling rails, and groaning machinery emanated low and soft from the walls. The earth seemed alive around them, breathing in mechanisms while reflecting upon the foundational legend of the whole damn world.

For the Baron, this felt almost religious. He didn’t believe in gods or the divine, but he believed that occasionally the whole sweep of history bundled itself up, stacking cause upon cause, riding higher and higher like energy piling up into the peak of a wave. Then, and only then, someone riding the swell might nudge it this way or that before it crested over and crashed into a long future. Someone could choose the beginning of otherwise inevitable, world-making change.

The Baron had once ridden the wave of science and philosophy, enjoying the Enlightenment. The Apostate had crested the wave of the occult, undoing empires. The Zombie had ridden that highest wave of ancient magic, and all of mundane history had followed his sins.

Even Marco, the initiate, was hushed in awe of that terrible influence.

Then Phyllis chuckled, breaking the reverent moment. She glanced back at the Zombie. “No offense meant to you, of course.”

“None taken!” The invincible man was grinning broadly, teeth reflecting warmly in the lamplight. “I’m always flattered by her version of the story. I’m not so clever, and it’s hard to imagine I outsmarted the gods, but here I am. The Apostate’s explanation is as good as any. She leaves out my favorite detail though.”

“What’s that?” Phyllis asked.

“Among the cults of the Plains, they sang that for my sin, the Land of Fire sunk beneath the waves.” He clicked his tongue. “Not that I blame her for not knowing it. I didn’t know about it until a Mormon Oracle lectured me about Native American cultic myth.”

“You really don’t care about all that stuff?” Marco asked.

“What stuff?” the Zombie asked.

“About being a murderer and a trickster.”

“Why deny my nature?”

“Because!” Marco whined. He didn’t have the skill to articulate his feelings, but the Baron understood. It was a common notion—being called something was worse than actually being it.

“It’s like cheating,” the Baron said. “Nobody wants to be named a cheater.”

“Even if they cheat?” the Zombie asked.

“That’s human nature.”

The Zombie shook his head. “The labels are useless. I can only remember so long ago, and once I’ve forgotten something, it’s no longer a part of me. We know the stories. I’ve been insane. I’ve been feral. I’ve been a priest. I’ve been a king. It doesn’t matter.”

“Wouldn’t you want to know what you’ve done?” Marco asked.

The Zombie shrugged. “It’s not my choice to forget. The past is buried by all those years. The last three centuries are all that’s real to me.”

The Baron said nothing, but the implication was there. Near the end of this century, the last memories of a lonely Golem would begin to disappear. All that would remain would be the Baron’s friend. He wouldn’t be the same creature he was when they met.

“Are you like this because you don’t have a soul?” Marco asked.

The Zombie sighed, openly mocking the teen.

“Sorry. I know you don’t know,” Marco said.

“Stop apologizing,” Phyllis insisted.

Marco waved away her complaints. “What’s it like without a soul?” he asked.

The Zombie laughed. “It’s not like anything.”

The Baron held his lamp up high. “What color is the fire, Marco?”

“Orange.”

“Good. Why is it orange?”

“Cause I see it.”

“Because you can see it’s orange?”

“Yes. It’s got a color.”

“You have an image inside your head. You can experience the orangeness of orange.”

“I guess so.”

“The Zombie cannot. He reacts as if he can see the orange. To us, he is completely alive and can tell us exactly how he should be feeling. He can talk about an inner life, he can even understand our notion of orangeness, but without the alleged soul, he can’t experience it.”

“What does he experience then?”

“Nothing,” the Zombie answered. “When I look inside, there’s nothing. I don’t know why I can talk about what I’m seeing or hearing or thinking. I just do, and it’s correct.”

“I think the soul theory is wrong,” the Baron said, “but that’s neither here nor there. It’s interesting enough on its own. If there were souls, he’d prove the human mind was identical to the human brain. A soul would just be a place for reflecting the activity of the mind, like a mirror.”

Marco looked at the tunnel walls and shivered. “Sounds a little scary to me.”

“It is,” the Zombie said happily.

“It really isn’t,” the Baron said.

“Only as long as you’re around,” Phyllis said to the Baron. “The Apostate was afraid of him for a reason. I’m sure she’d be happy to see you were still alive.”

The Baron felt a pang of anxiety, as if he were embarrassed because the imaginary Elizabeth in his head cared about him. It was absurd, of course. She was just a figure, someone far away from another cult and another time. She couldn’t care about his mere survival. He didn’t really matter—no more than any celebrity would.

Maybe she’d feel like he mattered though. “Maybe she’d be happy because she finally met the other immortals,” the Baron said with a smile. “People who understand endless life.”

“Is that why you call her Elizabeth?” Phyllis asked.

“What’s that?” The Baron’s thoughts dissipated into the darkness.

“Do you like her?” she asked.

The Baron laughed. That was the common interpretation, easy to dismiss. “I don’t know her, young lady. I don’t know what kind of woman she is, what kind of thinker. I don’t know what she looks like, and I don’t care. It’s not the promise of her that entices me. It’s the mystery. She chose to live forever. Why? What does she live for? Her book doesn’t tell us. She barely even talks about herself, but I want to know. She’s the only other ageless person in the world, and she remembers why she wanted it. Nobody else has that perspective.”

“You want to sit down over coffee and chat about immortality?”

“I want to know what’s in her head. This was thrust upon me, but she demanded it at metaphorical gunpoint. I honestly don’t know what she’d tell me. It’s fascinating.”

“Why call her Elizabeth then?”

“Why not?”

“There must’ve been a reason.”

“That title is an insult. She doesn’t deserve it. That’s all.”

Phyllis smirked. “I don’t believe that.”

“What else would my reason be?”

“You like her. Or you like the idea of her.”

He scoffed. “You think that I’m being familiar?”

“Sounds like it to me.”

“You can’t be familiar with someone you’ve never met.”

“Ah, yes,” Phyllis said brightly, “that’d be crazy.”

“Ha!” The insult put a spring in the Baron’s step. “I’m wounded.”

“Marco is wounded,” the Zombie said cheerily. “You’re just a wimp.”

They reached a low in the tunnel. It’d gradually dipped over the last few hundred yards, passing underneath some conduit of utilities boring through the rock overhead. At the bottom, there was an unusually deep pool of water that nobody bothered to drain, but debris had been heaped into an isthmus of gravel and paved over with more wood. This raised the path near the ceiling of the tunnel, and someone had hammered a hook into the roof at the nadir of the curve.

The Baron stopped there, reached up and touched the ceiling. It was damp. At his feet, cinder blocks were set together to hold down separate parts of the plywood platform. “How are you feeling Marco?” He hung his oil lantern off the hook and checked the radium dials of his watch. “It’s been almost an hour since you were shot in the back.”

Marco stopped beside the Baron. “It just feels really hot all the time. Like someone is washing the holes with steaming water.” He turned around, showing his back to the Baron. “How do they look?”

d’Holbach looked over the wounds. Phyllis stepped around to join him. The Zombie stood patiently, having no reason to rest his hand or set down the lantern. There was a great deal of obscenely thick blood jiggling in the bullet holes like black puddings. The back of Marco’s shirt was caked to his skin with a thick layer of heavy clotting like drying paint, and it must’ve bled for most of the walk. There was a dark wave of bloodstains traveling all the way down his back to his pants. By its sheer volume, the Baron guessed that the Cat must do something to replace the blood.

“You’re closed up, but don’t touch the clots,” the Baron judged. “Don’t pick at your shirt.”

“I won’t,” he said.

“It doesn’t itch or hurt?” Phyllis asked.

“It does, but then the heat kinda scratches it. Like when your foot itches and you put it on a hot sidewalk. It’s like that.”

“Good,” the Baron said. “The Cat is pulling you together.”

“I’m getting pretty hungry,” Marco added.

“We can’t do anything about that yet.”

“My feet are starting to hurt too.”

“I can imagine. Take a seat for a minute. We can’t spare much time though.”

Marco squatted down onto a cinderblock and groaned like an old man. “Jesus.”

“Burns?” the Baron asked.

Marco nodded.

“Your nerves are growing back,” the Baron guessed.

“I guess,” Marco said. “Dying hurts really bad.”

“I told you earlier,” the Zombie said, “it has to.”

“Bet that’s why the Apostate chose to live forever,” Phyllis added idly. “Fear of dying.”

“It’s why people want the Cat,” the Baron said. “You can take big risks when you have a few lives to lose. It’s what made Nagy so terrifying.”

“Nagy?” Phyllis asked.

“The Soviet assassin who died on the SS John G. Paines. He was famous for having zero fear.”

“Was he crazy or something?”

“No. It was the practice that made him so dangerous. Most people die or retire after taking a few lives, but Nagy had the Cat in him. He couldn’t die and didn’t have to retire. That gave him an edge. Then he got good at killing, and that made him almost unbeatable.” The Baron shrugged. “He almost single handedly wiped out the Thule Society.”

“Who?” Phyllis asked.

“The Nazi cult,” the Zombie said.

“Ah.”

“Langley killed the last Thule member in South America a few years back,” the Baron said. “We found him actually. His death was inevitable after that.”

“Do you do this stuff all the time?” Marco asked.

“Not exactly like this, but the Zombie and I are always doing something.”

“I wouldn’t protect you if you sat around all day and drank wine,” the Zombie said.

“See? My safety depends on risking my life. I have the smartest friends.”

“Better than being bored.” The Zombie’s tone was ambiguous. It was hard to tell if he’d really meant it or if he was cracking wise. The Baron often felt it must be both.

d’Holbach preferred to never plan for his own demise, but the Zombie couldn’t stand to be bored. His lust for excitement sometimes led them to places and circumstances where the Baron’s life was at risk anyway, and the Zombie became very, very upset over it. This contradiction was a dry joke between them, though it was rarely discussed. It was also a terrible precipice upon which they often ran, inches from disaster.

Marco looked up at them. “Have you tried looking for that lady before?”

“No, I can’t go back to Europe,” the Baron said. “Not since the Napoleonic Wars. I was already facing death threats after the Fall of Trust. By the time Elizabeth came around, we were already off the continent and heading across the Atlantic after Napoleon himself.”

Phyllis asked, “Was Napoleon a cultist?”

“No, but he had several major French cultists in his entourage, and many of them were sympathetic to my plight. It’s a long story though.” To Marco, he said, “Even if I could go back to Europe, it wouldn’t matter. If she’s alive, she’s very, very well hidden or she’s fled the region. People hate her far more than me, and she doesn’t have the Zombie to protect her.”

“What did she do?” Marco asked. “What’s the big deal?”

“There are two answers. One, she’s a woman. Two, she knows the most important secret in the world. That’s why she can live forever.”

For once, Marco’s blank expression cracked into a slight smile. “What’s the secret?”

The Zombie answered first: “It wouldn’t be a secret if she told anyone.”

“That’s not what he meant,” the Baron chided.

“Sounded like it to me. He’s not too bright.”

“Ignore him,” the Baron said to Marco. “You want to know what the secret is about, right?”

“Yeah,” Marco said.

“She knows what the Baron wants to know,” the Zombie interrupted.

“She knows the nature of the gods,” Phyllis said.

“Thank you both for answering for me,” the Baron said wryly.

“Did she step on your toes?” the Zombie asked.

The Baron felt the playful barb. “Are my toes broken? No?”

The Zombie laughed. “You tell me!”

“The last time they were broken was the last time you stepped on them.”

“Children,” Phyllis said lightly, “we can’t sit around forever.”

The Baron checked his radium dials. “Okay,” he said, “break is up.” He helped Marco to his feet—the teen made a noise like a creaking log. Then d’Holbach picked the lantern off the hook, and he led them onwards.

The tunnel rose for a brief time, then flattened out and began to track a broad, otherwise unnecessary curve. Either there was an existing underground structure almost eighty feet below the soil, or more likely, the quality of the rock changed, and they were circling around a geological dike of softer material. The curve was disorienting, but the tunnel could only lead to one place. Out and onto the surface sooner than later, and out of the safety of the underground. They’d already spent an hour down here. He worried about what might be happening overhead, especially if the police captain were dead. New York would be involved, Langley would be involved, Malik would be making plans—it wasn’t as if they could respond to any of it, but they couldn’t even observe it from down here. Things would change soon.

Marco seemed the least aware of this. The entire walk was turning into a kind of lesson for him, the progression of his induction into the occult tradition. The system of prestige wasn’t a kind of hidden magic waiting to be unlocked. You couldn’t announce it on the nightly news and have people making wishes before bed. Even showing them a wish wouldn’t give them access to power. That’s why the system never spread out of control; it’s why becoming a cultist required a lot of time and energy. The gods themselves judged when you were ready to participate, and they usually required their cultists to believe without any doubts, to have a low-level connection with the idea of prestige even if they were horribly misinformed about its applications.

Leaks and conspiracies about the system of prestige were harmless. Most people flat out wouldn’t believe, even if they were hardcore believers in religious miracles, witchcraft, or other forms of magic. The Baron thought they were inherently too reasonable, only accepting their personal fantasies without question. Modern religion even acknowledged this careful disbelief by placing all power in hands beyond their own. Miracles and magic happened to people, according to them. It never came from people.

This was a pervasive attitude in the West, and it made induction a real chore. One needed to cultivate a great deal of credulity to participate. Otherwise, they couldn’t muster the intent necessary to make a wish occur. Just saying the words out loud wasn’t enough—being shown the system was real wasn’t enough. To become a cultist, one had to become part of the occult world through and through—to swim down in Phyllis’s metaphor or to be weighed down until you drowned in the truth. The Baron judged that it wouldn’t be the Cat’s presence that would induct Marco, though the Cat would’ve functioned regardless of belief. It was Marco’s interest in their stories which would make him a permanent part of this secret world.

The Baron had to do his part to cure Marco’s ignorance. “Listen,” he said, “I want you to promise me something.”

“Yes, sir?” Marco asked.

“When we get out of here, I’m going to pick up a little prestige wherever I can. After that, I might teach you how to make a very specific kind of wish called a dodge.”

“Yes, sir.”

“If it works, that’ll mean you’ve become a cultist. You could participate in the New York cult. You could earn the afterlife for yourself, or any other wish you had for that matter.” He glanced back. Marco was rubbing his dirt stache with a finger, a thoughtful expression. “The thing you have to promise me is that you won’t persecute women cultists.”

“Okay,” Marco said with a little confusion.

“The cults in the West don’t allow women to become cultists. It’s a foul tradition from the Vatican cult going back almost a thousand years. The early fathers were already steeped in a misogynistic church tradition. They picked some ammunition out of Saint Augustine’s works, justified the men’s only club with quotes about original sin, and kept the power for themselves.”

Marco looked at Phyllis.

“That’s right. They wouldn’t have allowed her to become a cultist. They still won’t. The only reason she’s here is because of Elizabeth. She wrote a handbook in strict violation of the requirement that only record books may be kept. It teaches women how to recruit other women. If you went to Tammany Hall tomorrow and told them about Phyllis, they’d drive her out.”

“Or kill me,” Phyllis added darkly.

“You can’t tell anyone about Phyllis, and if you meet other women cultists, you have to help them. Be at their disposal.”

“Dad helped you?” Marco asked Phyllis.

“He did,” she said, lying only by omission. “He believed in women.”

“My dad was a good man,” Marco said, testing the words and finally finding them agreeable. It was revisionist thinking, a way to further obscure his grief for this journey. The Baron had seen it often enough in young soldiers at war, calm even around camp, only letting themselves fall to pieces after they sailed home and saw all the reminders that things would never be the same again. “I think I get it, Baron.”

“Tell me,” the Baron suggested.

“They hate the Apostate because she was a woman, and she made other women into cultists.” Thoughts were connecting in Marco’s head. “Who made her a cultist though?”

“A clever question.” The Baron smiled. “London did, before they fell.”

“Oh, it’s a great story!” the Zombie cried. “I couldn’t aspire to half the things she did. She put one over on the gods, shamed them—like me! She ruined an empire. Nations fell because of what she did. The whole purpose of prestige changed. It was a, uh—Baron?” He snapped his fingers, pointing at his friend.

“Paradigm shift,” the Baron said.

“Yes!” the Zombie said proudly. “I’m not in the story of course, but not all stories are perfect, and it’s one of my favorites, the Fall of Truth. People are still angry about it, even today!”

“What happened?” Marco asked.

“I’ll tell you the story,” the Zombie said. “It’s great. Lots of people died.”

The Fall of Curses happened in the early 14th century. There was a big disaster—a huge famine for two years. Literally decimated, a tenth of the population had died. Bodies were stacked waist high, and the major occult powers were shaken up, alliances were disappearing. Everyone knew that you couldn’t make permanent artifacts anymore. The big powers, the churches, the guilds—they spent two centuries scrapping over any artifacts that’d survived the conflicts. Lots of wars, even the Crusades—they all had secular roots, but the cults used them as cover to ransack each other, to slaughter their leadership and their bankers.

Bankers became a big deal then. You couldn’t make an artifact to hold your prestige anymore. It used to be that you blessed something with value, and then whoever broke it in the right way would earn the prestige back. Great, right? But now someone had to hold onto the prestige at all times, and it couldn’t be your leader—he had to show his face. If he died banking up the prestige of your cult, pow! Your power base would be destroyed in one shot.

The only option was to get someone tough, someone loyal and secret, and have them hold onto the prestige. You covered them in guards, you gave them artifacts if you had any—you put all your eggs in one basket, because it was easier to protect one man than many, and most schemes with multiple bankers ended up with one of them turning traitor for profit.

Of course, it wasn’t as risky as it sounds. At the first sign of danger, a banker generally had an assigned second, third, and fourth. These redundant trustees could accept the prestige at the drop of a hat, and all a banker had to do was say the magic words and whoosh—the prestige was gone, put in safe hands.

Now, this wasn’t perfect. Transmitting prestige over even a short distance had a steep cost, so your seconds and thirds had to be in the same buildings as you. If they were in the next county over or whatever, all prestige would be lost in transmission.

Contrariwise, the only way to transfer prestige for free was to touch someone directly, exchange it hand-to-hand. That’s part of why handshakes are popular, you know?

Anyways, most of these bankers even had conditional wishes—which were available at the time—saying that if they were fatally wounded, the prestige would be moved. I’m saying, everyone tried as hard as possible to make this work, to collect power and keep it.

Of course, people still tried to take it, and sometimes, they succeeded. Lots of really nasty murders happened. Threats and blackmail sometimes worked. Even torture.

I’m saying, people were coerced into handing over their prestige. We’re talking poisons that made you expel your intestines out of your ass, whipping people to death, dipping their heads in hot oil, crucifixions, all that Inquisition torture dungeon crap. It was common to frame people and seek public executions, hangings mostly, but sometimes they were drawn and quartered like a slaughtered lamb.

Being a banker was generally considered a death sentence. You were set up in a nice place with all the luxuries of the late Middle Ages, even a complimentary wish for the afterlife, and then you tried to tough it out for as many years as you could manage.

Truth be told, bankers were just too easy to find. Most were holed up in the only castle or church for miles, like fucking fish in a barrel. Second, most were too obvious—the wishes to identify them or their location were far too cheap.

You could still wish for knowledge back then, and the gods were straight shooters. You got everything you asked for and then some. The only reason the cultists weren’t asking about the deep secrets or the Philosopher’s Stone or whatever was because people were ignorant, and the bigger the gap of ignorance between your current beliefs and the truth, the more prestige it cost you to learn how wrong you were. This made almost everything of any importance impossibly expensive to learn, but it made it easy to take half-assed intel and transform it into a rock solid dossier on everything and everyone you wanted to kill.

So imagine that most of the fighting happened in Northern Europe, the British Isles, and the Middle East. They sank two hundred years deep into this cloak and dagger business, dropping corpses all over the continent, using big wishes to pick each other out of the populace. They got skilled at it. They murdered straight through the Black Death, practically doubling their efforts in the middle of a biblical apocalypse because it was easy to manipulate circumstances and spread the disease to their targets.

Out of this mess, one cult started to gain a lot of influence over in Britain. They rode the Protestant Reformation to power, ripped the entire British isles out of Vatican hands, and started working hard on exploiting untapped resources—I’m talking colonies in the Americas, in Africa, and in the Orient. They built a base out of Westminster, recruiting manpower out of neighboring London. You see where this was going?

The Vatican cult tried to burn London to the ground in the 17th century, but it was too late to stop their momentum. The London power base was spread too wide, with all the heavy investment in North America and the Indian subcontinent. They rebuilt the city and got madder than a pack of rabid dogs. They fought proxy wars through their colonies, conquering other places and vassal cults through superior force and espionage, and they enslaved the local cultists at secular gunpoint, pushing them to farm tasks for prestige. That prestige was dumped right back into British intel, and the London cult soon learned everything they needed to know.

After a few decades, they became an indispensable part of the colonial companies that were tied back to the crown. They were right there in the middle of the British Admiralty, they held positions of leadership in the Royal Marines. Almost every British spy either was a cultist or reported back to one. They had so many places farming tasks, so much prestige—there wasn’t a wish for knowledge they couldn’t make.

London was big, real big, bigger than anything the world had ever seen. By the time the Fall of Trust came around, most of Europe was afraid of them. If you crossed them, they wished up a complete rundown of your operation, identified the weak links, and picked it to pieces within the month. Lots of allied states fell in cultic circles, becoming vassals to the London cult. The Londoners started dreaming as big as their secular empire—they set their sights on the whole world under the crown, maybe even taking the Ark of the Covenant from Ethiopia. That was like planning to steal Russia’s nuclear arsenal. It was madness, but they were serious.

Their only weaknesses were their bankers. The opposition was fierce in many regions, and the backup bankers would be assassinated literally moments before the primaries were slain. This would blow the collected prestige of a nation for a year or two, really set the cult back in one colony or another. The London cult spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to protect their distributed wealth. Their answer was the Apostate.

It was 1841. The leadership of the London cult decided that they were too important to pay tradition any heed. They even called it a sin, but they didn’t care. They picked a teenage girl out of prison, pardoned her hanging. She was a commoner who’d run a small-time crime ring, and she was savvy—she was game. When she saw a way to slip the noose, she swore her fealty to the London cult and meant it. They inducted her twice over—both into the cult and into the British nobility—and they said, welcome, you’re our new banker.

The trick was actually kind of clever. At the time, there wasn’t such a thing as a female cultist. If people even courted with the idea, they treated it like Pope Joan, like it was a disaster. Women were considered bad luck, consorts of the Devil, purveyors of cursed tasks—you name any stupid belief you can think of, and women were blamed for it.

So imagine when the enemies of the London cult saw the local bankers throwing their pools of prestige back to London proper. They put their mind to the problem. If London was centralizing, they wanted to identify the new London banker and eliminate them. Prestige was scrounged up. Ancient banking artifacts were dug up and broken. These pools of prestige had been kept for just such an emergency, and they only had to make one wish.

Who was the new London banker?

Funny thing was, not a single goddamn cult could afford the answer. It was the “who” in the question that mattered most. Every last one of them assumed that “who” was also a “he,” and in their minds’ eyes, they were wishing to fill the mold of an important and powerful man. Because they couldn’t conceive of London daring to induct a woman cultist, their gap of ignorance ended up being a chasm. They were so damn stubborn, they couldn’t figure it out for nearly a decade.

In the end, it was the Russians who put two and two together. They’d been fighting the Great Game in Central Asia, an extended non-conflict with Britain. The Russians were afraid of deploying soldiers they didn’t have, and the British were afraid of having to defend the nebulous claims they’d made north of Pakistan. As a sign of peace, the London cult held out an olive branch and pulled strings to invite the Russians to attend the Crystal Palace Exhibition, a gaudy display of progress and wealth that the British had built on the back of their prestige-fueled empire. The Russians accepted, not because they wanted to participate, but because they thought it would be an opportunity to walk into the enemy’s home without a fight. They planned to bring the Apples of Perun and Solovei’s Whistle—some of the big Slavic artifacts they’d collected after the Fall of Curses and kept under wraps for just such an occasion.

Then they started the sacrifices. The Russians didn’t have a lot of prestige—nobody but London did at the time—but they had a lot of peasants that they could induct, so they played a killer game of twenty questions. An inducted peasant would be blackmailed into wishing for a feature about the London banker—was the banker tall, was the banker short, did the banker wear glasses? Because the gap of ignorance was so steep, most of these people spent a minimum of fifty to seventy years in the sanctuary, aging away a human lifetime for a single answer. Hell, those were the survivors—many corpses were found in the sanctuaries of Russian temples, mummified and easy to throw away.

Over the course of several weeks, they wasted more than a thousand lives for a list of features about the banker. They were willing to brute force the result in a way that nobody else had considered realistic. They assembled pictures of the banker, dossiers—they still assumed the London banker was a man, but just to be thorough, they had one drawing made of a woman.

That was the breakthrough. A peasant who knew almost nothing had no preconceptions to fight against. He saw the picture of the woman, wished to know the truth, and came out of the temple an old man with a name, Elizabeth of Westminster. No surname. She’d never had one.

That was the beginning of the end. The Russians came with some of the world’s most powerful weapons in the hands of a man who’d swallowed the Cat o’ Nine Lives, and they attacked London’s occult headquarters in the middle of the night in March.

They’d collected the names of the Apostate’s trustees; they already knew the names of the British leadership. They flattened an estate just outside the city, leveling six buildings in the fighting and starting several large fires. We’re talking an elite suicide squad of seven or eight Russian cultists, killing while dying, taking the Cat from their fallen comrades and swallowing it to extend their own suicidal assault. Only one man had to survive after all was said and done, even if he had to blast his way to the port, laying waste to London’s secular populace with Solovei’s Whistle between his lips.

The Apostate wasn’t prepared for the attack. Nobody had a chance to warn her.

The Russians interrogated survivors of the fallen leadership, finished them off to the man, and made their way to the Apostate’s hideout. Her guards were eliminated quickly. Many of London’s artifacts were blasted with an Apple of Perun. It should’ve been a coup de grace.

Ultimately, she was her own best defense. They underestimated her. She hadn’t spent a decade just sitting around. She’d been reading, exercising, practicing marksmanship. She ambushed one of the assassins herself, shot the Russian carrier of the Cat in the head, then hacked it off with a machete. If there’d been a little more time, she would’ve stolen the Cat and an Apple for herself, but the last two assassins managed to drive her into a corner in her personal library.

This was the turning point. She tried to pass on the prestige of the London cult. Once it was gone, she planned to dodge to the local temple and escape into the London streets.

But she couldn’t. The people she targeted were already dead, and she didn’t know anybody else. For the sake of secrecy, she’d been kept away from the rest of the London cult leadership.

She couldn’t pass on the wealth, she couldn’t dodge, and she was going to die once they decided to throw an Apple. At this point, they were keeping her alive just because they thought they could convince a woman to give up—as if she were weak-willed.

She was sitting on the largest pool of prestige in recorded history. It was probably the largest pool of prestige ever. London had been farming more than half of the world’s cults for nearly one hundred and fifty years. While they’d spent a lot of prestige, they’d earned far more, and it was all at the Apostate’s disposal. Tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of years of prestige, unimaginable power. Millions of years? I don’t know. Screw it, say it was billions. It’s more than we can imagine. It was so much, she couldn’t think of a single thing to spend it on.

The Apostate was clever though. This was where she got the better of the gods. She whispered to herself under a desk, mere seconds away from death, “I wish to know what wish could I afford, something which mankind has always wanted. I want to go into debt, but I don’t want to waste the world’s prestige.”

The gods put the knowledge in her head.

There was one wish whose debt had long been considered effectively infinite. Everyone who had attempted it was lost. All that came out of their sanctuaries were shards of bone amidst piles of dust. But the cost wasn’t truly infinite. Some say the debt for the average wisher would’ve been ten times the age of human civilization, but it wasn’t forever.

That wish was to know the nature of the gods.

And after telling her that the world, through her, could finally learn the nature of the gods, those very gods spoke with her directly. They told her that she shouldn’t make the wish. They asked her to die under the writing desk and fly to paradise with them.

She refused to die. Without hesitation, she asked the gods, “What is your nature?”

The wish was granted. The prestige of the London cult, the source of its power, vanished instantly. Its leadership was dead and burned. Its banker was gone. The Russian assassins fled successfully, but they took the story of what they heard with them.

Her debt was three days long, but the scrutiny of the gods was too intense to ignore. She couldn’t remain in torpor. She spent those three days in isolation, arguing with the divine. We know nothing about their deliberations. We only know the conclusion.

The moment she emerged from her sanctuary, the gods began the Fall of Truth. All wishes for knowledge were immediately banned, and a great task was assigned to bring her dead or alive to the temple in London. The reward would be all the prestige she had spent. There wasn’t an Oracle on Earth who didn’t hear the new rule and task. Every available cultist would’ve swarmed over London. Their terrible war would’ve been for the fate of the globe and the secret of the gods. It would’ve made the fighting from the Fall of Curses look like friendly sport.

The Apostate thought the stakes were too high. Whatever she knew, it was enough to demand the gods’ personal attention. She spoke to them again. She stepped outside the system of prestige, rejecting the confines of barter and exchange for wishes. She offered the gods a service from her. In exchange for immortality, she would never tell another living soul about the nature of the gods, and she would die if she tried.

They agreed to her terms on two conditions. First, that her immortality be no stronger than that of the Baron, for all other forms had been banned. Second, that she would become physically incapable of even hinting at the truth. The knowledge of the nature of the gods would be locked away in her absolutely and forever.

The deal was struck. For the first and only time in history, a task was revoked. There was no need to kill her, for there would be no reward. The Apostate fled London, then disappeared entirely from the eyes of the world. They christened her new title because she rejected the faith inherent in the system—they called her a second Eve, having dared to bite from the apple of knowledge. She’d brought further sin into the world.

Without wishes for knowledge, the London cult effectively dissolved. Thousands of loyal London agents were killed across twelve bloody nights. The power that had dominated the world was beheaded, exsanguinated, and pummeled into dust. The Apostate’s wish killed London and barred us forever from divine revelation and all occult paths to truth.

Author’s Note:

We’ve learned about the Apostate, that strange woman Elizabeth.

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

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July 18, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

At the turn of the century, the savage competition of the rail companies, bold city planning, and the abundant optimism of investors all combined into a single, volatile mix. Enriched by new money and sparked with vision, their plans exploded across proposals and blueprints, imagining New York’s subways as a unified network stretching across all five boroughs. Distant terminals would’ve ended in farmland, in neighboring cities, and at ports for both air and sea.

Dreams of an eastern seaboard megalopolis cast mirages over these far flung destinations. Someday, the builders imagined, businesses and homeowners would thrive among high-rises of staggering complexity and beauty, a gleaming utopia of mechanism, science, and industrial design. With arteries of power and water wrapped like veins around their subway tunnels, developers would pay richly for the utilities served through the earth itself.

Yes, that was the key—money spent now would be worth ten times as much later, so hundreds of miles of tunnels were planned and dug well in advance of demand. This was in the teens, the twenties, even in the stubborn denial of the early thirties. Then the Great Depression became undeniable, and the expansion and prosperity they’d predicted became the shadows of regret. So many places were closed, written off as losses and struck from the public consciousness as an embarrassment, better forgotten than reminding mankind of their frailty and stupidity and their blind, desperate faith in simple models. How many tunnels were born from the deliberately cultivated belief that growth lasted forever in a finite world?

About twice as many as were currently in use, the Baron judged.

There were many side tunnels and niches cut into the stone and lined with brick, shortcuts built by the workers who’d spent their youths toiling underground. After scouting the rail tunnels near the platform, they discovered a maintenance shaft with a cut padlock, which led down to a lower level track. That was the known sign of a smuggler’s road, a well-tread tunnel which otherwise hadn’t been on city maps for decades.

At the edge of the train platform, the Zombie awkwardly bent his fingers against the latch of a maintenance locker until it broke open. Then they stole two oil lanterns, which they lit using the Baron’s lighter, and they climbed down a short access ladder, one at a time, entering that lower tunnel—the smuggler’s road itself.

The Baron held one lantern; the Zombie carried the other. Warm orange light cast about the rust-red brickwork, shaped by shutters into two searching beams. Carefully, they traced the lines of brick arches, picked out support beams, and illuminated the path ahead.

Most of it was clear beyond a thin layer of grit, but maybe twenty or thirty meters away, they could see shallows of exposed bedrock filled with pools of stagnant water. Sheets of tarred plywood had been set across cinder-block trestles, a bridge laid by some industrious criminal with spare time and unfettered access.

The Baron laid out his plan for their escape. “We’ll follow this path north, at least as far as the smugglers built it up. We should be underneath the 2 the entire way.”

“You sure?” Phyllis asked.

The Baron held the lantern close to one wall, where oil-crusted braces were bolted to the bricks. Optimistically, cables would’ve run there, just in reach yet untouched by the slow accumulation of water. “They dug a lot of these secondary tunnels for utilities—power, water, even steam. They’re meant to trace the train lines, but I doubt this goes under the East River.”

“If it does, I bet it’s full of water,” Phyllis said ruefully.

“Yeah. Not everything gets pumped anymore. When we’re close, we’ll head back to the surface and make for a C-line station. That’ll take us to Lower Manhattan, and we’ll figure out our way from there. Do you know roughly where we started?”

“Sterling and Nostrand,” Phyllis answered. “We’re underneath the Sterling Station.”

“Any idea how many miles that puts us from the East River?”

“Four and a half, maybe five?”

“Even if we walk fast, it might take a couple of hours.” The Baron held the lamp out towards Marco. “Good news. You’ll be healed by the time we’re out of this tomb.”

Marco was gently touching the stains on his back. “I’m covered in blood.”

“Once your wounds close, we’ll toss the shirt,” the Zombie suggested.

“When do you think we’ll arrive?” Phyllis asked the Baron.

”Mm. It’ll be sometime after five when we reach the C-train.”

“That’s a long hike,” Phyllis muttered. “Do you want to go up and risk taking the subway? It’d be a lot faster. We could get out of here while the sun is still up.”

The Baron sighed. “They’ll probably watch all the stations along the 2.” He cast an apologetic frown towards Phyllis. “The convenience isn’t worth the risk.”

Phyllis echoed his sigh. “I suppose you’re right.”

The Zombie grinned. “Are we going to stay up past the Baron’s bedtime?”

The Baron chuckled wryly. “We might have to look for a place to shelter overnight. It depends.” He glanced at Marco, explaining himself before any questions were asked. “Night favors the assailant, not the defender. Malik has decided that secrecy is no longer important, so we’ll hide tonight, if we have to.”

“Do you think the gods will assign a task with his name on it?” Phyllis asked.

“Who, Malik?” the Baron replied.

“Yeah. That frozen air was a spectacle. People will pass it off as a freak freeze, but that must’ve threatened the secrecy of the occult.”

The Baron started across the wooden plywood bridges, carefully arranging his steps along the middle of each span. The cinderblock trestles were set stably on their sides, rising just a few centimeters over the waters. Once he was certain that their footing would be stable, he turned his thoughts to Phyllis’s question. “That’s a terrifying possibility,” he said, thinking aloud, “but it’s unlikely. You gave the secular explanation yourself. It’s spring. Sometimes, there’s cold air.”

“What’s terrifying?” Marco asked.

“Look, there’s a reason the occult is a secret,” the Baron explained. “What people believe about the world sets a baseline, which the whole system of prestige is measured against. That has knock-on effects. Three of them, which are all well-documented at this point.”

“People get scared!” the Zombie said cheerily.

“That’s the first one,” the Baron continued. “People have a powerful anxiety about the world not being normal. When they encounter the occult, they don’t see what we see. They have an emotional buoyancy, pushing them up towards their normal. They need a lot of evidence to weigh them down—to help them sink into things and really see what’s happening. Otherwise, they explain it away, and go back to their lives. That’s why we’ve been teaching you, Marco. To show you overwhelming proof.”

“If you can’t find enough proof, you can swim.” Phyllis glanced down at the pooled water around them, just before they crossed a final span of tarred wood and returned to the safety of brick roads.

“That’s from Apostasy!” the Zombie said, recognizing the metaphor.

The Baron snapped his fingers and pointed back at them. “That’s right. The Apostate wrote that you have to fight your buoyancy and swim down to find the truth. If you want to believe, you can. She actually begs women to try.”

Phyllis looked up towards the arched bricks above, then beyond them, towards the darkness that suffused the earth itself. “That was me, when I found Apostasy. I read it, I believed in it, and it was amazing. And it still is—it’s real miracles—but sometimes, through all the stress, I forget why I started.”

“Why’d you start?” Marco asked.

“This world is full of magic,” Phyllis replied. “It’s hidden in the margins, but it’s there.”

“Shit,” Marco muttered, glancing down at his bloody shirt. “I guess I have to believe it too. I should be dead.” The boy paused a moment before asking, “So why don’t more people believe?”

“It has to be hidden,” the Baron continued. “The second effect is very strict. The cost of a wish depends on how much of a miracle it’d be in the eyes of the world. A wish made in secret by unknown cultists? That’s cheap, practically subsidized. A wish made in front of a TV camera, by a famous politician? It’d take all the prestige of the world.”

“Huh. Is there a magic politician?” Marco asked.

“Yeah. Consider Stalin. He’s a cultist. When he was young, he could afford wishes, but now he’s too famous. His prices are oceanic, so he delegates all the occult power to others. He can’t participate anymore, not even in secret. People would notice.”

“The eyes of the world have tremendous weight!” the Zombie cried.

“Do you think Stalin wants to… to wish?” Marco asked.

“No,” the Baron replied firmly. “He would have to give up his secular power. He’d have to fake his death. If he doesn’t, he’ll live and die like a regular man, and frankly, most of them do—the powerful. They choose power over magic. They die important. It’s what they live for, and then they go to the afterlife.”

Phyllis spoke up. “It wasn’t always this way. Few hundred years ago, everyone believed in magic. Wishes could be public, and famous mystics could afford them.”

“What changed?” Marco asked her.

“The Enlightenment,” the Baron said quickly.

Phyllis laughed. “Yeah. Science got better, way better. Reason won over the world. Ever since then, if the public can see it, your wish has to look like a coincidence, or speculative science, or it’ll cost too much. Real magic has to look believable.”

“Exactly right,” the Baron said. “That price structure keeps a lot of secrets. Most of the big wishes must be excusable with a moment’s thought. Miracles aren’t obvious anymore.”

“Ehhh…” Marco let out a sound of confusion. “What about the Cat?”

“Grandfathered in from a mythic age,” the Baron answered. “Old miracles can look as big as they are. The ancient standard holds for them. That’s why the Cat is so valuable. There’s nothing else like it. Still, there are limits. If you walked on camera with the Cat and survived a beheading, or something else that’s hard to explain—”

“There’d be a task,” Phyllis finished for the Baron. “That’s what I was worrying about with Malik. If all else fails and you’re threatening the mysteries, then the gods will set a task on your head. All the other cultists will come to kill you.”

“But that won’t happen to me?” Marco asked.

“I wouldn’t worry,” the Baron answered. “You died, but people have survived some bad injuries. The public will excuse it. The Zombie would be the real problem, if he weren’t a special case. His invincibility stretches all the way across the system. No tasks are ever about him. The so-called gods ignore him in the hope that he’ll just go away.”

Marco tried rubbing his lower back again. “So I really did die up there?”

“You did,” the Baron said.

“Shit. I thought I was alive the whole time.”

“Why so?” the Zombie asked curiously.

“Well, it hurt,” Marco said. “I heard on the radio, death doesn’t hurt.”

The Zombie stepped up close behind Marco and leaned over to whisper in his ear. “The dead don’t feel anything, sure, but I know how the dying feel.”

Marco quivered and picked up the pace to open some space between them, then cast the Zombie a worried look.

The Zombie grinned even wider. “Nothing hurts more than dying, boy. Those who don’t hurt, don’t fight, and once upon a time, your ancestors fought and survived against all odds. Escaping death was the only way to end their pain without succumbing to the world.”

“Jesus,” Marco said.

“Speaking of death,” the Baron interrupted, “you’ve died at least twice, up to five times. Those gunshot wounds were fatal, and I think the injection was their test for the Cat o’ Nine Lives. I need you to think back though—how long were you not breathing?”

“I don’t know,” Marco said.

“You were out for several minutes. If you took a breath somewhere in the middle, you might have survived. If you didn’t, you’ve died another time.”

“I don’t remember. When they stuck the needle in the back of my head, the world got really dark and dry. I felt like I was shriveling up.”

“Baked under a black sun,” the Zombie whispered.

“Stop hassling him,” Phyllis griped.

The Zombie laughed.

The Baron ignored their bantering. “We’ll err on the side of caution and assume it’s been five deaths. Three from the bullets, one from the injection, one from asphyxiation.” He gestured at Marco with the lamp. “If you die again, remember that you don’t stop living. Act like you’re alive. Will it, and the body will work.”

“Like these wounds in my back,” Marco said. “I’m dead right now?”

“That’s right. If we cut the Cat out of you, you’d bleed to death. You need to hold onto it for at least a couple of hours, preferably overnight. Then we can take it out.”

“That also gives us time to hide from the police,” Phyllis said thoughtfully. “That’s not even considering our long-term arrangements. We’ll have to keep off the radar for at least a month, if not longer. The Zombie may have murdered a police captain.”

The Baron kept pacing forward. The road was long and the days were all too short. Nevertheless, he couldn’t share Phyllis’s pessimism. “A day will be enough. Tammany Hall will work to keep the Zombie a secret, and he’s the only part that matters. He’s the spectacle.”

Phyllis stopped walking and frowned. “Baron, you need to take this seriously.”

d’Holbach stopped as well, and everyone paused in their march. “I am serious. They won’t want another Rasputin on their hands, so they’ll protect us. They’ll hide us.”

“Who is Rasputin?” Marco asked.

“A Russian monk who held the Cat during most of the Great War. He was using prestige to convince the Tsarina he was a miracle-worker, and he wanted Russia to drop out of the conflict. The Orthodox cult was slow to stop him, and the gods didn’t like that, so a great task came out of Berlin to murder him before the end of the year. It was a mess.”

“Tell him in a minute,” Phyllis said. “Listen to me. Baron, you must take this seriously.”

“I said…” The Baron paused. “Why do you think I’m not?”

“Mr. Barilla may have been ignorant, but he wasn’t a fool. You’re in a special position. You have that man—” She pointed at the Zombie. “—and New York has to protect you because of him. That’s just good business on their part. But they don’t have to protect me. They don’t have to protect Marco. I’m supposed to be running the docks tomorrow, but if I show up in connection with a stevedore getting pinned for murder, they’ll string me up for the disaster you made in the streets. New York won’t protect me. Once they figured I was with you, they’d probably kill me in the county lockup themselves. One more Artemisian, dead.”

“They’ll be looking for the Zombie—”

“That’s bullshit. He drove his fingers into a man’s skull, and there were a lot of witnesses. They’ll want all of us, and they’ll know my face and Marco’s.” She pointed directly at the Baron. “Don’t tell me that we’re just going to hide for a day and the heat will be off. Our lives just went to hell back there, and we don’t have the same privileges. We won’t be safe for years.”

The Baron’s face burned a little. “You volunteered.”

“Because you asked me, and said I’d be safer with you. I expected nothing like this though. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t belly aching. I accept our situation, which is currently really bad if you aren’t a mythological figure, so you need to think seriously on what happens next before it happens to us. Okay?”

“Fine, you’re right.”

“I’m here for the same reason you’re here. I want to keep power out of Stalin’s hands. This is the whole world we’re talking about. Just play it smart.”

The Baron raised his hands in surrender. “As I said, you’re right. When we get to Manhattan, we’ll find a hideout from one of the local mafioso. Is that a plan?”

“If we get to Manhattan, I know a place,” Phyllis said.

“Perfect. Thank you, Phyllis.”

“We shouldn’t stand around here,” the Zombie interjected. He picked idly at a brick in the wall, chipped off a shard with his fingernail and put it in his mouth. The sound of grinding stone reminded the Baron of popcorn at a theater, distracting and out of place.

Phyllis nodded to the Baron, and he nodded back. An understanding was reached. She then said to the Zombie, “I’m good now. We can go.”

“Good.” The Zombie chewed until the chip of brick turned to sand, then to mud, and by the time he was wiping ruddy silt from his lips, they were all walking again.

The tunnel varied little. Most of it had been excavated, supported, and lined with bricks. Where the ceiling had collapsed into piles, a path was cleared. Where the floor hadn’t been laid, plywood ramps and surfaces abounded. This road had almost certainly been used to smuggle something by volume, likely on a small cart or wheelbarrow. Marijuana bales? Opium? Cocaine? Heroin? Morphine and codeine? Maybe even an occasional bag full of mixed gems, diamonds, or stolen art from the war. None of it would’ve surprised the Baron. One end of the tunnel was near the docks or trucks coming over the Brooklyn Bridge. The other end was in Crown Heights, where new wealth could afford expensive, addictive habits.

Marco spoke up after several minutes of quiet marching. “I think you bruised my ribs with your shoulder,” he said to the Zombie.

The invincible man was following the teen closely. “Be glad that’s the worst that happened,” he replied curtly.

“You weren’t hitting me very hard. You just felt like a rock.”

“You were lucky,” the Baron opined. “He’s inconsistent.”

Marco grunted. “I have no idea what that means.”

“It’s an element of luck,” the Zombie explained. “d’Holbach has a good theory about this. The gods themselves can’t make an invincible thing, because invincibility is nonsense.”

“I didn’t say that,” the Baron corrected. “I said that invincibility as a property is nonsense. If you want to interact with the world, then it must have some impact on you. That impact changes you, and that change violates the core tenet of invincibility.”

“That I cannot be changed,” the Zombie said.

“Exactly. Invincibility can’t be a property, but it can be a description of outcomes. If something happens, the gods can alter it so the Zombie doesn’t change. Understand? It’s a mediated invincibility, like one endless divine intervention.”

“The gods never preserve me the same way twice,” the Zombie said.

“This makes him invincible in the only way the word has any meaning. It also means that the gods use a different technique for every interaction, and the results are unpredictable. If you hit him, it’d be a coin flip whether or not your fist stopped dead or shattered your bones.”

“There are too many possibilities to count,” the Zombie corrected.

“Could I have died while riding on your shoulder?” Marco asked.

“Absolutely,” the Baron said. “It was a calculated risk, I’m sure.”

“I didn’t want the Baron to wait on you,” the Zombie said.

The Baron snickered. “That’ll give him a boost of confidence.”

“He can be confident I’m telling the truth. His life shouldn’t inconvenience yours.”

Phyllis added her two cents: “Just don’t touch the Zombie unless you have to. It’s for your own safety. He’s a steel man in a glass world. It’s too easy to break against him.”

“Nobody can touch you?” Marco asked.

“Very carefully,” the Zombie said, “they can.”

Marco lapsed into silence for nearly a full minute. They felt in their chests the rumble of a subway train passing somewhere overhead. Before it was gone, he’d found the question he wanted to ask. “Isn’t that lonely?”

“No,” the Zombie said, “that’s not the reason it’s lonely.”

“So you are lonely?”

“Not anymore,” the Zombie said, his grin slowly vanishing. “But you don’t have to worry about me. Even if I was lonely, it wouldn’t hurt.” He tapped his sternum. “Do you know that feeling in your chest? That twisting up little knot in your stomach that hurts when you’re unhappy?”

“Yes,” Marco said.

“I don’t feel it. I don’t feel anything. I don’t have a soul.”

“Did you ever have one?”

“If I was ever human.”

“What do you mean? You’re a person—”

“I don’t remember being a person,” the Zombie interrupted. “I don’t have a given name. I can’t remember any faces of any family. You tell me, where’s the proof I was a person?”

Marco was looking back at the Zombie quickly, glance after glance. “You don’t remember your dad? Your mom?”

“Did I even have them?” the Zombie asked.

“I—uh… You really weren’t a person?”

The Zombie stopped and asked sharply, “Do I look like a person?”

“Yeah?”

“That’s reason enough to believe the myth. Congratulations, you’ve dug up the truth. I’m the body of a disassembled man.” He gestured forward. “Move.”

“Sorry,” Marco began.

“Don’t apologize to assholes,” Phyllis said.

“Yeah, okay, I just didn’t mean to offend him.”

“You didn’t offend me,” the Zombie said, “but you asked some stupid questions.”

“Leave him be. He doesn’t know the myths.” Phyllis was picking at the corners of her eyes with her pinky. “I don’t think his father knew them well either, honestly.”

“Ha!” The Zombie began to grin again. “Ignorance is a good excuse.”

“What? That’s backwards.”

“Is it?” the Zombie asked. “What’s the opposite? Ignorance is no excuse? Sounds like something only assholes would say to punish people.”

The Baron laughed.

“You really don’t remember anything?” Marco asked.

“I remember a little,” the Zombie said. “I was born a farmer by the Euphrates, but I became a hero. I slew a tyrant king, and the priests taught me a forbidden rite.”

“He’s lying,” the Baron said.

“Yes, that one was a lie,” the Zombie continued. “I was actually a bandit in Central Asia. When I was captured, they tried executing me by the southern mountains, but I escaped and lived in the ruins of a cliff-dwelling people. In their caves, I found an artifact of great power.”

“He’s just playing with you. He doesn’t know his origins.”

“No, no, I definitely remember. I was the chief of a tribe in the jungles of Laos. My people were dying of disease, and they blamed our rivals for placing a curse on us. They sacrificed themselves to give me power, and I exacted their revenge on our innocent foes.”

“Why don’t you tell him one of the real myths about you?” Phyllis asked.

“Because they aren’t my myths. I’d rather tell one of my stories.”

“He prefers it,” the Baron said, “even if his stories are lies.”

“How do you know they’re lies?” the Zombie asked.

“Because you never tell the same story twice.”

The Zombie wagged his finger. “That means only most are lies.”

“Marco, listen,” Phyllis said, “the Zombie is extremely old. Probably older than writing.”

“How old is that?” Marco asked.

The Baron fielded that question: “The oldest written tablets come from the 26th century BC, more than four and a half thousand years ago.”

“Don’t swamp him with facts,” Phyllis chided.

“The Akkadians wrote about the Zombie first—” the Baron started deliberately.

“Shush! Marco, there are a lot of myths out there, and every cult on the planet has their own take on the nature of the gods, the Falls, and the occult. Everything you can think of, someone has probably believed it somewhere—but what’s really interesting is what they all believe together. These are mostly oral traditions, but they all agree on some stories.”

Marco was following Phyllis in the middle of their march. He glanced back at the trailing light. “The Zombie?” he asked.

“They give him a different name and different motivations depending on their traditions, but the cults all agree he exists. Some of them think he was the cause of the first Fall. Others think he was the cause of the second or third. But again, there’s something they all agree on. The Fall of Prestige was the first Fall in recorded history.”

It was incredible what a half hour and five attempts on someone’s life had done to fix an uncouth attitude. The boy with the vulgar mouth had vanished. A young man had taken his place, and he was listening closely, hanging on every word Phyllis had to say. “The Fall of Prestige…” Marco tried reasoning it out, remembering what the Baron had told him back in the Imperial Apartments. “So there was something the Zombie did that made the gods change the rules about what you could wish for?”

“You’re paying attention. That’s good,” Phyllis said, “but it’s a little more complicated than that. The Apostate wrote down the London cult’s version of the myth.”

This was what the Apostate wrote.

Compare all the myths you can find. Collect your books, your notes, and tally up the powers of legend. There’s a pattern shared across everything I’ve ever read—Christian, Classical, Egyptian, Norse, Celtic, Welsh, Slavic, and Oriental.

The older a myth is, the more powerful the magic it portrays.

This isn’t a coincidence. After creation, after many falls from grace and original sins, there comes a point where myths align with history, and it is this point where our impact begins. For as long as there have been people, there have been cults. For as long as there have been cults, there have been cultists. Our wishes have changed the world, and the myths reflect our influence. Before the Falls diminished our strength, we were powerful. How sad it didn’t last.

Over time, the rules closed around us, we weakened, and the stories changed.

Look back again. There have been many Falls both great and small, but none seem more important than the Fall of Prestige. Our system was born out of this era, and all of civilization was built in the shadow of one man’s sin. We could no longer rely wholly on the gods, and we were forced to rely on each other. Food, health, and wisdom—all became scarce.

Before the Fall, there was a golden age when wishes were granted for sacrifices, and three kinds were known. Prestige was the sacrifice of effort. Life was the sacrifice of time. Wealth was the sacrifice of possessions. The gods accepted all three freely, and the wishes granted were powerful and numerous. Consider all the ways wealth could’ve aided primitive man. A hungry mother could’ve destroyed her favorite necklace for a fortnight of warm food. A healer could’ve burned the fat of a goat to cure disease and plague. Powers could’ve been bought by selling away strength, valor, and cunning—for even intangible qualities were possessions of a kind.

Before the Fall of Prestige, we could’ve given up our wealth for a wish.

In this time, there was an unnamed city in the furthest land, and the people of that city called it the Land of Fire. There was no name for the city, for there was no other city in the land. Their arts were few. Their wealth was scant. Their time was spent in the fields and forests.

As all cities have a god, there too was a god for the Land of Fire. She was a young god, and she loved her people. Whenever she could, she fulfilled their greatest wishes for the smallest sacrifices, asking only token tributes for her intervention.

In the Land of Fire, it was a time of grace, though grace goeth before a Fall.

There was a very clever man in the city. We don’t know his profession, nor his name, nor the rank of his birth. We only know his cunning. With the vigor a farmer lended to his crops or the hunter to his hunt, he searched for flaws in everything. In human love, he found weakness and the force to divide houses. In generosity, he found foolish trust and undeserved charity. He was by all accounts an evil man, and he set his eye on finding the flaws of their god.

Here the accounts vary. Some say he cheated and schemed and stole until he had enough wealth to sacrifice for knowledge. Others say he meditated on the problem and discovered the answer through simple reason. I favor the stories demonstrating a little of both.

This clever man wished to know, “What is man’s most valuable possession?”

He already had an idea, and the god confirmed it. Man’s most valuable possession was his soul. It carried his will and self. He perceived only because the soul formed a locus for perception. Without it, a man was nothing but meat and bones.

He wished to know, “Can a soul be sold?”

Not forever, the knowledge came. It can only be exchanged for a time.

The clever man rested upon this truth. He considered it for many years, turning it about in his mind to examine every angle and detail. He felt the grain of the notion, the warp of its wood. He knew the concept through and through before he acted.

He would be more clever than the gods themselves.

He cleaned himself, dressed in a simple style, and went to the temple. There he sacrificed everything he owned in the world, and he wished for great health and youth, so that for a day he wouldn’t suffer from human frailty, its hungers or its thirsts. His home burned with his animals and tools. He had no plans for shelter or sustenance. It was success or death.

He wished to make an exchange. “My soul to you,” he offered, “for absolute and true invincibility until I choose to exchange it back.”

The gods are fallible. The god of the Land of Fire accepted the terms, for she couldn’t imagine anything more terrible than the emptiness of a soulless body. The mind, separated from the soul, would have no inner life. It would live and breathe and talk and dream, but it’d be perception and intelligence passing through an empty theater, a shadow play put on for nobody. Such a state would be unbearable. The soul would yearn to return to the world.

She ripped the man’s soul from his body and left his flesh an invincible vessel, immortal and enduring. What he did next isn’t clear. Some say he used his new power to overthrow the Land of Fire. Others say he smashed the temple with his bare hands. All accounts agree on one thing. With the perfect liberty of absolute invulnerability, his first impulse was to destroy.

The god grew upset beyond all measure. She called upon the pantheon of the globe, and together they held the man in place and demanded that he choose to regain his soul. The people of the land demanded justice. She threatened to withhold the afterlife itself from him. If he remained invincible, he would be damned to this world, and his soul would be set in darkness beyond paradise, where no joy would ever be felt again. To earn eternity, he would have to accept their punishment freely. Choose, they demanded, and choose now.

It is said that he grinned then, for without a soul, there was nobody to suffer the misery of soullessness. There was only the intelligence of the body, which argued his case.

“I can’t choose to take back my soul,” the man said. “I can’t choose anything. Without a soul, I have no will. I’m not free. I can’t choose any more than the rain chooses to fall or the flowers to bloom. Whatever I do now is inevitable like the rising of the sun.”

The god fumed. She told him that men had exchanged their souls before and taken them back. Why should he be an exception? Why should he be unable to choose?

“The gods were wrong,” he said. “I’m not human anymore. I can’t choose. It’s the wish I wanted and what you granted. Or would the gods refuse a fair exchange, with fair conditions?”

The gods would not refuse to grant a valid wish. To do so would not be generous.

“Then by reason, this body will remain invincible forever.”

And it has remained, appearing on every continent in every occult tradition since the records began. His current name is the Golem, though he has gone by many others: the Body, the Immortal, the Sin that Walked, the Falling Mountain, and a thousand more.

The gods saw the logic of the Golem’s exchange, and they feared it. If one man could find absolute invincibility through the exchange of wealth, what else could be lost for eternal gain? What other holes would they find in contracts made with sacrifices?

How could they trust themselves to never allow another Golem to be born?

There was no great task given. No man could oppose the Golem.

After they released him upon the world, the gods turned to their Oracles and whispered in their ears. “We’ll no longer accept sacrifices of wealth. You may pay only in life and prestige.” Then they were told the story of the Golem, and they all knew why the world was changing.

The new rule destroyed the world before civilization. Disease ran rampant. Famine chased people to the grave, where they were buried with riches they would’ve offered for food.

Contributing to this chaos, the Golem was rampant and cruel.

Each cult that met him has feared him. He is a murderer, a trickster, and a monster, depending on the state of his sanity and his tenuous connections to the rest of the world. He will be among us forever, and nothing we can do will be rid of him.

Children of Artemis, my beautiful girls, avoid this man. You will know him by the ruin he brings and the joy he seeks through annihilation of good and wonderful things. He can only be approached under a single circumstance. There is a philosopher whose story precedes mine by fifty years. In his presence, the Golem is docile, even charming. If he still lives when you read this book, you will recognize him as well. He is the Golem’s pet and the Golem’s master at once.

You may approach the Golem if he is with Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach.

Author’s Note:

This is one of my favorite chapters in this entire chunk of the book. It’s a foundational myth, finally revealed. I hope you enjoyed it~

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

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July 15, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

Against the Baron’s rush, reacting to the Baron’s wish, the police captain twitched with his gun raised. He pulled the trigger—a click, then nothing. Panic flashed on his face, a life or death terror. “Fixed!” he bellowed, cocking the hammer.

His finger was still on the trigger as the gap closed between them. The Baron reacted on intuition alone: “Through!”

One shot, a death bark to make d’Holbach’s ears ring, an inevitable flinching. A punch of gas drummed the cloth over his heart. The sting of powder residue kissed his skin. Somewhere behind him, a ricochet sang off brick and soared into the afternoon air.

The crowd evaporated into screams.

Schuler had inspired that one. A single second of intangibility to bullets, accepted by the world as a shot gone wide with panic. More than enough.

The Baron grabbed the revolver with his bare hands and shoved up. The second, third, and fourth rounds exploded with deafening power right by his ear, blasted over his shoulder into the wild blue sky.

The Zombie blindsided them both, a wild collision of bodies to break everything apart. There was a screech cut short. The Baron stumbled back with the revolver’s hot barrel clutched in his left hand. The Zombie and the police captain were already lying at his feet. The invincible man had tackled his opponent while burying two fingers up to the knuckle in the captain’s skull. He’d nailed digits straight through the hat, straight through the bone.

“Zombie!” the Baron shouted over the ringing in his ears.

Fingers were yanked out, blood slung away. The Zombie scrambled to his feet, pausing only to toe-kick the downed officer. The hit went badly; a rib shattered into pieces with an unmistakable crunch, and the captain crumpled—still awake, still alive—but in greater, almost overwhelming agony. Trepanations and internal lacerations were slow killers, but only a wish could reliably save the captain now.

The Baron dropped the revolver. Phyllis swept around him, shouting not at the downed cop but at the weapon itself. She picked it up, saying something, but the Baron couldn’t make it out clearly. The ambulance engine roared into life.

The Zombie turned and sprinted for the vehicle.

Phyllis knelt in front of the downed captain. The Baron concentrated. He could hear her shouting, “Are you Communist? Are you Communist?”

The captain quailed, unwilling or unable to respond through the pain.

“Get Marco!” the Baron yelled at Phyllis, at the Zombie, at the world.

Phyllis put her shoe on the captain’s shoulder and shoved him over onto his back. “Keep your hands out, stay flat!” She held the revolver in his general direction, mere threat.

The Baron’s ears were recovering quickly. The ringing faded fast.

The Zombie hit the back of the ambulance with wild abandon. He didn’t merely strike it. He threw his body into it, limbs flailing without restraint or control. One fist stopped, the random results of invincibility; the other collapsed the door like foil. The ambulance peeled out, but the Zombie had his arm shoved into the vehicle up to the shoulder. He jammed in deeper, slamming the crown of his head against metal, irregularly pounding open a hole. The ambulance swerved to shake him before it had any momentum. He wriggled into the shredding steel like a puppy into newspaper, the sharp edges destroying his shirt but crumbling against his skin.

When he was halfway to his waist through a half-missing door, the driver must’ve realized they weren’t going to lose him. The ambulance screeched to a halt.

The Zombie shoved himself back out of the hole, laughing uproariously as he landed on the pavement. The slim medic kicked open the passenger side door of the cab and tried to run. The Zombie came around the edge of the vehicle, drawn by the movement.

“Driver is still there!” the Baron shouted.

The Zombie reacted immediately and dove for the right rear tire. He managed to get his arm jammed up into the wheel well when the ambulance peeled out again. Physics dragged him no more than a half foot into the rotating mess before everything tore itself apart in a spray of rubber and smashed chassis. The engine fought against the immovable object. Metal screamed while the wheel twisted off its axle. Suspension collapsed with a groan of failing springs, audible even amidst a din like a factory line tearing itself apart.

The Zombie’s laughter rose above it all as the corner of the ambulance settled slowly onto his shoulder and pinned him in place. He jerked at his limb violently, and after a few tries, all materials gave way, freeing him from the vehicle and leaving behind most of his shirt.

He got to his feet and looked at his bare chest. Healthy, young, unchanged after millenia—he thumped it with both fists and shouted a war cry at the police. Their rounded black-and-white squad cars were pulling to a halt at the head of the ambulance.

“We need Marco!” the Baron yelled to Phyllis.

He could’ve asked the Zombie to recover the teenager, but an invincible man could be put to better use. This fight was moving outside the bounds of secrecy, and they needed a spectacle to cover their escape. For one brief moment, they’d show the world what it was like to face a monster out of legend.

The Baron ran to the back of the ambulance with Phyllis close on his heels. They crouched behind the coach’s double doors; Phyllis stopped at the corner with the ruined door, while the Baron checked the handle on its mostly-whole twin.

She leaned around the corner with the revolver, then ducked back. “We’re clear for the moment.” She glanced at the Baron. The powder mark was burned into his suit. “You could’ve died,” she said. “They’re prestigious as hell.”

The Baron yanked fiercely on the door handle. The mechanism was crushed. “I came with more prestige than a person should need. Turns out it was enough.” He pounded once on the door with the side of his fist. There was a smash of glass somewhere up ahead and a shout of pain. He glanced through the back window. The Zombie was halfway through the front windshield, dragging the large medic out over the steering wheel.

“Are you spent?” Phyllis asked.

“I nearly zeroed my prestige.”

“I didn’t know you could make a bullet pass through you.” She glanced around the corner. “Cops around the Zombie.”

“I can kick this open from the inside. Wait here, I’ll go in through the passenger door.”

“No, stop.” Phyllis passed him the revolver. “I’m smaller. Take this and cover me for a second. Don’t drop it again.”

The Baron gripped it tight. “You want to go around?”

“I’m going in.” She nudged him aside and started squirming through the hole that the Zombie had punched through the right door. The burred edges caught her once on the shoulder, but she didn’t hesitate, cutting a line down the sleeve of her blouse. Once her arms were through, the rest was easy, and her wool-clad legs disappeared into the gap.

“Can they see you?” the Baron called after her.

She crouched just inside the hole. “No, it’s the Zombie. Here, get out of the way.” She stood up as far as she could in the back of the coach, braced herself with an overhead bar and kicked the door. The latch made a metal ping but didn’t give on the first hit.

The Baron looked around the left corner, up over the road. The Zombie had put on the medic’s oversized white jacket and was busy buttoning it up. The jacket’s recent owner was face down on the pavement in an undershirt, his arm twisted back until his shoulder was dislocated and purple. The injury must’ve come after the Zombie made the man strip.

Two officers in uniform were circling warily, ready to tackle. One came in. The Zombie struck out lamely, fist and arm out of position to take the hit. The officer struck gut-first and folded over the invincible man’s arm like he’d run into a lamp post.

“Ha!” The Zombie grabbed a handful of the man’s shirt, pulled him down and swung him around until he slammed head first into the side of the ambulance. The cop blacked out instantly and collapsed. It’d be five or six seconds before he was up.

His partner smashed the Zombie over the skull with his nightstick, but the truncheon rebounded away with excessive force, flying out of the assailant’s hand and flipping end over end through a high arc in the air. The Zombie grinned. The cop gawked.

A moment later, the stick shattered a second-story window.

“Home run!” the Zombie yelled.

Quivering, hands raised, the cop stepped backwards.

“Trash cars!” the Baron shouted. “Not people!”

The Zombie turned, still grinning, and gave the Baron a thumbs up. Then he swept around and started punching the driver’s side door of the ambulance, aiming to break the hinges.

There was a snap; the rear doors rattled open. The Baron came around the back. Phyllis hopped down onto pavement, pulling the stretcher behind her. The Baron unfolded the wheels once they were free. Marco was still failing to breathe.

Fuck it. The Baron slugged Marco on the shoulder. The young man shuddered and looked at the Baron, then gestured slowly at his throat. “Move!” the Baron yelled at the teen. “Do you feel the heat in your belly?”

“You’ve got more muscle,” Phyllis said. “You carry him.”

“That’s the Cat o’ Nine lives, giving you oxygen!” The Baron yanked the release on both buckles strapping Marco to the stretcher. The teen rolled over uneasily, then dropped his feet to the pavement. The Baron put a hand under his arm to keep him steady. Marco’s eyes rolled back, and he shuddered terribly as he began to take a raspy breath.

“Dying hurts,” Marco whispered, a ravaged voice.

“They injected you with something fatal.”

“I can’t move well.”

“You’ll have to carry him,” Phyllis said. “Come on!”

There was a clang. The Zombie had ripped the door off the ambulance.

The Baron handed the revolver back to Phyllis. “Don’t make yourself a target.” He knelt down in front of Marco. “Lay on my shoulders. We’re running.”

Marco collapsed gratefully onto the Baron, who pulled him over both shoulders, grabbed one arm and one leg from behind, and with the weight distributed evenly over his spine, he began walking as fast as possible. Phyllis jogged behind him, revolver pointed at the street but clearly in hand, a dare against approach. They passed the supine captain, pale and shocked.

“I hope they save your life,” the Baron said to him.

The captain followed the Baron with his eyes, but his only response was a desolate moan from a faraway place, a borderland between life and death.

“Take his radio,” the Baron ordered. “We’ll need to listen to police channels.”

Phyllis paused to unhook it from the captain’s belt, then stood without giving the downed man a second look. Once they were out of earshot, she asked, “Where are we going?”

“Underground,” the Baron said. “We can lose them in the tunnels.”

“Which tunnels?”

“I’m not sure yet.”

“You don’t know the area?”

“We’ll move between stations.”

Marco groaned as he bumped across the Baron’s shoulders.

d’Holbach huffed. “Keep trying to move your legs. I need you on your feet.”

“They’re on fire,” Marco whined.

“I can’t carry you forever. We’ll need to run soon.”

They continued down the hill. A squad car pulled up ahead, but Phyllis aimed the revolver in a firing stance, and the officers in the Cadillac raised their hands and stayed in their seats.

There was a sound of gunshots up the hill. The Baron paused and swung around slowly under Marco’s weight. The Zombie was standing on the hood of a police car, smashing the ambulance door against the windshield. Two officers were laid out on the sidewalk in front of the car, victims of some kind, while others stood behind their vehicles like soldiers in a trench, plugging away at the Zombie. Shattering bullets blasted out bits of white jacket like squibs. The invincible man hopped down off the hood and ran at the assembled officers. The volume of fire intensified immediately.

The Baron ran to the shadow of a recessed storefront, where he set Marco down and supported the teen between him and Phyllis. They could hear stray fire spattering into the roads and buildings. A large window down the street shattered into sword-sized shards. The Baron glanced out of the recess at the spectacle. The Zombie was slamming officers on their sides and backs with the ambulance door like it was a paddle.

Someone must’ve realized the Zombie wasn’t going down. After a brief moment, an officer turned and sprinted up the street, and once one broke rank, the rest routed. The Zombie lobbed the door like a discus after a slow man, then turned and vaulted a vehicle and started sprinting downhill at a break-neck pace, using gravity and invincible footfalls to reach an uncontrollable top speed.

“Back off!” Malik’s voice came from the radio in Phyllis’s hand. The parked police car roared into life, peeled out and hopped the median, making its escape.

“CPUSA?” Phyllis asked.

“They’re reactivated members, probably legitimate police.” The Baron stepped out of the recess and waved at the Zombie. “Over here!”

The Zombie kept going down the street, dodging around parked vehicles that civilians had abandoned once the fighting started. It occurred to the Baron that there must be many witnesses around—but where? He turned and glanced through a small window in the door at their back. There was a cluster of people huddled among racks of used clothes, staring up at the window and wondering when this bitter taste of war would be washed away.

To say the least, New York would be extremely unhappy. This wasn’t the kind of damage that the Baron could cover with a checkbook and a smile. This was terror on a Sunday afternoon, and the worst part was that the Baron couldn’t let them punish him. Justice would be abandoned, because the Zombie would never let him languish in jail.

Hiding the Baron’s identity, sweeping the entire affair under the rug or even pinning it on a scapegoat—these were the things that New York would do to keep the peace.

The Zombie angled his run towards the sidewalk, hit the curb with a foot, kicked up a chunk of concrete the size of a fist, tumbled over, hit the walk hard—and stopped dead without a sound.

“Hahaha, great!” The Zombie pushed himself to his feet. “Look at that result!”

“Can you run?” the Baron asked Marco.

“I think so,” the teen said. He was touching his back with his fingers, testing the wounds. He inspected his prints, finding them slathered in coagulated blood. “I think I’m bleeding?”

“The wound will take an hour or two to close up. The Cat saves you before it heals you.”

“You’ll have a huge scar,” Phyllis added. “Rasputin had one on his gut.”

The Zombie jogged over. “Where are we going?”

“Tunnels,” the Baron said.

The Zombie looked uphill; his jacket was riddled with holes. “They’re already coming. I should’ve wrecked more.” The vehicles he hadn’t damaged were ripping down the hill, engines gunning. Some of them didn’t even have windshields. No time to waste.

The Baron shoved Marco out of the recess, “Go!”

They ran. The concrete clapped beneath their shoes. The police cars wouldn’t catch up to them before they reached the station, but it’d be close. They were only about a hundred yards from the entrance, just about a block, but a football field was a hell of a sprint.

Marco slowed, grabbing at his chest. He felt his wounds.

“We can’t stop!” the Baron shouted.

Phyllis didn’t even turn around to look. She kept running down the walk, taking huge gulps of air. The Zombie turned, caught Marco running with one arm, and slung him up over his high shoulder. “Don’t move or you’ll shatter your ribs.”

Then the Zombie began to sprint. Unlike the Baron, he didn’t have to worry about injuring his spine or feet. He didn’t have to worry about a bouncing body wearing him down or injuring his shoulders. With a terrifying fleetness, he outpaced all of them at twice the speed. Marco yelped while the Zombie’s invincible shoulder mashed his chest like a stone curb.

They only slowed when they reached the station stairs. Phyllis was breathing raggedly, the Baron was in better shape but still whipped, and Marco was coughing violently. Blood and mucus spattered down the back of the Zombie’s already ruined coat. The invincible man set the teen onto his feet, then nudged him down the stairs with a tap of his fist.

“Jesus, it’s like being hit with a sock full of pennies!” Marco whined.

“You’ll live,” the Zombie judged.

The Baron pointed down into the underground station while they descended, the steps quaking beneath heavy footfalls. “When we reach the platform, jump down to the tracks.”

They spiralled deeper, passing out of view, now hidden from the sky, but they could still hear cop cars screeching to a stop. Hoarse voices crowed about following the runners into the station.

“I’m down here!” the Zombie bellowed up at them.

The voices quieted, and the Baron imagined that the police would delay, reassert the chain of command and decide who would go down first. It was a smart move, a responsible move. They’d be lauded for taking it.

Unfortunately, in the confusion, they’d lose track of the man who tanked more than a hundred rounds without dropping and punched holes in steel—the man that would show up in reports and later in urban legends, even as the unreality of what had happened set in. Even the people who’d fired at the “devil” would begin to believe that they’d missed.

It only made sense that way. To the secular world, the Zombie wasn’t real, and their minds would rebel at their own memories until they vanished, leaving only myths.

Author’s Note:

Urban legends begin in moments like these, unreasonable and fleeting.

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

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July 11, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

Phyllis interrupted the Baron’s story at this point to add her own interpretation. “The Apostate thinks Jakob dodged, died in his sanctuary, and was buried in an unmarked grave.”

“So was he really this Böhme guy?” Marco asked.

The Baron answered promptly: “Indeed. He’d been extending his life, completing tasks on borrowed time, then extending his life again. He had access to oceans of prestige, and at the time, wishes for truth were common. The gods told him that I was the preeminent man of reason, the first to complete a materialist metaphysics. If I could be convinced of the occult, then nobody was beyond the system of prestige. Everyone could be convinced.”

“Except you couldn’t be?” Marco asked.

“That’s right. Their evidence isn’t enough. It never will be.”

“It was a disaster,” Phyllis noted.

“What happened?” Marco asked the Baron.

d’Holbach took a deep breath, brushing aside any lurking stress or memories of that long dead conflict. “They called it the Fall of Trust. One day, the gods decided that I would never believe in them, and the condition on my head would last forever. I’d stolen immortality out of Böhme’s well-meant wish, and the cults of Europe tried to kill me for it.”

“Can they kill you?” Marco asked.

“I can die,” the Baron said. “I’ll recover from most injuries, but I’m only a man.”

“Did Böhme know what was going to happen to you?”

“No. Diviners don’t know the future. They’re listening closely to the gods, and the gods are always watching the world, so the theory goes that a Diviner is vaguely aware of what the gods are watching. In a sense, they know the present better than anyone else, but not the future.”

“So he made you live forever by accident?”

“He thought agelessness would be proof enough to convince me. Even the gods must’ve thought I’d change my mind, or they wouldn’t have agreed to the wish.”

“You live because you’re an atheist then.”

“Because they aren’t gods. They’re powerful, unknown beings, but they aren’t divine.”

Marco paused mid-step. “Does anyone else live the way you do?”

The Baron stopped and faced him. “Are you asking if anyone has the same kind of immortality?”

“Yes, sir.”

“No. I’m unique, the first and last of my kind. The gods are fallible and people find holes in the system, but if the exploit is severe enough, the gods change the rules to close up the loophole.” The Baron patted Marco on the shoulder to get him moving again. “Take my example. I proved that conditional wishes could accidentally lead to immortality, so you can no longer make wishes of that kind. That’s the Fall of Trust.”

“It’s a fall from grace,” Phyllis clarified. “It’s like the Fall of Man in the Bible. The Baron sinned against the system by exploiting its gracious implementation.”

“It was an accident,” the Baron insisted.

“You were accidentally stubborn enough to throw away letters from hundreds of Oracles across Europe?” the Zombie asked. “Accidentally thick-headed, maybe.”

The Baron grinned. “Böhme’s accident, my friend. Not mine.”

Phyllis continued talking to Marco. “Before the Fall of Trust, you could wish that if something happened, then your wish came true. After the Fall, conditional wishes were banned. We couldn’t trust that someone would fulfill every condition. Old wishes were grandfathered in however, so as long as the Baron keeps his own philosophy, he’ll remain young. Tough.”

“I have no reason to lose my way,” the Baron added.

Phyllis smiled. “For what it’s worth, Marco, the Apostate wrote that the Baron was a friendly zealot. A sane man would’ve believed by now.”

“I’m attached to skepticism!” the Baron declared.

“You’ve told me what you believe,” the Zombie said. “You’re attached to science-fiction.”

“Ha! Not as much as you.”

“I still believe they’re gods.”

“But you hope they aren’t!”

“Hope? Don’t you mean pray?” the Zombie joked. “They’re gods after all.”

The Baron and Phyllis laughed, while Marco gave them both a confused stare. “There’s really nobody else like you on Earth?” he asked.

“Nobody,” the Baron answered. “I’m not just any baron. In the system of prestige, I’m the Baron.”

“And I’m the Zombie,” the Zombie said.

“I’m just Phyllis,” the Artemisian added wryly.

That last joke was lame enough to make Marco crack a smile.

They crossed over the peak of the hill and hit an intersection crossing a one-way road, with all four lanes of traffic heading south. This place formed both a main artery of the neighborhood and a natural commercial district. An afternoon shopping crowd was streaming along the sidewalks, visibly doubled by the vertical ponds of the storefront windows. The colors of cars and passersby reflected in them fluidly, streaming along like oil on water.

Maybe a century ago, this wide road must’ve been a dirt track following the shallow spine of a ridge. It stretched from the nearby lowlands up a shallow slope to the broad summit, where old admin buildings stood only a little higher than the surrounding landscape.

Down the hill, about a mile from the summit, taxis clustered around an underground train station. Like an ant trail, people were following implicit and signalled directions, carrying packages in and out of the hole in the Earth.

The Baron halted at the intersection. “I need everyone to be on the lookout for suspicious behavior. This is one of the stations close to the apartments, and if Malik is half as good as I think he is, he’ll have placed people to pick up our trail around here.”

“Why?” Phyllis asked. “We could’ve taken a car for all he knew.”

“Don’t underestimate the level of surveillance he could muster. The Soviets are well-organized and state-funded—Stalin is both Soviet Premier and Chairman of the Soviet Cult. If he’s putting resources behind their Bolshevik agents, then we’re talking prop planes with spies in them, long-distance observation—whatever it takes.”

“Spy planes?” Phyllis reflected on that. “Ok, for the Cat o’ Nine Lives, yes.”

“Exactly. Denisov thought they’d have no manpower on the ground, but look at what happened—Malik called up a fifth column of sleeper agents, apparently cultists to the man. I wouldn’t be surprised if the CPUSA members we saw were all New York vassals. I doubt it’d cost them much to put a man or two on every station to watch for us.”

“So what’s the call?” Phyllis asked.

“Avoid them if we can.”

She hummed thoughtfully, glowering. “If they’re well-prepared, wouldn’t they just inform the next tail somewhere down the line? If we see anyone, I think we should take them out, then backtrack, and find a different route.”

The Zombie was delighted. “Take them out?”

“No killing,” Phyllis and the Baron said at the same time.

“There are many ways to stop a man without murdering him,” the Zombie said with an air of condescension. “Some of them are even fun.”

“I’d just like to get this thing out of me and go home,” Marco said. “Mom needs to know what happened, and pop needs a burial. Who do you even call to make that happen?”

“We’ll worry about arrangements for your father,” the Baron said, “but first I need to make sure you get out alive before CPUSA manages to kill you.”

“Wait, what?” Marco asked. “They don’t know that I have it, do they?”

“No, but killing everyone around us is the easiest way to test for the Cat,” the Zombie said.

“Oh…” That revelation visibly weighed on Marco.

They started downhill on the left side of the road, moving against uptown foot traffic. They weren’t causing a disturbance—many people were pushing against the flow—but the natural snaking of movement around angry pedestrians, the pauses and meaningless apologies and excuses all added up to slower progress.

Even so, the Baron didn’t want to cross the main street and give anyone in a vehicle an excuse to try running them down. By forcing the crowd to thicken up around them, they were making it harder for possible CPUSA members to hit and run.

“We look paranoid,” Phyllis whispered.

“Thats because we are,” the Baron said, “and justifiably so.”

“Spread out a little, look casual.”

They all took one step apart, spacing to let people slip between them. The crowd was thickening with every step towards the subway station. Its presence would give CPUSA a lot of camouflage, but it’d force them to act discreetly. In a short range struggle, the Zombie was an absolutely superior force. Phyllis would also add a bit of uncertainty to the affair. Malik’s decision makers wouldn’t be able to cleanly pick out the “innocent” to test.

“If someone comes for you, step towards the Zombie,” the Baron muttered to Marco.

“What’re you expecting?” the Zombie asked conversationally. “Knife?”

“Talk quietly,” Phyllis ordered softly.

The Baron answered the Zombie’s question, talking at a level just barely audible above traffic and footfalls. “Watch for a close range stabbing. They won’t shy away from murder. Remember, they don’t want witnesses, but desperation is the father of necessity.”

“Don’t you mean ‘mother of invention?’” Phyllis asked.

“Sure, but I don’t think they’ll be inventing anything. Odds are good the attack will be as cliche as it gets.”

They were about halfway down the block now. Beat cops were idly watching the road and chatting with white shoppers. The sparse immigrants and blacks averted their eyes, a behavior beaten into them by a lifetime of betrayed trust, by the blind eyes of authority overlooking them whenever they were victims of organized crime.

The Baron met the policemen’s bored expressions with a gentlemanly smile, though the rest of his companions looked away. Marco was Italian. The Zombie was busy looking for things to fight. Phyllis was clearly on guard.

Down at the end of the block, a man in a captain’s uniform was idly chatting with the drivers of an emergency ambulance, a white-and-red box coach. There wasn’t anyone hurt in the area. They were simply idling by the curb, discussing something from earlier in the day.

The captain looked up the street twice, directly at the Baron. They didn’t make eye contact, and it was more than a hundred feet away, but the Baron could sense the recognition. There was something unusual about the man’s gait. He paused his conversation with the ambulance drivers and lifted up a radio to exchange a few quiet words.

“That man,” the Baron said, “police captain. He sighted us for someone.”

“You sure?” Phyllis asked.

“I’m sure. He’s the only one looking for someone.”

“Okay,” she muttered. “Do we want to cross the street?”

“That’d just confirm who is with us.” The Baron felt a chill sweep across his scalp. He held out a hand to stop Marco. “Do you feel that? It wasn’t just my imagination?”

A passing lady with exposed calves asked aloud: “A cold front?”

“Feels like it,” Marco answered, mostly speaking to himself.

The temperature continued to drop. The Baron could feel the moist air of spring disappearing into the sharp bite of winter. He touched his bare head. Chilled water was beading on his skin. On windows up and down the street, a thin film of frost spontaneously sublimated.

“You can’t make that much air cold,” Phyllis said quietly.

“Zombie?” the Baron asked.

The invincible man grunted. “Never seen anything like it.”

“That’s so much prestige.” The Baron’s last word was muffled, as if all sound were being dampened by a pillow. The whole street was quiet, heard from across some gulf of open, silent air. They might as well be on the far side of a canyon from the world, but it wasn’t true silence either. The atmosphere was positively frigid for an instant, cold like a still winter morning, dead of life and activity. The Baron had never felt anything exactly like it.

There was a sound like the gentle crack of a gas bottle being opened. Again, and again, three times total. Marco’s back splashed like flesh was made of jelly. Three tidy spurts of tissue, not red but pink, disintegrating muscle. His shirt fluttered neatly. They weren’t grand hits. There wasn’t much noise. If the Baron hadn’t been watching, he wouldn’t have seen anything.

Marco croaked, the air knocked out of him.

Phyllis hadn’t even noticed yet. Her eyes were on the sky.

One second passed. Two seconds. The Baron was shoving Marco to the ground too late. The spring warmth suddenly blustered into being, the static grip on the atmosphere was finally relieved. Water ran in tiny droplets down glass and dried away.

“Get down!” the Baron roared.

The thundercrack of three shots, fired almost five seconds ago, finally reached them. The pedestrians around them shouted and screamed, scattering, an uproar that hurt the ears.

“Up the hill!” the Zombie shouted over the din.

The Baron swept about. Over a mile away—tiny at this distance—a rifleman was standing at the peak of the hill in the middle of an expanding shockwave of panicked civilians. They’d been running for some seconds already, having seen the man uncover, aim, and fire a rifle three times. This sniper threw down his weapon and jumped into an idling vehicle. Beat cops were running for their squad cars.

Bullets, likely .30-06 rounds, were hypersonic. They easily outraced the sounds of gunfire over such tremendous distances. The Baron would think of all this later, processing the moment over and over, but at that instant, he recognized only one thing. The air had chilled because the sniper had wished for perfectly still conditions. No crossbreeze had disturbed those shots. The sheer scale of it all, and in public! Years of prestige had been spent to kill a boy.

Marco gurgled wetly, face down against the walk, and all other concerns fled the Baron. He squatted over the fallen teen, grabbed one of the holes in the back of his shirt, and tore the cloth wide open. The edges of his entry wounds were pulled in like puckered lips. Red rings of hemorrhaging skin were swelling visibly. Blood didn’t gush or run from the wounds. There was a slow, gentle upwell of fluid, filling a cavity beneath Marco’s shoulderblade. The dearth of blood wasn’t a good sign. The teenager was bleeding into a chest full of ruined organs.

“He’s shot?” Phyllis yelled to the Baron. She huddled down around the wounded teenager across from d’Holbach. “How bad?”

“At least one death!” The Baron leaned closer to Marco’s ear. “Start breathing, or it’ll count as two lives!”

Marco made a noise like someone squeezing air through an old bellows, then shuddered violently, forcing a dark gush of blood out of the clustered entry wounds.

“Is that near his heart?” Phyllis asked him.

“Above it. Major arteries.”

“Didn’t he swallow the Cat?”

“He’ll be on his feet in a second.” He slapped Marco on the good side of his back. “Breathe! Don’t asphyxiate!”

Marco tried again, and there was a sound like air being forced into a football bladder, a long wet, sour whine making its way through flapping bits of rubbery flesh.

A sudden sonorous noise interrupted them like the long howl of a steel wolf.

The Zombie was close behind the Baron. “Police captain, on the move!” he called. “Ambulance pulling around!”

“After the sniper?” the Baron asked, hoping that there wasn’t a secular problem running uphill to meet them. He pressed his hand on Marco’s flank, feeling the next wet pull of air. Breathing was already easier. They only needed a few seconds.

“You know they’re coming here,” the Zombie declared gravely.

The Baron glanced down the hill. The new threat was about thirty feet out—the captain that had noticed them just before the shooting started. He was wearing the colors of authority and secular state violence—a five-point peaked cap with a gold crest, a white shirt, a black jacket, and a black tie. For all they knew, he was also a spotter for the occult.

Dread drenched d’Holbach like a soak in the North Atlantic; if he was arrested, the Zombie might harm a lot of people before the New York Cult could arrange for his release. They needed to run. Marco needed to be on his feet seconds ago.

“Is this man shot?” the captain yelled, trotting to a halt just a few yards away.

The Baron didn’t answer him, concentrating on the boy. “Fight the pain, Marco! You’re alive! Will it, and move! Like the ancient warriors, move!”

The boy tried to speak and choked on every broken thing inside his body. No words followed, only a violent, hacking cough. Vibrant, living crimson spattered across the concrete.

The captain approached slowly, chest out, holding out a gloved palm at all of them. “Sir, ma’am, I’m going to need you to step back.” He had a holstered revolver on one side of his belt and a bulky field radio on the other.

“We know him!” Phyllis shouted at the captain.

The Zombie stepped past the Baron, providing a physical barrier to the officer’s approach. The captain stopped moving. The Zombie’s tattered clothes were more intimidating than words. Maybe the captain knew who the Zombie was.

“Marco,” the Baron pleaded with the downed teenager, “you’re not dying. Get up!”

The captain took two steps left, circling around the Zombie. “Sir, I’m with the New York Police Department. Step back!”

The terrible machine howl of the ambulance filled their world. The bulky coach pulled up against the curb beside them, its thunderous tone shifting low and deep. Time was up. The crisis had arrived. If anyone took Marco, there was no saving the boy from the Soviets. Their spies would find him in a hospital, murder him, and harvest the Cat.

So the Baron stood up and bellowed at the captain: “Stay away, officer!”

The Zombie stepped forward, backing up those words with every foot of his towering visage. The captain instantly took a step back.

The siren shut off, and two fit young men hopped out of the cab with white coats and white caps, donning pairs of blue latex gloves powdered in corn starch. They looked like off-service firefighters, just the kind of men who’d be on standby for medical services. One was large; the other, small, carrying a doctor’s bag in one hand.

“Recognize the Zombie?” the Baron shouted at the captain.

The police officer flinched, shrinking away from those words. It seemed increasingly certain that the man was at least trained in occult lore.

“Out of the way!” yelled the large medic. He deliberately barged into Phyllis, who was still kneeling, and shoved her off balance with his leg. “Move!”

“Fuck you!” Phyllis caught herself with one hand, barely keeping her balance.

The large medic planted his boot against her chestbone, and shoved again before she could stand. She half-stumbled, controlling her collapse until she landed on her bottom.

The Baron turned on the large medic. “You too! Step back, or else!” he threatened.

“Don’t you dare!” Phyllis roared, looking past the Baron.

d’Holbach turned around. The smaller medic jabbed the needle of a full syringe into the nape of Marco’s neck. Into the spine.

“Zombie!” the Baron roared, a rough, desperate cry that demanded violence.

Before anyone else could fully react, the smaller medic slammed the plunger, injecting the syringe’s contents with force. Then he jumped to his feet and sprinted exactly like a man should when the Zombie was already charging after him. An instant later, they were both running past the ambulance and into the road.

“What was that injection?” Phyllis shouted.

Marco clenched up violently, going into some kind of sudden spasm on the concrete. He smashed his nose against the walk, smearing another line of blood where his face dragged. What little air he’d brought into his lungs escaped with a single wet hack; then he seized up entirely, eyes opening wide in deathly panic.

“Poison!” the Baron shouted.

The captain swept in quickly and drew his revolver with his right hand, pointing the weapon at the Baron’s head. The Zombie was away; for an instant, such threats mattered.

“The Pact!” the Baron shouted.

“I told you to get back!” the police captain roared. “That’s an order!”

Marco began to relax, unfolding face first against the ground. The large medic kneeled over Marco and started to lift him under the shoulders, prepping him for a proper fireman’s carry—ill-named, since it was more often practiced as a soldier’s technique.

“Zombie!” the Baron cried, a completely different tone that begged for help.

“Last chance!” the police officer yelled. “Move!”

The Baron stepped back slowly, buying time. One step. Two. Three.

The smaller medic sprinted into view a few yards downhill, finishing a full arc around the ambulance before returning to the sidewalk. Already flagging, he tried to stop, lifting his hands and turning to “surrender,” but the Zombie caught up and playfully crossbarred him, flinging the man off his feet and onto his back. A meaty thud, a wheeze.

Laughing, the Zombie swiveled to help the Baron—and spotted the revolver. All smiles died, leaving behind a polar calm. “You’ll put that away,” the Zombie called. “Or else.”

“Everyone, stay where you are!” the captain shouted.

Around them, civilians were beginning to collect at ten paces, watching from the sidelines. They couldn’t know what was happening, but they could sense a conflict unfolding. Their glares could be felt on the Baron’s back. A policeman was their champion. A captain’s enemy was the people’s enemy. The growing crowd was catcalling.

“Get him out of here!” 

“Help the boy!”

“Watch the coolie!”

“This’ll be peaceful!” the captain roared at the Baron, implicitly demanding a secular resolution that didn’t involve any further violence.

The large medic finished shifting Marco’s dead weight up over his shoulders. After a fatal poisoning, it might take the teen a minute or two to learn to move again. Enough time to lose him forever.

“They aren’t medics!” Phyllis yelled at the crowd, “He’s not a cop!”

The Baron couldn’t wait any longer. He took one step back towards the captain, gambling on aggression. “You can’t shoot me,” he declared.

The captain lifted his revolver, glancing at the Zombie.

The Baron pressed on. “If I die, you’ll die, everyone you know will die—”

“Shut up!” the captain bellowed at the top of his lungs.

“Everyone they know will die. The city will burn—”

The captain aimed the revolver again. “I said shut up!”

“I’m begging you to consider what’s at stake.”

The Baron’s attention was split, even as he pleaded for sanity. While arguing with the officer, the smaller medic had risen to his feet, dazed. Then he’d jogged well around the conflict and arrived at the ambulance in time to pull the stretcher out for the large medic.

In seconds, they’d lay Marco down, buckle him up, and shove him into the back for transport. This was the worst case, but the Zombie wouldn’t move to stop them, not so long as there was a gun trained on his vulnerable friend.

“We can’t let you take him,” the Baron said.

“You don’t have a choice!” the captain snapped back.

“I could keep coming. You can’t stop me.”

The captain was sweating. “If I have to shoot you, it’ll be on your head! All those lives on your head, Baron!” So there it was—the masquerade was dropped because Marco was laid down on the stretcher. “We’re taking him. We have the authority here.” 

The Baron waited. Phyllis was yelling at the crowd, telling them that the medics were kidnappers. The story was too fantastic to believe, but they couldn’t ignore her either. The Zombie was frozen in place. The Baron suspected he’d have to make the opening move. Once events were in motion, the Zombie would do the rest.

“Zombie, if anything happens, you have my permission to go wild,” the Baron said.

“Nothing will happen,” the captain insisted.

On cue, new sirens began to scream.

“Others on the way!” Phyllis shouted.

Some of the other cops uphill had noticed the confrontation and were making their way down, squad cars droning like air raid sirens.

The Baron had reached the limits of peaceful confrontation. If he attacked, he was gambling with his life and thus the lives of everyone around him, but he couldn’t wait. There wasn’t any more time. Tied to a stretcher, Marco’s limp body was shoved into the ambulance.

The Baron had to make a move. If his intent was clear and the wish was obvious to all, then his words could be brief. The secrecy of the public would hold. Anticipation was key.

The back door slammed shut. The captain glanced at the vehicle.

The Baron charged, bellowing his wish at the revolver, “Misfire!”

Author’s Note:

Death is defied, but it hurts. Oh, how the body screams!

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

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other readers!

Join the Patreon to support the story and access 4 weeks of early chapters!

July 10, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

Baron d’Holbach was a noble from the Rhineland-Palatinate. By way of his mother, he was heir to the fortune of the late Prince-Bishop’s tax collector, and by way of his father, the owner of ten square-miles of vineyards. His uncle raised him, one Messire François-Adam, Baron d’Holbach, Seigneur de Heeze, Leende and other Places, who’d made his own fortune speculating on the Paris Stock Exchange.

It was his third year after opening the salon at his personal estate in rue Royale, butte Saint-Roche; the third year after both his father and his uncle died. A mixture of wealth, lavish accommodations, and academic connections from Leiden University had placed the Baron at the nexus of the Enlightenment in France and thus throughout Europe, and though he had never become its greatest philosopher or thinker, he had been the movement’s most gracious and enthusiastic host. Philosophers, scientists, and politicians from the continent and beyond were admitted on Sundays and Thursdays to discuss and debate their discoveries and theories. Many of them were allowed to stay in the guest rooms for weeks on end, drawing on the Baron’s vast library of over three thousand volumes in order to inform their papers, pamphlets, and books.

The salon of d’Holbach’s Coterie was arguably the radical vanguard of Western intellectualism, sowing the seeds of the academic revolutions to come.

In this fabulous place, a hemorrhaging of wealth and wine, they called themselves philosophes—distinct from philosophers because they believed that critical thought applied to all subjects. Reason was their sole tool of education, and letters were exchanged freely across all boundaries. Organized religion in particular was abhorred, and most men of the Enlightenment were deists, nodding towards a natural God but denying the authority of His alleged churches.

Only a few of these philosophes spent late nights drunk under the stars, whispering over dim lamps about the system of nature—about atheism, materialism, and determinism. Each element was considered by itself, with adherents arguing for one or two at a time but rarely for all three at once. The Baron found himself prime among these, believing that there must be some element which connected the disparate but parsimonious philosophies.

It would be almost two decades before he wrote and published a book on the subject. For the intervening twenty years, he would cooperate with figures of the Enlightenment to edit and organize The Encyclopaedia or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts. It was the first single reference book containing succinct, technically detailed articles about all the subjects adored by the philosophes. Working out of the Baron’s draft rooms and studies, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert edited, revised, and approved translations of the work. For the first time since Aristotle, the Baron imagined they were bringing together all the knowledge of mankind under a single title. They believed they would transform the world.

For a time, the Encyclopaedia would seem like the most important thing the Baron ever participated in. Even his own books, including The System of Nature, would pale in comparison to the social, political, and economic accomplishment of creating and publishing a combined body of knowledge in a time when less than a twentieth of the population could read, and the echoes of feudal politics distorted the tenuous lines of communication across borders and boundaries.

Yet the Baron lived long enough to see the impact of his efforts disappear. The world evolved. Paradigms were overthrown. The subtlety of every subject was greater than they could’ve imagined, and their confidence had been unfounded. Day by day and year by year, every single word in the Encyclopaedia became obsolete. Even history, the supposedly immutable record of the past, was discovered to be as sturdy as sand castles by the sea.

Their best ideas were crude from the perspective of two centuries gone by. The Baron supposed this was the course of progress. If it even arrived, it didn’t build upon the past. Progress reviewed it, rejected it, and sculpted something finer.

Only one event actually mattered in the long run. Only one passing moment still mattered, because it preserved the Baron, and only the living could truly change the world. He didn’t recognize its importance for thirty years.

In the winter of 1753, the Baron was enjoying a Saturday afternoon alone in the southwest hall of rue Royale, butte Saint-Roche. It was the side of the estate opposite of the high north wind, with the bulk of the building in front of the blizzard and a heavy fire roaring in an old cooking hearth. The heavy pots had been pulled aside to let the heat radiate freely from the masonry and into the open air. Servants came by every half hour to tend to the fire, but for most of the day, the Baron was alone, drinking and eating thin slices of dry cheese while reading a stack of letters sent from his chateau at Grandval.

His first wife was staying there until the end of the month or the foul weather broke, whichever came last, and the Baron easily tolerated her absence because she sent poems spiced with hints of eroticism—a mood which he would indulge on her return.

The sun was nearly down when a servant came to him with a message from a caller. “Baron, there is a cobbler asking after you at the north doors.”

The Baron folded up a letter and set it on the pile. “Those heaped with snow?”

“Yes, Baron.”

“I don’t need my shoes repaired. Send him on his way, and pay him a quarter écu for the trouble of climbing the butte roads to see me.”

“Baron, my apologies,” the servant said, “I have misspoken. The cobbler is not here to repair shoes, though he says it’s his trade. He’s very old and wears only leather in this storm. He calls upon you only to speak.”

“I see. Does he look hungry?” the Baron asked.

“Yes. Like a starving bird, he is frail.”

“Send him here to the hall and warm some water for a bath. Have the mistress prepare a bed for the evening, and make sure I have another plate at dinner. He’ll join us.”

“Yes, Baron,” the servant said.

“Did he give you his name?”

“Yes, he called himself Jakob Böhme.”

“The dead theologian?” the Baron asked, amused.

“I’m not familiar with the name, Baron. Is he an impostor?”

“No, there are many Jakobs and many Böhmes. Send him up.” Jakob Böhme was a German mystic who’d died nearly a century before the Baron was born. It was absurd that anyone would take his name and pretend to be a hundred and eighty years old.

The ancient man the servant led into the hall was surprisingly similar to the portrait of Jakob that the Baron had seen in Edesheim. Originally painted in Gorlitz, the picture in his memory was of a thin, long-faced man with bulging fish-eyes, a broad forehead shining between sheets of thin brown hair which reached to his shoulders, wrinkles as deep as carvings in wood, and a pinch of a mustache like barber sweepings pasted beneath his nose. The figure that entered the hall was spotted, mostly toothless, and even more deeply wrinkled—but he had the same sheets of hair, now shock white, and the same wisp of stache like tufts of cotton.

“Monsieur Jakob Böhme, let me introduce you to the master of the house, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach. Baron, this is Jakob Böhme, the cobbler.”

The Baron was in a leather chair beside a stand covered in opened letters. He gestured to a wooden chair closer to the fire. “Warm yourself. Would you like wine and cheese?”

“I’m not hungry anymore,” Jakob said, settling into a warm chair with a shudder, “but you are a good master for offering a man of my station such fine fare.” His rough leather coat was already running with melted snow, but he didn’t seem to mind the soaked hide.

“Are you cold?” the Baron asked.

“I have steeled myself against the freezing weather.” He looked out a distant window at the growing darkness outside the hall. “The condition ends. There’s so little time left.”

“Till sundown?” the Baron asked.

“I am very old,” the man explained, though the Baron didn’t exactly follow his meaning.

“Do you mind if I have more wine?”

“Please, enjoy yourself, master. I’d never deny a man pleasure in his own home.”

“You can call me Baron,” d’Holbach corrected, more out of preference than any rebuke for a forgotten station. He filled a glass goblet and sipped the bitter, astringent liquid. It was a strong red wine, drier than most vintages. It’d been laid down less than five years ago, still too young by most standards, but fine for drinking alone.

Jakob grinned, empty gums gaping between cracked, scabbed lips. Somewhere deep in the recesses of his mouth, dark molars still held the shape of his jaw. “Baron d’Holbach, I have been told that your coterie is a place of great wisdom.”

“Thank you, but don’t give me too much credit. It’s my wealth and a master chef that draw them here. Not my wisdom.”

“I hear better things about you on the summer winds,” Jakob said. “The trees and the sunlight sing your praises, Baron.”

The Baron laughed. Insanity never frightened him. “The sunlight sings?”

“I’ve heard the sun ever since I saw the structure of God in the light of a pewter dish. You may not be the most brilliant or most charismatic, but you have the strongest conviction. Among your coterie, you lead because confidence is the only strength they respect.”

“Is that so? And who says I have conviction?”

“Even if the wind didn’t whisper it, I would know already. I am mad, mad, mad, but you aren’t shaken. Nothing I could say would disturb your heart.”

“I don’t know about that,” the Baron said, “but I hope it’s true.”

“It is!” Jakob grinned emptily. “I can hear it, the iron in your soul.”

“If you know me so well, then you know I don’t believe in souls.” The Baron sipped his wine and waited. The guest was already proving to be an admirable speaker, and he had at least passing knowledge of the original Jakob Böhme’s books.

“Yes, yes! Exactly, Baron. You are resolute. Down to the bones, you believe in reason.”

“I’m flattered, Monsieur Böhme. I pride myself on such matters.”

Jakob laughed. “I wish to test your reason against some facts I’ve learned.”

“I will do my best,” the Baron said, “but I make no promises. You’re a puzzling man. Well-educated, yes? Though a cobbler, you speak like a man of the court.”

“I’m the opposite of a court man,” Jakob said. “They would call me a sinner and a slob, though I have spent my fair share of time at the feet of kings.” He scooted forward in his chair. “I will tell you three things, each more fantastic than the last. I wish to hear your thoughts.”

“Please.” The Baron ate a slice of hard cheese off a plate and took a deep draught of the wine. He could feel it in his sinuses, in the fore of his head. Drinking was freedom and fault at once. He would be more willing to entertain Jakob’s nonsense.

“The first then. You’ve heard of me, but you believe I perished long before you were born. I am the famous Jakob Böhme, the Mystic, and I’m almost two hundred years old. When I was young and truly insane, my friends took the truths I wrote in my journals and published them without my permission. I thought them traitors at the time, though I could barely express myself through the madness I’d chosen. The Catholics would’ve skewered me with a pole, but the Lutherans were willing to exile me because I’d intended to keep my secrets to myself.”

Jakob waited for the Baron to respond. It was clearly a fantastic story, but what was the challenge in picking that element apart? To refute the logic of a thing by denying its foundations was easy. To destroy something by showing that it had no logic was the real challenge.

“Assume a man might live for two centuries,” the Baron said.

“For every three days of a prestige, one day of life,” Jakob muttered, “but that means nothing to you, Baron. Assume it. What do you say?”

“How do I know you’re that Jakob Böhme?”

“I know myself, and over the last century I’ve come to resist the madness of my wish. I remember myself again. I’ve heard the many voices of our divided God, and I’ve learned His story. He was once the Abyss, unified and formless but for one desire—to know Himself. He knows no other beginning, and nothing like himself, and also no end.”

“This is your God?” the Baron asked.

“This is the Divine, may He be one or many.”

The Baron drained the rest of his glass. “Go on.”

“For Him, time is measured against the original division. He rendered himself unto two halves, light and dark.” He split his hands apart, waving each one in turn. “Positive and negative. From this duality, He formed a pattern of interlacing being, ever dividing and multiplying in complexity, creating more and more information—collecting more and more knowledge about Himself. The world grew in this tension! It became a reflection of Him, both good and evil at once, though it was not Him—it only lived between his halves.”

“The world is between those halves,” the Baron mused.

“Yes! The good chose to stand apart in order to learn about Himself. The evil lusted to return to the unified state, but if it were allowed to cross the gulf—” Jakob clapped his hands together. “He would crush the stars and sun and moon and world. Eschaton.”

“This sounds vaguely like an explanation for change. Like Heraclitus of Ephesus, who believed that there was a logos—a universal understanding that formed the soul of reality.”

Jakob’s scabbed lips split into another wild grin, stretching their leather far enough to draw specks of blood. “Yes, he must’ve made the wish to hear all the voices of God! Change is the conflict between His wrath, God the Father, and His peace, Jesus Christ the Son. You can even see it in the Bible, Baron. The Old Testament is filled with hate and war, touched with reflection and peace. The New Testament is filled with love and salvation, touched by sin and betrayal. Through these two halves, the history of the world was made—the Holy Spirit, I call it. It’s the grand design crafted by the interaction of Father and Son across time.”

“You know Jakob Böhme’s theology,” the Baron admitted, “but I could’ve given you a similar review, and I don’t believe a word of it.”

“You’re an atheist, but you aren’t a fool. You’ll listen and remember the words of others, even if you refuse to believe. But look at me—am I not the image of myself? Would you believe—if it were possible men could live two hundred years—that this look and these words were mine?”

“If those things were true, then yes, that would be enough to convince a reasonable man.”

“So that is your standard of reason? With those assumptions, I might be Böhme?”

“If we make strange assumptions, yes,” the Baron agreed.

“This is the same standard I bring to my own theology,” Jakob said. “Revelation is only inspiration. To know truth, one must observe the world.”

“You’ve observed something to make you believe in God?”

“Yes, but I have an unfair advantage.” He blew his breath out of the gap between his gums. “I can hear them constantly, the aspects of the Divine. They talk to us, tell us how to increase the complexity of their tension. They instruct the weave of the Holy Spirit, though we cannot see the pattern. I’m afraid even they are blind to their ultimate purpose. They are still learning, God and his Son. There is so much to learn about oneself, that one could live forever and never finish.”

“That’s true enough. You couldn’t finish because you’d be forever changing,” the Baron said. “This is more Heraclitus. Even the dead continue to decay. Memories of them evolve when they’re recalled, and nothing about anything stays exactly the same.”

“You can only learn about the past,” Jakob said.

“Correct, Monsieur Böhme.”

“Baron, I cannot show you now because I have only enough prestige for one more wish, but will you trust me? I’m about to tell you something true, and someday you should go out into the world and witness it for yourself. Not tomorrow, not twenty years from now, but someday.”

“Please, continue. I find this fascinating.” The Baron poured the rest of the bottle in his glass and took another drink. “Do you mean a wish like a miracle?”

“Yes! The Divine chooses to reflect certain desires of man in exchange for man’s reflection of the Divine desires. Thus, God’s many aspects will grant the wishes of certain men. Like a science, it is reproducible, knowable, and beautifully simple. You don’t need faith—you only need will, and God acts on your behalf.”

“You can reliably wish for miracles?” The Baron swirled the remaining wine in his glass and sniffed the astringent and fruity fumes. “Is it a miracle then, if it’s reliable?”

Jakob laughed, a raspy sound. “Well said, Baron! Let us be done with miracles—throw aside faith! We only need reason now. Don’t you understand?”

“No,” the Baron replied with a grin. “Tell me though.”

“By witnessing wishes come true, God reveals Himself to us. He allows us to assume a place of importance in the process of His self-discovery. He grants us this power because we, like Him, are formed in the Divine image. We are infused by the essence of a soul.”

“Is this the second fact in your list of three?” the Baron asked, recalling that this Mystic had promised him two more truths to consider.

Jakob beamed with pride, a bundle of lively wrinkles. “Yes, Baron! Good, good! Consider that we can prove the existence of God by witnessing His interventions. By hearing His requests! That is a fact. God is real, and we can study His works.”

“Have you considered that the things you see might be natural, not divine? I see material nature everywhere, but I can’t explain even a tenth of it yet. My reason wouldn’t compel me to abandon this materialism simply because you’ve found more unexplained events.”

Jakob laughed. “Is this your standard of reason?”

“What do you mean?” the Baron asked.

“Would it be impossible to show you something that convinced you of a Divine foundation for reality? Is your system of nature so flawless that no crack or doubt can enter you?”

“Maybe so,” the Baron said. “I prefer to think that it’s not my duty to believe. Rather, it’s my duty to disbelieve that which is unnecessary and contradictory.”

“You suppose the Divine is like that?”

“I do. God is a philosophically useless concept.”

“My God isn’t,” Jakob said. “He is only a product of reason. Reason alone is all a man like you should ever need to see the truth.”

“What’s the third fact then?” the Baron asked. “Is it the truth that will convince me?”

Jakob brightened, the leather of his skin wrinkling up like a smashed date. “Of course, of course. I’ve placed a condition on myself to reach this day, Baron. I had to find a man of perfect conviction, a man married to reason. You’re that man! I will prove that God is real, and someday you’ll reason it out. You’ll believe what I believe because it is the inevitable conclusion.”

“That seems unlikely,” the Baron said, his voice not disdainful but filled with pleasure. This ancient cobbler was the most interesting guest he’d entertained all month.

“You will bring an end to the tension between reason and faith, Baron. You will play a key role in this endless search for God’s self-knowledge. Once your strict mind has come to terms with what I am about to do, we will find the truth. Do you understand?”

“No.” The Baron drained his wine. “Not yet, I suppose.”

“I am going to increase the complexity of the world through you.”

“What will you do?” the Baron asked warily.

“I’ll make a wish on your behalf. Would you accept it?”

“Is this like a prayer?”

“It’s better. Prayers are just words. Wishes are real.”

“Go ahead then,” the Baron said. “Wish upon my brow. I accept it.”

“Good! Good! I wish that you, Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, will neither age nor fall to illness and injury until the day you believe in the existence of the Divine.” Jakob suddenly twitched in his chair, then sagged. His breathing instantly became deep and ragged. “It’s all gone,” he muttered. “I’m done with it. Oceans, spent. Finally.”

The Baron shouted back through the hall. “Water for this man!”

“No, no, this is good,” Jakob said. “My borrowed vitality is finally coming to an end.”

“Vitality?” the Baron asked. He picked up the plate of cheese. “You must eat and drink. There’ll be a warm bath soon.”

Jakob waved the Baron back. “Please, no. This is what I expected. Respect my words, Baron. This is what I wanted.”

The Baron sat back slowly but didn’t set down the plate. A servant came running with a glass of cool clear water, which had been drawn from the well that morning. Despite his protests, Jakob drank greedily, letting water spill over his lips and run in beads and rivulets over his leather coat. The servant took the glass when he was done. Jakob collapsed back in his chair and started to laugh. “This is good,” he said.

“What is good?”

“I have worked hard for decades to preserve my life while collecting this prestige. I have learned to live with madness, to push it under until I am sane again. I’ve struggled for decades to find someone worthy of it, and then I found you. d’Holbach’s coterie—hah! Perfect, Baron.”

“You collected prestige?”

“It’s like silver,” Jakob said, “but I spent it on you.”

“What was that wish for?”

“Ah! You will live and thrive until you’ve reconciled the truth of the world with the strength of your reason. There’s no trick. You won’t trigger this condition on a technicality. You must, deep down, believe that you understand the Divine. You must believe as I believe.”

“And if I don’t?” the Baron asked.

“Then my wish will remain until you do.”

“I won’t believe in any divinity. I can tell you this now.”

“I’ve done this twice before, and neither time has it failed. You are simply the last, Baron, and the most challenging. It’ll only take a moment, but someday, that moment will come.” Jakob closed his eyes. “I don’t want to trouble you any longer. I’ve somewhere to go now.”

“In the dark?” the Baron asked. “At least let me find you a better coat and lantern.”

Jakob Böhme nodded slowly, as if he were about to sleep. “You are a good man, Baron, a virtuous atheist.”

The Baron set down his cheese and went to the back of the hall, towards the room where his servants would be loitering. He asked them to find a coat while he retrieved a lantern. They were generally pleased with d’Holbach’s charity and set about their search immediately for one of the older, unused garments in the mansion. The Baron took a lantern from the kitchen that he favored for trips to the well. It was sturdy and had a deep reserve of oil.

When he returned to the hall, Jakob Böhme had already disappeared.

Author’s Note:

A mystic arrived, then vanished. He wished to spread faith, even to the most rational philosopher in Europe.

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

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other readers!

Join the Patreon to support the story and access 4 weeks of early chapters!

July 9, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific CW.

An implicit timer hung over the Imperial Apartments. Sooner or later, CPUSA mercenaries would reach the neighborhood and deploy, searching for the Baron, the Zombie, and their “innocent man,” Marco. Nevertheless, the Baron instructed the teen to use the restroom and drink several gulps of tap water. Experience had long taught him that hunger could be delayed, but excretion and dehydration were ruthless opponents. Best to eliminate them now, in safety and privacy, instead of risking witnesses while seeking facilities later.

After Marco exited the restroom, Phyllis took her turn, promising to be quick.

The Baron and Zombie waited with Marco in the parlor. Quiet fell onto the room for some seconds. An air conditioner rumbled into life, fans and compressors at once, low and steady like a mechanical lullaby. It was a sleepy Sunday hour, if not for the threats bearing down on them and the world alike.

“You’re both… really old,” Marco observed. It wasn’t a brilliant thought, but it was the kind of bland thing a man said when he needed to take his mind off his feelings.

The Baron recognized two needs here, and indulging Marcos’ curiosity could sate both. First, it’d be far easier to help the young man if he were fully inducted into the mysteries of the occult, and second, the truth in its enormity could temporarily eclipse grief.

The Baron leaned against the parlor’s unstocked bar. “It’s true, but before you ask, we don’t have perfect proof. We can only demonstrate a little about what we are. The rest is rightly called mythology, though it’s a good time to learn it. You’re part of the occult now.”

“I see,” Marco muttered.

“Do you have a pocket knife?” the Zombie asked Marco.

“Yeah?” Marco reached into a pocket and pulled out a little folding Swiss Army Knife, far nicer than any of the penny knives that the Zombie had destroyed over the last couple of days. He hesitated with this valuable tool cradled in a soft palm. “Why?” he asked carefully.

“I can show you a cool trick,” the Zombie said.

“He’ll try not to break it,” the Baron offered, setting expectations for both Marco and the Zombie simultaneously. This would be a great demonstration, assuming Marco believed.

“Sure,” Marco said, passing the knife over.

The Zombie unfolded the steel blade. “Watch.” He stuck out his tongue and ran the sharp edge over the meat of it, pressing down with visible force.

Marco flinched away, but the Zombie just laughed around the weapon, a hollow, carefree sound like the knife was a tongue depressor. He pulled it away. “Aaaaah!” He tried to show as much tongue as possible.

Marco relaxed, peering closely. “You aren’t cut?”

“Got you!” the Zombie yelled as he slashed the blade across his eyeball.

Marco winced, cringing. “Ok, ok, you’re invincible! Stop!”

“That’s the polite version of the trick,” the Baron said. “I’ve seen strong men upend their stomachs when he does his favorite version.”

“I jam it under my eyelids,” the Zombie elucidated. He glanced over at the bathroom door. “Still got time if you wanna see it and don’t care about losing the knife.”

“God, no!” Marco briefly raised his hands in surrender. “Please, just give it back.” 

The Zombie wiped the blade on his damaged sleeve, closed it, and dropped it into Marco’s waiting hand. “Were you feeling skeptical?” he asked.

“A little, yeah. Before the demonstration.” Marco pocketed his knife. “It’s some weird shit.”

The Zombie grinned, chuckling. “Good! Don’t let the big lies fool you, because after we’re done here, you’ll hear a lot of them.”

Marco nodded to the Zombie, taking a deep breath. “So I get why you’re old. You’re invincible, like really invincible, yeah?”

“Oh yes! Time can grind even mountains to dust, but I’ll outlast the mountains.”

Marco eyed the Baron carefully. “Why are you so old though? You’re not invincible, right?”

“I’m not,” the Baron agreed.

“So what’s your story?”

Phyllis walked into the parlor, wiping her hands on her pants. “I’m ready.”

“Phyllis, Marco is asking me why I’m so old,” the Baron said. “I was thinking of inducting him, fully and thoroughly. What do you think?” The Baron’s plans weren’t changing, but asking for Phyllis’s approval altered the power dynamics between her and Marco. It’d be good to push the boy to trust in women, especially in his future dock boss.

Marco rubbed his thin mustache and gave them all his manliest glare. “Does it matter what she thinks?”

Phyllis eyed him. “It matters. He’s basically asking me if I trust you.”

“Well, what about it?” Marco asked her. “I’m my father’s son.”

Phyllis stared flatly. “Do you believe in my authority, even though I’m a woman?”

“Well—”

“Because they’re treating me like one, Marco. I’m an authority in the occult.”

Marco blinked as if he hadn’t considered the possibility before. “Really?” 

“It’s true,” the Zombie said. “Women cultists are strong, but her talents don’t stop there. I saw her wrangle ten Anastasia men in your father’s place. She’s got steel.”

The Zombie’s buttering up seemed to lubricate the social dynamics better than any words from Phyllis ever could. “Yeah—I mean, of course,” Marco said, tacitly agreeing with the machoest man in the room. “She’s always been my dad’s right hand.”

Phyllis grunted, smirking. “Yeah, Baron, induct him. I’ll help him after this is all over. Just remember, Marco, follow your father’s example. Don’t tell people I’m a cultist, all right?”

“Sure?” Marco said noncommittally.

“Her advice is good,” the Zombie added. “Keep her secret. That’s trust. Loyalty.”

Marco nodded. “I can keep a secret.”

The Baron clapped his hands together for attention. “We’re all ready, so let’s go.” He opened the door to the parlor and marched out into the broad hall with the slanted ceiling, following the dim cast of sunlight towards the elevators.

Marco fell in behind him, and the Zombie and Phyllis brought up the rear.

The Baron talked as they walked: “You’re about to become a practicing member of a religion which has no name. I call it the system of prestige. You and everyone else will call it the occult.”

“The occult,” Marco echoed dutifully.

The Baron pressed the call button at the elevator and turned to his new student. “It’s a global religion, but scattered, messy. There are dozens of stories for every city; hundreds of heroes and villains; thousands of variations on core myths. Yet there’s basically no books, at least in the West. Almost everything is passed along by oral tradition.”

“No books?” Marco asked.

“Almost none. Writing anything down is considered blasphemous. Only record books are widely accepted, and only because they can’t be used to prove the existence of the system.”

Marco furrowed his brow in concentration. “But there are real books?”

The elevator started grinding its way up to the fourth floor.

The Baron answered, “There’s one ‘real’ book about the system of prestige, and it was written by the only other ageless person. Her name is Elizabeth.”

“The Apostate,” Phyllis added.

“What’s that mean?” Marco asked her.

The Artemisian folded her hands at her waist. “It means she renounced the occult. She put one foot outside the boundaries, and the cults of the world loathed her for it.”

“What did she do?” Marco asked.

The Baron waved off the question. “We’ll address that later. For now, know that she wrote a book, and there’s a chapter dedicated to each of us, our natures—” The Baron paused, seeking a word to capture the aim of Elizabeth’s writing “—our principles,” he concluded.

“So you’re famous,” Marco said.

“Infamous,” the Baron corrected. “According to most cults, there are three living villains. The Zombie came first, Elizabeth came last, and I’m the second one, the middle child.”

“The middle evil!” the Zombie said gaily.

“The middle evil?” Marco asked.

“Yeah,” the Zombie said. “The lesser evil is Elizabeth. The greatest evil is me.”

Marco looked at him cautiously. “Evil like what?”

The Zombie cackled. “I’m a murderer.”

“He’s not that dangerous,” the Baron said dismissively. “Just treat him with respect.” The elevator bell dinged, and the door automatically opened. He pulled on the cage and stepped inside. Everyone sidled past him.

“I get you,” Marco said to the Zombie. “You’re strong.”

“Damn right,” the Zombie murmured with pleasure.

Phyllis spoke up. “You’re approaching this the wrong way, Baron. You two are outliers, exceptions. Everyone else has to start from the same basic beliefs.”

“Like what?” Marco asked.

The Baron closed the cage and pressed the button to go down. “It’s a religion, Marco. There are common doctrines.” The elevator shuddered into life and began to sink. Meanwhile, the Baron enumerated his points with his fingers. “First, it’s believed that gods exist. Their evidence is the miracle of prestige itself, the magic of wishing. For them, the supernatural is real, and what are their occult masters but gods?”

“Makes sense,” Marco said.

The elevator passed into the brief darkness between floors, where the hollow mezzanine of steel and insulation lurked between sheets of oil-treated wood. “Second, it’s believed that man has free will. The past is locked, immutable and unchangeable by divine decree, but the future will be defined by our choices. Their proof is in the system. One of the primary rules is that no wish can alter or impede man’s free will, and they say the gods would never make a rule to protect a freedom that doesn’t exist.”

“I follow you,” Marco said.

“Third, the vehicle for free will, the locus of interest for the gods, is a man’s soul. Their proof is in the afterlife. Almost everyone in the system of prestige is aiming for one wish—to go to the gods when they die. If they do, then they will surely survive death, and the living can speak with them, even if their body is buried or burned.”

“Did my dad go to the afterlife?” Marco asked.

The Baron paused; he didn’t know what arrangements Barilla had already made.

“Nobody knows,” Phyllis answered, jumping on the question. “He didn’t have a chance to wish for the afterlife, but it’s widely believed that the gods will take the best among us to live with them.”

Marco had a tense expression, lips stretched thin like rubber bands about to snap. They passed down between the third and second floors. “What if they didn’t? What if dad isn’t saved?”

“Nobody knows,” Phyllis insisted. “The rules of the gods maintain the mysteries of death. If you’re worried though, have hope. Your father was brave. He argued with the enemy, right up until he was shot. If there’s a judge of the dead, they’ll treat him well.”

The Baron was impressed. Phyllis was plainly mischaracterizing Barilla’s final seconds, but there was no reason to tear down the reputation of a dead man in front of his son, and plenty of reasons to pull Marco away from a straight drop into grief and despair.

“Yeah,” Marco said shakily, “yeah, his soul is in a good place then.”

The elevator stopped and the door opened. “I’m a universalist of a kind,” the Baron added. “I think there’s no god of moral authority. Nobody judges the dead. They don’t even care to reward us for our labor. I think they preserve us—all of us—because of what they are, because there are many of them and few of us. But I have very strange beliefs, Marco. Very strange. That’s why I’m called a villain.”

Phyllis opened the cage.

Marco didn’t notice. “I don’t understand.”

The Baron stepped out into a hall beside the foyer, a space of waxed wood floors and off-white wallpaper, like the bottom of a wooden drawer lined with old folders. Everyone filed out, while the Baron explained himself. “They call me the Philosopher, the Atheist, and Doubting Henry. Despite all of the so-called evidence, despite knowing everything I’ve told you, I believe there are no gods, no freedom, and no soul. I am an atheist, a determinist, and a materialist, and nothing I’ve seen has given me reason to doubt my philosophy. We live in a system of nature, and these occult elements aren’t supernatural. They’re unknown science, reaching out of the dark abyss of our ignorance and directing our world with purpose.”

“What purpose?” Marco asked.

“We don’t know. They obfuscate their goals with tasks.”

“Phyllis said there are gods—”

“There are things that men call gods, nothing more.”

“But you said there’s choice—”

“We are agents of our own action, Marco, but we are chemical machines.”

“And the soul?”

“Something is preserved,” the Baron said, “but everything the so-called gods do has the flavor of manipulation, not violation. They adhere to the natural order as we know it, and nature is materialistic. We are nothing but matter, and I believe they have the science to save and manifest the patterns that we call minds.” He pointed beyond Marco. “Go on now.”

Phyllis started towards the foyer. The teenager followed quietly, and the Zombie, grinning from ear to ear, walked with eyes trained steadily on his back. The Baron brought up the rear, finishing his story. “I am the great doubt that haunts the cults. I am the eternal skeptic.”

“Why?” Marco asked a question so empty of direction that it could only come from a mind similarly lost. He’d been told so much, and then told none of it was true.

“The Baron doesn’t believe,” Phyllis said. “He never has.”

“He never will,” the Zombie added. “That’s why I saved him. He’s fascinating.”

“These two believe,” the Baron said, “but my disbelief keeps me alive.”

They walked through the foyer of the apartment complex, a two-story room padded with more thick, cream-colored wallpaper and flexible hardwood floors. It was hard to imagine many people lived here, but New York City wasn’t a homogenous place. Despite the density of the population, there was always room spent poorly, empty or unused most of the time. In one sense, this was to their advantage. Nobody but the doorman would see them leave.

Yet the silence of the place was oppressive. The Baron felt the urge to talk more, simply to lift the atmosphere. Instead, he waited for Marco to digest his words.

When they reached the entrance, the doorman opened the outer door and bid them goodbye. “Well wishes to your father,” he added, smiling at Marco.

“Thank you,” the teen replied flatly.

They went down the stairs as a group. The Zombie walked tallest among them, still wearing ruined clothes. He whispered over Marco’s shoulder. “Why didn’t you tell him?”

The teen shrugged. “He’s an asshole. He doesn’t need to know.”

“A secret kept out of malice,” the Zombie muttered. “Simply delightful.”

The streets carried their regular Sunday traffic, both vehicles and pedestrians. A passing couple in their late 50s gave the Zombie a brief glance, but the normal appearance of his companions convinced them that none of this was their business. Foreigners were eternally unacceptable to men and women born in the 19th century. It only confirmed their suspicions to see one dressed like a madman in the middle of the afternoon.

“Hello madam!” the Zombie shouted to the old lady. Her thin hair had been puffed up by her beautician like a headful of dandelion seeds. “Do you like my fashion?”

The rest waited and watched. The Baron knew what was happening; Phyllis seemed ready to accept whatever happened. Only Marco was visibly worried.

“Don’t speak to my wife, sir,” warned the old man.

“She dresses like a woman of good taste,” replied the Zombie. “She’s been eyeing my finery. If she wants it, I’d gladly hand her my other sleeve.”

The husband put an arm behind her wife, and they huddled closer, ignoring the Zombie and moving on without answering his madness.

“I’ve vindicated your fears about the Orient!” the Zombie shouted after them.

“What are you doing?” Marco asked quietly.

“The Zombie does this instead of killing people,” Phyllis explained. “It’s in Apostasy.”

“He’s intimidating them,” the Baron added. “Come on. Let’s get moving.” They started up the sidewalk, heading east along the block, past a long line of fine cars facing uphill towards the actual heights of Crown Heights. Quickly, they fell into a line, letting the rest of the foot traffic stream past them on the left. People glanced but never paused. It wasn’t their business.

“You don’t kill people anymore?” Marco asked the Zombie.

“I only kill for good reasons,” the Zombie answered. “Not like I used to.”

“What happened?”

“I met the Baron.”

“He’s lying for fun,” the Baron said. “The Zombie has been on the path to civilization since the turn of the 13th century, ever since Constantinople was ransacked during the Fourth Crusade.”

“Ah, right!” The Zombie laughed. “I was in the court of the king of the Byzantines!”

“The city was ruled by an emperor,” the Baron corrected him, “and last time you told me about the sack, you said you were pretending to be the slave of a merchant.”

“Of course, of course, I remember now.” The Zombie grinned, winking when Marco glanced back at him. “I was a slave in the emperor’s court.”

The Baron shook his head. “He’s still lying. I spoke with an Ottoman pirate about a century ago, just before the Fall of Truth. He told me that during the Crusade, the Zombie smashed through the breadth of the outer walls by slamming his body against them for four straight days, all while defenders threw oil and torches down onto his head. The Sack was the last time he killed for fun alone. At least, verifiably. For certain definitions of fun.”

The Zombie squealed with delight at his own legend. “I’m awesome.”

“You’re egotistical,” the Baron teased.

“I’m a story! I only wish I remembered the Crusades.”

“You don’t?” Marco asked.

The Baron answered for the Zombie: “We’ve carefully tested his memory. It’s hard for him to recall anything more than three centuries ago.”

“Damn,” Marco said. “That… actually sucks.”

The Zombie chuckled. “No, it’s great. It means I keep changing.”

“Where are we going?” Phyllis asked them, interrupting their banter. “Looking for another cab?”

“That or the subway,” the Baron answered. “We need to reach Manhattan as soon as possible.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “There’s a station a few blocks east of here. Checkers are usually waiting outside.”

“We’ll decide when we get there,” the Baron suggested.

“What about you, Baron?” Marco asked. “Have you forgotten stuff?”

“No. I’m not like the Zombie. I’m only two hundred, and I won’t know if we’re the same kind of ageless for at least another century.”

“You’re not invincible?” Marco asked.

“That’s right.”

“Huh. But you aren’t old?”

“You mean physically? No, I’m not.”

“Why is that?”

The Baron rubbed his scalp thoughtfully. “I guess this is a good time to tell you my legend. It started a hundred and ninety-nine years ago, in the winter, when a particularly powerful Diviner called upon me at my home…”

Author’s Note:

Learn the lore, induct yourself into the mysteries, and become occult yourself.

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

Join the Discord to discuss the story and hang out with other readers!

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July 8, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

The Baron breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Pushing someone to believe in wild myths was often the hardest part of convincing a secular or near-secular person to cooperate, at least without asking the Zombie to perform a magic trick. Now it was time to motivate Marco, to offer a portion of hope to assuage any grief or dread. “You won’t die,” the Baron said. “We’ll make sure that you walk out of this situation alive, and I promise you, there will be justice for your father.”

“Yeah?” Marco dropped his hands to his lap. “Who killed him?”

“Just some Communist goon,” Phyllis said.

Marco scoffed. “God damnit it woman—”

The Baron twitched, and Marco shut up before he earned himself a second slap.

“If you have a question, ask it,” the Baron ordered.

Marco rubbed the red of his right cheek with a thumb. “Who ordered the goon?”

“Why do you care?” the Baron asked.

“Someone has to pay. Pop always said, ‘It’s an eye for an eye or you’ll go blind,’ yeah?”

The Baron opened his mouth, then closed it.

Phyllis stage-whispered, “That’s really how he said it.”

“Was he joking?” The Baron glanced at Phyllis.

She shook her head.

The Baron returned his attention to Marco. “Revenge isn’t an option. If you get anywhere near the Soviets, they’ll kill you, see that you have the Cat, and then kill you again and again until you run out of lives.”

“Answer my question, man. Who killed my pop?”

“You can’t kill him,” the Baron insisted.

“Why not?”

“Because the man is a Soviet diplomat. If he dies, you’ll start an international incident, and he’ll just be replaced by another man who’ll have twice as many reasons to gut you and sift through your entrails. Taking revenge on him won’t help, and it’ll certainly make things worse.”

“You’re telling me I can’t avenge my pop because of somebody else’s problem?”

“It’s not somebody else’s problem. It’s everyone’s problem.”

Marco was clearly upset. “What, the end of the world or whatever?”

“Yes, the end of the world. The Soviets have a cult with a lot of power and prestige, and the only reason they aren’t fighting with magic is because they’re a divided house. The Bolsheviks—the faction that murdered your father—are stymied by the Orthodox, the original owners of the Cat o’ Nine Lives. If anything happens to the Cat except for its safe return to the Orthodox leadership, the Bolsheviks will win control of the Soviet cult, and the ball will start rolling on an occult war between the CIA and the KGB—one that the Soviets will almost certainly win if they aren’t threatened with a nuclear strike.”

Marco blinked, suddenly imagining what every sane person saw after hearing the word nuclear—visions of annihilation. When he opened his mouth, his question came out like a prayer for hope: “Are you saying people won’t fight ‘cause of the nukes?”

“No, Marco, it’s the opposite. The Bolsheviks aren’t afraid of the bomb; nor are Langley for that matter. As far as they’re all concerned, committing to nuclear war isn’t a question of if but when. Taking your revenge wouldn’t just end your life. It might end the world.”

Marco shook his head. “I’m sorry, I hear you, but I… Jesus, man, I don’t care.” He blinked rapidly to clear his eyes. “My pop is dead, and he’d tell me to kill for him.” He sniffed, flinching at some inner emotion, overwhelming his machismo and resolve. “It’s what a man would do.”

The Zombie grinned. “Kid, doing what we want is your revenge. What do you think happens when you fail the Kremlin? When you fail Stalin?”

Marco’s chest convulsed, but he took a deep breath to smother the sob. “I don’t know,” he muttered. “You get fired?”

The Zombie laughed. “If you own up to your mistakes, you die in a Gulag camp, cold and starving, and that’s a mercy. If you run, the KGB kills you in some remote corner of the world. They rip off your fingernails and cut out your tongue and make you suffer for failing them. They take pictures, record your screams—they make an example out of you.”

Marco swallowed and sniffed, but he couldn’t muster a reply, not even with seconds to reflect on the Zombie’s words.

The Zombie continued, “The diplomat’s name is Andrey Malik. The Kremlin is watching him, I guarantee it, and if he doesn’t find you and take the Cat, they’ll call him home for Stalin’s judgement. They’ll punish him for all that pointless murder, and all the risks he took.”

“They’ll kill him because he killed my pop?” Marco asked.

“For that and more, he’ll die slower than you could imagine, ashamed and broken.” The Zombie grinned even broader. “Help us win, and Malik will suffer. Do you want that?”

“I do,” Marco said bleakly. “I do. He has to hurt before he dies.”

“We’ll make sure he knows,” the Zombie said. “I promise.”

“You’re a frightening man,” Phyllis said to the Zombie.

He cackled. “I’ve lived a long time and seen tyrants in every age. They’re all the same, paranoid, afraid of the world they’ve conquered. After a while, even failure and rebellion look the same. They’re both obstacles. They stand in the way of perfect safety.”

“I’m not letting you off the hook,” she said softly. “That’s just as creepy.”

“Who are you?” Marco asked the Zombie.

“That’s right. We haven’t introduced ourselves,” said the Baron.

Phyllis raised a hand for them to pause. “Allow me.”

The Baron looked to the Zombie, who nodded his assent.

Phyllis crossed her hands at her waist. “Marco, these are very old men. When I was a little girl, I read a book that changed my life, and some of my favorite stories were about them. The European gentleman is Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach. He was born more than two hundred years ago in Germany. His Asian friend in the ruined shirt is the Zombie. In the book, he was called the Golem, and he’s the oldest man alive. Nobody knows when he was born.”

“I have some theories,” the Baron said.

“I have stories,” the Zombie added.

“He has fiction,” the Baron corrected, “but it doesn’t matter. I won’t age, fall sick, or waste away from an injury, but I’m vulnerable. That’s why this man protects me. He’s absolutely invincible, and he swore an oath that if I died, he’d destroy everyone responsible. Marco, this includes you. I’m not threatening you. I don’t expect you to attack me. I just want you to know what’s at stake.”

“Okay.” Marco was already overwhelmed. The Baron could tell that he was ready to shut down, but they couldn’t afford the delay any longer.

“Marco, before we go, I need you to show me a phone.”

The boy stood up. He was a full head shorter than Phyllis and two heads shorter than the Baron. Compared to the Zombie, he was a squirt. “You need to make a call?” he asked.

“We need to reach our Orthodox contact. I don’t have the prestige to heal a stomach injury, and there are only two ways to remove the Cat. You either die for the last time and your corpse coughs up the stone, or someone cuts you open and rips it out. Since I’d rather you survived, we’re going to need a surgeon and a lot of prestige. Nobody has ever survived its removal without a wish.”

“You want to do surgery on me?” Marco asked bleakly.

“I don’t want to, but we have to. It’ll keep you alive. Phone?”

Marco pointed down the hall. “There’s a phone in the parlor. Private.”

“Show us the way,” the Baron said. 

Marco led them down the hall to an excessively thick oak door with rubber weather stripping around the edges. It cracked open with a shuffle of cold air, and the smell of stale cigarettes smacked them in the face. One of the window units was chugging along, bringing the room temperature down to nearly fifty degrees. Phyllis laughed to herself.

The curtains were drawn and the lights were down. The Zombie held the door open while Marco led the Baron to a rotary telephone at the end of a bar. “Thanks,” the Baron said.

“Who are you calling?” the Zombie asked.

“Operator.” He rolled out the zero and waited.

“You don’t have a number for your contact?” Phyllis asked.

“We weren’t supposed to call him. We were supposed to walk into the Soviet mission in lower Manhattan and put the Cat in his hands.”

“We could take Marco to the mission,” she said. “Think about this. You’re calling the Soviets. The lines will be wiretapped for sure, and who knows who’ll be listening—Langley, New York? The CPUSA guys under Malik will probably get the message too.”

The Baron shook his head. The operator came on the line and asked how she could direct his call. He told her, “I’d like to contact the Soviet mission. The name is Baron d’Holbach. I just need the external number, front desk. Public contact. Yes, thank you.”

“This is a mistake,” Phyllis grumbled.

The Baron covered the receiver with his palm. “There’s no other option. Malik already knows plenty, and there’s definitely been a shift in power since yesterday. Denisov might be under some form of house arrest. Contacting him will teach us a lot about the situation. Worst case, Malik learns that we found the Cat, and I’m sure he already expects that.”

“We might fail to contact him,” the Zombie suggested.

“One second,” the Baron said.

A woman with a clear Russian accent came on the line. “How may I direct your call?”

“Viktor Denisov. This is the Baron d’Holbach. He’ll be expecting me.”

“One moment please.” The secretary’s receiver went dead, but he was still on the line. After a few seconds, she returned. “Denisov is out of the office. Can I take a message?”

“It’s an important call. Did Denisov leave a forwarding number?”

Phyllis mouthed the words: Hang up.

The Baron shook his head. “Ma’am?” he asked.

The secretary seemed reluctant to answer. “He did.” She didn’t offer to help him. It wasn’t surprising. They’d probably switched someone else into the circuit, someone far too important to allow a mere secretary to make judgement calls in their presence.

The Baron decided on a gamble. “We have a message to give him about the Cat o’ Nine Lives. Tell the person listening over your shoulder that he’ll want to hear what we have to say, but we won’t say another word until Denisov is on the line.”

“Interesting,” the Zombie said.

“What’re you doing?” Marco asked.

The Baron shushed them both. Phyllis grimaced but stayed silent.

There was a long hesitation. “Yes sir,” the secretary finally said. “Switching you over now.” Another few seconds passed, a couple of clicks on the line, and then they were ringing in to another number. The phone rang ten times before anyone picked up.

“Denisov,” came the thick accent.

“I have a Baron d’Holbach on the line,” said the operator.

“Thank you,” Denisov said. “Go ahead, Baron.”

“Denisov,” greeted the Baron. “Where are you?”

“I’m at my office in the United Nations.”

So he had been moved from his office at the mission, even though he’d specifically instructed the Baron to return there with the Cat. “Has it been a busy weekend?”

Denisov chuckled. “The last time I saw the sun, I had coffee down in the village.”

So Denisov was under virtual arrest and had to stay on UN grounds. The Baron could work with that. “Do you have a lot of people helping you out?”

“I’m surrounded by many very helpful people. I’m glad you’re asking after my health, but you shouldn’t worry about coming to visit me. I’ll be fine on my own.”

The Baron felt Denisov was laying the double speak on a little thick, but image was everything. Denisov wanted to be able to deny his assistance with the Baron, even if everyone clearly knew what they were really talking about.

“Well, you’re in good hands,” the Baron said, carefully laying the groundwork for his next question. “Do they keep a good surgeon on site?”

“Of course. We have our own medical staff.”

“And anything they can’t handle, you can heal with prestige, right?”

“As you said, I’m in good hands, Baron. I’m ready for anything.”

“That’s good to know. About the Cat, Denisov, we haven’t found it yet.”

“The Cat?” Denisov asked as if confused.

“I’ll keep you updated if I have anything to bring you.”

“Good to hear,” Denisov said. “Keep me posted.” He hung up the phone.

The Baron hung up his end. This was the best result he could hope for. They’d learned where Denisov was stationed and the resources he could muster, while Malik’s listeners learned almost nothing new. “Denisov is at the UN. He’ll be ready for us.”

“What the hell was that?” Phyllis asked. “Nobody will be fooled by what you just said. The lady doth protest too much—”

“I know Shakespeare,” the Baron said, “but you’re missing the point. Malik already knew we were close to the Cat. We gave up nearly nothing in order to speak with Denisov, and if we can get to him before he moves again, we win. Malik loses. It’s that simple.”

Phyllis frowned. “Fine, that’s fair, but I’m still not happy with this.”

“Trust us,” the Zombie said. “We’ll make the best of a bad situation.”

“If you follow our instructions, I think we’ll be able to keep Marco alive.”

“Thanks?” Marco asked, not quite mustering the energy for sarcasm. The teenager could tell something was wrong, but he couldn’t put his finger on it, and the Baron wouldn’t volunteer the facts. The truth was, keeping Marco alive was a luxury, and the easiest way to save the Cat was to cut it out of him here and now. Fortunately for Marco, the Baron didn’t want to take the easy way out, not when it doomed an innocent life.

The phone rang on the bar. Everyone looked at it. It could only be a coincidence unless someone followed them here and looked up the number in the directory, and in a building this size, there would surely be dozens of numbers. Yet for all this reasonable thinking, the Baron felt in his gut that the call was for him. Why? Because it was the middle of a Sunday, and they were the last people to make a call from the parlor. “Is this the only set for this phone line?”

“Yeah,” Marcos said.

The phone kept ringing. “Do you know who’d be calling about now?”

“Nobody.”

The Baron pointed to the Zombie. “Watch the hall from the door. We may have been followed, though I don’t know how.”

“That’s not possible,” Phyllis said.

“Maybe they could record the rotary pulses off the phone? I don’t know enough about phone switches, but I don’t think you can just call someone back.”

The phone continued to ring. Eight. Nine. Ten rings.

The Baron picked it up. “Hello?”

“Baron, I was afraid you’d already left,” Malik said.

The Baron laughed. “That’s ridiculous. How did you find this number?”

“I didn’t,” Malik said.

“Wishes for knowledge are impossible. You can’t know where we are.”

“Baron, does a good magician reveal his secrets?” Malik asked.

There had to be a way. What parts of the system were manipulatable? How could you exploit the nature of phones to return a call? Wait, Malik didn’t have to know—he simply had to ask for the call itself, and the gods would make him pay extra for his ignorance. “You wished for the phone to call this me back,” he told Malik, “and it cost you a great deal.”

“Correct,” Malik said, “a brilliant—”

The Baron hung up the phone.

“Who was that?” Phyllis asked.

“It was Malik. He wished to have the phone system dial us back.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing yet, but I’m checking something. Give it a moment.” The Baron raised a hand. After a second, the phone began to ring, and he picked it up again. “You pulled the number off the callback somehow,” he concluded.

“I wrote down the number of pulses,” Malik said angrily, “so stop trying to waste my prestige and listen. Based on what I heard, I’m guessing you’ve found the person who swallowed the Cat, but you can’t cut it out safely without a doctor and years of prestige.”

The Baron refused to respond. He’d learned what he wanted from the second callback. Right now, one of Malik’s underlings would be connecting the parlor’s number to an address. Malik was more resourceful than the Baron had anticipated, and his ability to exploit the system of prestige and squeeze knowledge out of a standard wish was admirable. The Baron had been bested, and his supposedly safe behavior had exposed them. Soon, CPUSA would learn their location and their destination. The enemy would come soon. Still, he waited on the line, looking to squeeze a little more information from his enemy.

“You’re silent,” Malik said with great satisfaction. “You agree with me. I know it. You’re a moral man, Baron, the history books make it very clear. You care deeply.”

“Thank you,” the Baron said. “You’re a clever man.”

“No, thank you. You’ve done half the work for me. Because New York isn’t ripping the city down to the foundations, I’m confident that they don’t have the Cat. Since someone has already swallowed it, I’m guessing it’s in a neophyte. Someone this Barilla knew, eh? Family, friends—I’m sure he put it in an innocent person, yes?”

The Baron said nothing.

“What is he saying?” Phyllis asked.

The Baron shook his head. He mouthed: Wait.

“Of course he did,” Malik concluded. “A civilian sees an artifact and thinks only about power, not about consequences. He thinks it’ll save someone he loves.”

The Baron remained steadfast. Malik was blathering, and at this point, it was equally likely that he’d spill crucial information or hang up the phone.

“More silence! Baron, use your head. Talk to me! Give up! Where is the Cat, eh? I’ll send my doctors, my prestige. We’ll save your innocent man!”

That offer finally twinged the Baron’s frustrations, demanding a response. “I don’t trust you,” he replied. “I can’t. Not after you killed children to keep them quiet.”

“Ah, Baron—you poor man! I preferred when you were silent.” A cough, clearing his throat. “I don’t need to know the location of the Cat, but I can’t leave any survivors until I have it in my hands.” A long pause, waiting. When the Baron didn’t respond, he continued with more verve: “I don’t like killing, Baron—I don’t!—but I had to be sure that the mob, that New York, Langley, the Vatican—I had to be sure that everyone but you stays away!”

“Everyone but me?” the Baron prodded.

“Oh, yes! I can handle you, and you think you can handle me, but neither of us can win a war against the world, yes?” He giggled. He’d probably snorted a line of cocaine before making the call. “I could trail you, or I could wait for you to deliver the clues to me. You’ve lost, you see. I know where you are.”

“I know,” the Baron said. “You’ve worked back to this location.”

“Then we’re…” Malik laughed to himself. “What’s the saying? We’re on the same page of the book? You have an innocent, and he has the Cat. You won’t make it to Denisov with him alive, I promise you that much, and you can’t go to any other occult doctor without losing the Cat to a third party. There’s no solution to the dilemma, don’t you see?”

“Why are you telling me this?” the Baron asked.

“Because I’m a tidy man, Baron, and I don’t want to kill anyone else on American soil. My offer stands. If you bring me the innocent, I will cut the Cat out and heal him, and you will be paid twice Denisov’s fee. Nobody else will have to die, and the details of Soviet politics will be worked out on the far side of the Atlantic. We’ll leave you in peace.”

“I don’t betray my client for a higher fee. I’m a mercenary, not a traitor. If I want work, I have to stick to my principles.”

“Pfah!” Malik made a long snort. It might’ve been another line of cocaine off the table in front of him. He coughed and sneezed, then said into the receiver, “Don’t refuse on a technicality. You were hired by the Soviet cult, and I am their ranking officer in America. If you give me the Cat, that’s it! Contract done. But if you refuse?” A snicker, another cough. “You’re making a choice to kill an innocent man, Baron. You can’t use your principles to weasel your way out of this decision.”

The Baron scowled. “My principles are mine. Do you know the saying, ‘History is written by the winners?’”

“Of course. Orwell. Englishman.”

“If the Cat ends up in your hands, you’ll treat Denisov as a traitor, and the Orthodox faction—who hired me—will be destroyed. That will be my fault. I will be a traitor. If it ends up in Denisov’s hands, then I’ll have completed my work, and the decision to send Nagy to New York will be undone. It’ll be as if the Cat was never here.”

“Hm. So you’re suggesting that only the Orthodox hired you?”

“That’s what I heard in Denisov’s office.”

“And you think the Orthodox faction will last long enough to pay you?”

“Yes! They have the Apples of Perun. If there’s an occult war, they’ll slaughter you. In any case, this isn’t just a single day for me, Malik. My reputation will continue long after you’re dead. People will talk about what I did here a century from now. Two centuries from now. If I’m going to stay in this line of work, I can’t betray my clients. In view of those coming decades, an offer for a lesser evil isn’t even tempting.”

“You assume you’ll live for decades,” Malik said softly.

“The Zombie is right here,” the Baron replied, words like lead.

“Try to save this unknown innocent.” Malik was unhappy, but his rising high was interfering with his ability to maintain focus. “Just remember, when it seems as if he has no lives left, the offer stands. We will save him, whoever he is. Just give me a call.”

The phone clicked, and the tone buzzed in the Baron’s ear.

“What did he want?” Phyllis asked.

The Baron hesitated. If he told Marco about Malik’s offer, it might drive a wedge between them. It all depended on whether or not the teen’s desire for revenge overwhelmed his survival instincts. However, if he didn’t tell Marco, and Malik later referred to this conversation, Marco might realize the Baron had been holding important information back.

“He wanted you to do something,” Phyllis asked, “about Marco, I assume.”

She’d brought it up first, just by guesswork. Smart woman. That made the decision easy. “He was offering to cut the Cat out of Marco,” the Baron said. “I refused for now, though the choice is ultimately Marco’s. If you’d prefer to throw in the towel and give Malik what he wants, I won’t stand in your way, though I think there are better alternatives.”

“Like what?” Marco asked.

“We take you to Denisov, as planned, and you get your revenge on Malik. Right now, we still have the advantage. He doesn’t know who you are, and we’ll be moving you through public transportation. There’ll be too many witnesses for the enemy to make a move.”

“You mean New York cultists?” Phyllis asked.

“Langley too. They have at least one agent in the city. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were just waiting for the Soviets to trip over themselves before they made their own move.”

“Malik is using CPUSA members,” Phyllis noted.

“Just for plausible deniability. There’d be no doubt for a Langley cultist. Have you met one? Everything in their world is about the war on Communism. We’ve already had to face them down back at the Biltmore Hotel. Thankfully, they don’t know about the Cat.”

“Langley cult? What’s that?” Marco asked.

“Special Operations Group,” the Zombie called from the door. “Occult patriots.”

“Who?”

The Baron answered. “It’s the paramilitary branch of the Central Intelligence Agency. They’re mostly incompetents, but they contain a cult whose roots stretch back to the American Revolution. Those few are dangerous. Real dangerous.” Marco had a confused expression, so the Baron asked, “Do you know what a cult is?”

“Not really. Pop said New York has a cult.”

“It does. A cult is a group of people who share a single set of beliefs and rituals. All cults of prestige believe in roughly the same mythology and cosmology, but they have their own rules, loyalties, and philosophies that separate them from one another. The New York cult is deeply pagan and utilizes a lot of classical Roman ritual in their worship. They’re feudalistic. Your father was a member of a vassal cult recruited out of the Cosa Nostra, and he paid a yearly tithe of his prestige to the New York nobility in exchange for their protection.”

“They didn’t protect him,” Marco said.

“They’re a sleeping giant. Give them time, they’ll fight back. An influential man named Schuler fought CPUSA at the factory. New York will know what happened very soon, and they’ll be very angry. We just have to keep them from learning about the Cat.”

“Why? If they were supposed to protect my father, wouldn’t they protect me?”

“New York is the most powerful cult in the West, likely the most powerful on Earth. Their feudalism pays for an army of cultists almost ten times larger than what any other power can muster, a veritable battalion of well-armed civilians with prestige. Nobody will win in a fight with New York, and they won’t accept the Cat going back to the Soviets. If it’s in their territory, in the son of one of their members, they’ll take it for themselves.”

“That sounds fine,” Marco speculated.

“That’d be bad for the good half of the Soviet cult,” the Zombie said softly. “Then there’d be no revenge. No dead Malik. We shouldn’t let that happen. We should kill for your dad.”

Phyllis frowned at the Zombie’s brazen methods of persuasion.

“Is that so?” Marco asked the Baron.

The Baron nodded. “If we lose it to New York, then the man you want dead takes control of the unified Soviet cult. He starts using the occult to win the Cold War, or he tries. Langley fights back, and sooner or later, someone important dies. Then it becomes a secular war, and we already told you how that ends.” He didn’t have to say anything more. The gloom of nuclear armageddon passed over them like a shadow across a window, blotting out the open sky.

Marco shuddered. The fear of atomic fire haunted even the most indifferent men. “So you want me to go with you to meet with this man, Denisov?” he asked.

“Yes.” The Baron glanced at Phyllis.

Marco took the non-verbal suggestion and asked her, “What do you think, uh, ma’am?” Everyone could hear the force of will it took to respect Phyllis’s word, but at least he was asking. One slap and one glare had extracted at least fifteen minutes of respect out of the boy.

She pursed her lips. “It’s the right thing to do, Marco. It’ll save your life. For your momma.”

“Okay, okay.” Marco seemed to steady himself mentally. “I’m with you, Baron.”

d’Holbach grinned. They could get moving, and just in time. “Follow my instructions, and we’ll see you through this. Stay with us until the Cat is out of you, and I promise, you won’t die.”

Marco put a hand over his stomach. “Until it’s out.”

Author’s Note:

There is nobody on this Earth who has a better chance of pulling Marco through the fire than the ageless philosopher and his invincible man.

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

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July 6, 2026

CONTENT WARNINGS

No specific warnings.

It was Martin that saved them from a grill session with the Anastasia family, not through his authority but through his subservience. By the time someone identified Barilla’s corpse, he was already treating Phyllis like the new dock boss, and the mafioso didn’t seem to care. As long as someone ran the rackets and paid their superiors, it didn’t matter who was in charge, and Martin’s presumption quickly became the facts. Men came by to talk to Phyllis about her factory and her street gangs in the roughest area of the roughest neighborhood in Brooklyn, and because she’d spent years working under Barilla, she was able to answer their secular questions and take command of the cleanup.

The Baron and Zombie wandered the property, taking the measure of the dead. CPUSA had lost around twenty men—fewer than the Baron expected after all that sound and fury. Most of them had died fighting; in testament to their desperation, one of them had even shot himself, unable to win and on the verge of capture.

The Zombie dug through their pockets, but none of the dead bodies carried identification. Even the half-wrecked CPUSA vehicles were barren, without documents or plates to identify their owners. There was no way to trace any of this back to the Soviets.

Meister Schuler was missing entirely, and nobody in the secular crews had seen a man in a bloodied, brick-dusted cassock. The Zombie guessed that the Diviner had fled the combat zone to avoid explaining himself to secular enforcers.

Phyllis assigned Martin to take the young gangsters home, and then she pulled aside the Baron and the Zombie and spoke to them just outside the front door. It’d been almost thirty minutes since Barilla’s death, and it shocked the Baron that nobody had called the police. Out here on Clinton Wharf, it seemed even a heavy shootout was completely ignored.

Phyllis explained this as best as she could. “If someone made a call and we found out, the boss above me would pay Murder Inc. to remind everyone that we keep D&D on the docks.”

“Deaf and dumb?” the Baron asked.

“If people want to live,” she said.

The Baron was finishing up the last good slice of his cigar. The rest would be too smoky to enjoy, at least for a man with a refined palate. He blew rings into the midday air. “We should find Barilla’s son soon,” he said between draws. “What’s his name?”

“Marco Barilla. Do you have a car?”

“Not in New York. Is Marco at home?”

“No, thank the gods. We couldn’t have waited here long if he was. That Russian we heard on the radio? Five dollars says he’s raiding the Barilla home right now.”

 The Baron nodded. He stubbed his cigar against the brick facade of the shoe factory and offered the nub to the Zombie.

His friend sniffed the end, then popped it in his mouth and started chewing the dried leaf with a sticky sound.

Phyllis balked, but the Baron smiled and said, “He does that all the time.”

“That was in your mouth,” she complained.

“He can eat anything. Has for that matter. It doesn’t make a difference.”

“I know, it’s just the thought of it.”

“It’s tasty,” the Zombie said, still smacking loudly on the shredded tobacco leaves.

“Where is Marco now?” the Baron asked. “At a friend’s home?”

“No, he stays out late on Saturdays and sleeps in. There’s a parlor and hall in Crown Heights. He’s usually on one of the couches there until two or three in the afternoon.”

“Can you take us there?”

“Yes, but we’ll have to take a cab. I used to ride with Martin and Barilla, but we can’t really involve Martin in this.”

“Is he going to keep quiet?” the Zombie asked with a full mouth.

“Martin?” Phyllis asked. She was distracted by something, pulling down on the corners of her mouth with her thumb and index finger, but she answered his question before bringing up what was on her mind. “The man is good at following orders. So are the boys for that matter, but Baron? Why is the Cat o’ Nine Lives in New York? Better yet, how is it that I’m just now hearing about it? If anyone knew then—what’s the saying?”

“Even the—“ the Baron began.

“Apostate would know,” Phyllis interrupted, finishing the line for him. “Thats the one.”

“Elizabeth,” the Baron corrected, “but yeah, that’s what they say.”

The Apostate was widely considered the most remote and “lost” figure in occult lore, cut off from the world while hiding under a secret secular identity. Saying she heard occult news was hyperbole of the strongest kind, at least here in North America. The phrase wasn’t nearly as popular on the other side of the Atlantic, where the Apostate was often “sighted” with about the same frequency and validity as the Yeti or the Loch Ness Monster.

Phyllis was surprised. “You call her by her first name?”

“I do,” the Baron affirmed.

“Have you met her?”

The Baron chuckled. “Have you?”

“Of course not.”

“I just don’t like the title,” the Baron said. “Nothing strange about that.”

“It’s a little strange,” Phyllis said.

“It is,” the Zombie agreed. He swallowed his chunks of cigar.

The Baron waved aside the problem. “Fine, I won’t argue. Should I call a cab?”

“I’ll do it,” Phyllis said, heading for the front door but pausing briefly. “Stay here, okay? I’ll be right back.”

“Sure.”

After she went inside, the Zombie grinned at the Baron. “Just between you and me, I’d wager a clean hundred that we haven’t even put a dent in CPUSA.”

The Baron had already assumed that the enemy’s full resources were much deeper than the single platoon sent to the shoe factory, but the Zombie’s attitude was still surprising. “Why are you so certain?” he asked softly.

The Zombie shrugged in his tattered jacket. “Size of the city. We’ve got 12 million in the metro, and CPUSA had their headquarters here, right?”

The Baron had followed the politics of New England since immigrating to America. Still, it took him a moment to recall any details. “Uh, Mr. Ruthenberg moved it here in the 20s, yes.”

“Right, so let’s say one-hundredth of one percent of folks were trained for WWII and were members of the older Worker’s Party. That’s at least a thousand men. If a tenth of those had served in combat roles and had families, there’d be at least a hundred soldiers. At least that many. Plus, this is America. Give ‘em cash—most of it for their family, a little for equipment. They can buy their own guns, rent their own cars. The Soviets stay clean.”

“A real fifth column, above and beyond their spies.” The Baron blew out a breath. “You should’ve squeezed a bet out of me before the explanation.”

“Yeah?”

“You’re almost certainly right. I’m convinced.”

The Zombie was smug. “Being right is its own reward.”

Phyllis returned through the front door. “Oh good.” She seemed relieved.

“Everything okay?” the Baron asked.

“I was worried you might run the second you were unsupervised.”

“I wouldn’t think of it.” The Baron smiled. “You’re part of this now, young lady.”

Phyllis guffawed. By mortal standards, she was decidedly middle-aged. “Is that a joke or flattery?”

“I’m centuries old,” the Baron said. “It’s both.”

“Honestly, it’s hard to imagine. You don’t look old, you don’t act old, but I read about you in a book written a hundred years ago.” She hesitated, eyes turned up, searching for something in memory. “Baron, Zombie—you’re like figures out of a Bible story.”

“Ah, I don’t know about acting young. We’re jaded enough,” the Baron said.

“I’m not jaded,” the Zombie added cheerfully.

Phyllis shrugged. “You still have that energy, I can tell. You yearn to do things.”

“Thank you.” The Baron felt that regardless of intent, it was always best to turn flattering ideas into a compliment. The Zombie picked up a brass casing off the pavement and started gnawing idly. “I try to keep interesting company,” the Baron added.

Phyllis must’ve meant it in a positive light. “You’re welcome.”

“Did you find a cab?” the Zombie asked between bites.

“It’s on the way, five minutes tops. The garage isn’t far from here.” She cracked her knuckles, a nervous tic. “Before we head out, I have a question. Why are people of your… significance here in New York? Why are you looking for the Cat, instead of—I don’t know—an army?”

The Baron appraised her closely. They were already at her mercy in some sense. It would be best to provide her with most of the information she asked for, if only to show that they trusted her. He honestly hated that he even had to think this through. In better times, there wouldn’t have been any hesitation. “I’m sure you’ve heard, but the Zombie and I are mercenaries. We specialize in occult investigations, and we’ve been hired by the Orthodox branch of the Soviet cult to find and recover their lost artifacts. The man you heard on the radio is the local leadership for the Bolshevik branch. If that man, Malik, recovers the Cat o’ Nine Lives, the Soviet cult will be destabilized. We’re interested in preventing that.”

“You’re helping the Russians?” Phyllis was clearly unhappy with the idea.

“That’s the wrong way to think of it. We’re hindering Stalin’s half of the Soviet cult. I’ll hash out the details later, but for now, trust me, there’s really no other solution.” The Baron cleared his throat. “Also, I’d like to mention that we don’t ask people to work for free. I’d like to offer you a flat fee for your guidance and assistance with Marco.”

Concern crossed her face. “How much?”

“Ten thousand dollars,” the Baron said.

Phyllis blinked with confusion. “Excuse me? Can you repeat that?”

“Ten thousand.”

She closed her eyes, frowning. “How much again?”

“Ten thousand dollars.”

Her eyes fluttered open. “Are you kidding? That’s a staggering amount of money.”

The Baron nodded once. “Money only means something if there’s somewhere left to spend it.”

Phyllis’s jaw dropped, then clicked shut. A second later, her voice emerged, tight and careful. “You mean, Stalin’s group would what—take command of the Soviet Cult?”

“Yes,” the Baron said.

“And then what… occult war?” she asked, putting the obvious and ominous pieces together on her own. “Langley would fight them, I assume.”

“Occult war is the start of that sentence,” the Zombie said. “Nuclear war is the period.”

“That’d be the worst case scenario,” the Baron added, “but it’s what we’re trying to avoid.”

Phyllis waved the Baron off. “I’m taking your payment, but if it’s ten thousand dollars of importance, I want to help.” She cracked her knuckles again. “We’ll need to cut the Cat out of Marco fast anyways. Mr. Barilla had a lot of friends who knew everything about his family. This man Malik will eventually pick up the trail.”

The Baron was glad to have her on board. “Last note. You’ll be a valuable target until this is over, so I’d like you to either stick with us or head to a temple after we’re done picking up Marco. Nothing else is safe.”

“I’m not safe either,” the Zombie said sweetly.

The Baron chuckled, glanced towards his friend. “Alone, sure, you’re a disaster. But together, we’re safe. And don’t tell me that’s false. You let a man go today.”

The Zombie grimaced. “Please. I have a reputation to uphold.”

The Baron smiled at Phyllis. “He looks like a disaster, doesn’t he?”

She raised an eyebrow. “Do you always insult each other?”

The Baron smiled wider. “Insult? Zombie, are you offended?”

“Are you ugly?” the Zombie asked.

“Apparently he’s not offended and I’m handsome. Does that answer your question?”

“You’re both apes,” Phyllis concluded, taking her own shot.

The Baron looked pensive. “Better than dogs, I suppose.” His expression flipped to satisfaction as Phyllis laughed softly.

No one said anything else as they waited for the cab. The growing quiet of Red Hook’s abandoned industries helped bleed off the adrenaline of the last half hour. Shattered windows and fallen bricks settled into the same peace that enveloped the rest of the docks. Snatches of conversation drifted through the hole in the building’s front wall. Someone was planning a story for an insurance company. A runaway panel truck hit the shoe factory. The Baron listened until the speakers departed for the interior of the building, and then his ears enjoyed the cries of gulls and the whispers of cool breeze, mercifully free of gunshots.

After the cab arrived, the Baron and the Zombie took the back bench, while Phyllis rode up front. With a cabbie in their midst, there was little they could discuss during the ride except their destination. Phyllis chatted with the driver about the state of affairs in Crown Heights.

When they were children, it’d been a bedroom community for old Manhattan money and upper-class Jewish families, yet WWII had changed the place. Economic stress had driven people out, prices had dropped in response, but low rent hadn’t called the original population home again. Instead the empty apartments and row houses were filled with young immigrants from Jamaica, the rest of the Caribbean, and much of the old American South.

Aspiring Italian families still bought apartments outright, treating the neighborhood as a token of wealth, but the economic segregation that’d formed its reputation was finally breaking down. Most of those families would be disappointed to learn that they’d bought into a future middle-class neighborhood. At least that was Phyllis’s best guess.

The Baron had his own ideas. Any changing place could become the heart of a thriving integrated community, but extant racial prejudices could breed resentment. The attitudes of the new locals would be key; their cultural enlightenment would determine their prosperity. Integration would grow the local economy. Segregation would break it. He’d seen it happen both ways back in Boston, back in Paris, going back to his original life as a German noble.

He didn’t interrupt Phyllis. She already held a sophisticated view of the neighborhood. Complicating it with cynicism wouldn’t help things. He just hoped her optimism was right.

The cabbie dropped them off outside a station along the west end of Crown Heights. From there, it was only a short walk to the Imperial Apartments on Bedford Avenue, about two blocks away from Prospect Park and deep into the richest slice of the old neighborhood. Heavy foliage sprouted from planters on the sidewalks here, as if the well-kept park were overflowing into the surrounding urban landscape. The leaves on the elm trees were waxy and dark, the luster of the living jungle transplanted from a rainy Central America to a relatively dry sidewalk in New York.

“They drown these trees in water,” Phyllis said, when she noticed the Baron’s stare.

“Fertilizer too, I bet. Everything here looks painfully expensive.” The Baron looked at the concrete walk underfoot. “Do they sweep the side of the road?”

“They wash the walks down with hoses.”

“Post-War waste,” the Zombie said. He ripped down a small elm branch and started snacking on the green wood and crunchy, feather-shaped leaves. The crisp sound reminded the Baron of celery, but amplified tenfold. Wood was reduced to pulp.

“Do you have to do that in plain sight?” the Baron asked.

The Zombie defended himself with a full mouth. “It’s a plant. People can reason it away.”

“It’s wood.”

“I thought you’d be happy if I ate regular things for a change.”

“It’s wood,” the Baron repeated. “Nevermind, you’re finishing that off pretty fast. Just chew with your mouth closed. We’re escorting a lady.”

The Zombie swallowed his pulp and crammed the last handful of leaves and twigs into his mouth. “She looks impressed,” he muttered around the arboreal mash.

“She looks mortified.”

“I don’t know what to make of it,” Phyllis said, still gawking at the Zombie.

“It’s pica,” the Baron said, “it’s not really voluntary. If he doesn’t eat heavy things, he’ll become irritable and upset after a while.”

The Zombie finished his branch. “I’m not hungry, but I need to feel like I’m eating sometimes. There are so many flavors…” He stopped and frowned briefly. “If I could truly taste them, I’d tell you what it was like. I don’t know what anything is like though, do I?” He looked at a ripped sleeve, tore off a bit of frayed cloth and started nibbling.

“We’ll need to change your shirt when we get a chance,” Phyllis said.

“Maybe I’ll steal a shirt,” the Zombie said. “Is this the place?”

“This has to be the place,” the Baron said.

The Imperial Apartments were an architect’s fuzzy memory of a brownstone castle. Each corner was a fat turret peaked with a dark apex, forming the borders of an elaborate facade like the rolled ends of a scroll. Each face was patterned with multistory arches framing several layers of smaller, heavily-decorated windows.

Anachronistic air conditioner units were mounted in many of these window frames, and their compressors chugged like the prop engines of distant airplanes. They’d been introduced on the market only a few months ago; to see this many in one location spoke volumes about the obscene wealth and almost hedonistic comfort of the inhabitants.

The Baron looked up and down the street from the corner. There were no cars with pale green windows, nor any with missing plates. He could only hope that CPUSA was drawing a number of their vehicles from the same carpool, or at least modifying them all similarly. It’d be nice to have some easy warning signs, though he doubted they’d make such simple mistakes.

Phyllis dug through her pockets until she pulled out a keyring, jangling with bundles of scratched brass keys. “This is it. Marco will be on the top floor, passed out. I have a key.” Phyllis led them to the front door. There was an old doorman standing just inside the entrance, in the shadow of the recessed entrance above the stoop. She waved to him as she unlocked the front door. “Picking up Barilla’s son,” she explained. “With some friends.”

“On Sunday?” he asked, doffing his hat to them, “Yes ma’am.” He stopped the Zombie briefly with a hand. “Wait, this Asian gentleman is with you, Miss Miller?”

“Yes. It’s a long story,” she replied. “We’re just glad he wasn’t injured.”

“There was an accident?” the doorman asked skeptically.

The Zombie cast him a broad smile. “My sleeve was caught in a car.”

“We’ll be heading up,” Phyllis said, “if you don’t mind?”

“Of course, of course.” The doorman unlocked the secondary door for them and walked them to the elevator. “I saw Marco asleep on the couch in the hall.” He opened the elevator cage and pressed the button for the fourth floor. “Sorry to hear about your accident.”

The Zombie let his fingers bounce along the cage bars. “It was fun.”

The old doorman looked terribly confused before the door shut. The old elevator booted into life, and they could hear the creak of ancient pulleys turning slowly. A small engine did a lot of work at a leisurely pace.

Phyllis folded her hands at her waist, waiting for the lift to do its job. “I’m not looking forward to explaining all this to Marco.”

“Does he know much about the system of prestige?” the Baron asked.

“Less than his father.”

“We’ll educate him. If he doesn’t listen, we’ll force him to cooperate.” The Baron looked at Phyllis. She was girding herself for something unpleasant. “Why does Marco bother you so much? Martin said something about talking to women?”

“He’s a little pig. Federico wanted to teach Marco courage, so he took him to a bar and made him flirt with the girls. He thought Marco would learn to talk smooth. Instead, he pinches me and whispers cuss words, things not even his father would say.”

“You?” the Zombie asked. “No offense, but you aren’t a young boy’s fantasy.”

“A little tact, please,” the Baron said tersely.

“No, it’s fine. The Zombie is right. I think he does it to make me upset.”

“What does he say?”

Phyllis looked grossed out. “He calls me a word.”

“Is it too harsh to say?”

“You’ll know when you hear it.”

That was ominous.

The elevator stopped on the fourth floor, and the Baron opened the cage into a wide hall stretching from one end of the building to the other, with an oddly slanted ceiling overhead and thin carpeting underfoot. At either end, a bank of tiny windows cast diffuse light over a pair of couches. It was public seating, probably for parties. It was likely some of the rooms up here were public spaces instead of private homes.

Passed out on one couch at the west end of the hall was a well-built teenager, not fully grown but obviously athletic and well into puberty. He had his limbs cast awkwardly over the armrests and off the edge of the cushions like they were loose and numb. His mouth was hanging open, and his tongue would be dry. His dark face had the ugly mud smear of an underdeveloped mustache. Obviously, he hadn’t bothered to shave it in days.

“That’s him,” Phyllis said.

“Come here.” The Baron huddled with her for a brief rundown on the kid. He needed to get inside Marco’s head a little bit. Grief tended to paralyze, freezing action and depressing judgement. The Baron needed a way to motivate, to take advantage of the teenager’s psychology. “How old is he again?”

“Seventeen,” Phyllis said, “but he’s truant and spends his days drinking with mafioso.”

“So he thinks he’s old. Was his relationship with his father good?”

“Honestly, no, he’s here for a reason. Barilla drove his mother out and blamed Marco for it. The kid’s a mess. He loved his dad, but he’s got no friends, no girlfriend, no education.”

“His dad was going to make him the dock boss?”

“I don’t know. I’m basically the dock boss for now, even if he inherits the property.”

The Zombie grunted. “How’s that work?”

Phyllis frowned. “Seen it before. If I do well, the family will offer me a loan and push him to sell it to me. Really, they just want someone loyal at the waterfront.”

“That only matters if he survives today,” the Baron noted.

Phyllis sighed. “True enough.”

“Listen, I’ll speak to him first. If either of you see a good angle, feel free to interrupt. We need Marco on his feet and in our camp. Are you ready?”

Two nods answered his question.

The Baron walked out ahead of them, Phyllis behind, the Zombie in tow. She seemed more than willing to let him take the lead. It was clear she didn’t want to hear what Marco had to say, and d’Holbach honestly didn’t want to hear it either. It was for the best that the Baron delivered the news and collected the pieces of the boy after he broke.

They stopped in front of the couch. Marco was breathing through his mouth, but he seemed otherwise insensate, utterly unaware of the new arrivals.

The Baron said quite loudly, “Marco Barilla!”

The teenager jerked a little, and his limbs began to organize themselves in a reasonable fashion. Still, he seemed to want to sleep, and he began to roll over quietly onto his side, folding up into the fetal position without ever really becoming aware of what was happening.

“Get up, or I’ll pull you up,” the Baron commanded.

Marco stopped moving. He was waking up now, anyone could see, but he was pretending to be asleep. He was obstinate, and they couldn’t afford to coddle him.

The Baron kneeled down by the couch. “Boy, we don’t have time for this.”

Marco scowled and his eyes opened up. He glared at the Baron, the Zombie, and then his eye caught Phyllis. “Hey, what’s with the goon squad?” he called to her.

“Talk to me, not to her,” the Baron said, physically inserting himself into Marco’s view.

Marco groaned and pushed himself up onto one shoulder. “What did you say?”

“Listen to the man,” Phyllis said sternly.

Marco sneered. “How about you tell your dog to back off and answer me first, cunt—”

The Baron slapped the sneer off his face, and Marco squealed and jerked back, twisting up and away. The Zombie wolf-whistled, appreciating the discipline.

“You say another word like that and I’ll play your ribs like a drum,” the Baron said. “You will never speak to a lady like that, ever—do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir,” Marco said, clearly terrified out of his wits but holding his voice as steady as steel. He was preparing himself mentally for the next blow.

The Baron would work around that reaction. “Let’s make something clear. I don’t strike men without a reason, Marco. Be on your best behavior, and I’ll never touch you again.”

“Yes, sir,” Marco said again, calmer but surlier than before.

The Baron stood. “Here’s the facts. Your father died in a shootout less than half an hour ago, and the men who murdered him will be looking for you.”

“Murdered?” Marco asked sharply, then winced at the sound of his own voice.

The Baron pressed onward, making his case. “By now, they’re in the process of ripping your home to shreds. Once they don’t find what they’re looking for, they’re going to come for you. We’re going to ask some questions, and then we’re leaving.”

“My father is dead?” Marco said aloud, as if trying the statement in order to hear the truth in his own words. It was clearly something he’d imagined before; he had a well-practiced squint, refined in grim fantasies over months or years. He rubbed the scraps of his mustache and took a deep breath. “Did one of the scabs get him?”

“This wasn’t about the docks,” Phyllis said.

“Who then?” Marco unfolded on the couch and started rubbing the corners of his eyes with his thumbs, picking at the crusts left behind by the sandman. “Fuck. My head hurts.”

“I wish your hangover was cleared,” the Baron said. He felt a chunk of his prestige drain away, and the wish came true.

Marco rocked back in his seat, shutting his eyes tight. Sudden relief could be as shocking as sudden injury, and the boy wasn’t ready to be fully awake or aware. He’d been wearing his hangover as a shield; now the world was directly in front of him.

The Baron snapped his fingers to capture the boy’s attention. Marco cracked one eye open, and the Baron answered his question. “The Soviets killed him over the Cat o’ Nine Lives. That’s how serious this is. It’s international in scale. Global.”

“Jesus,” Marco said, and it was difficult to tell if he was remarking on his sudden sobriety or the insane suggestion that Communists had targeted a small-time criminal boss.

“Have you ever seen a wish come true?” the Baron asked.

“Not like that. How’d you do that?” Marco put a hand on his stomach. His nausea would be clearing up. He straightened his back. “I feel… shit, I feel all right, all things considered.”

“I wished for it, and my wish was granted. Ever heard of prestige?”

“Pop told me about it, I think. He said there were people out there that could ask God for miracles. They worked, earned, uh, that prestige, and spent it—on miracles. He said God was nice. He even showed me a miracle once.”

“That’s close, Marco. Most people believe it’s many gods, not just one, and they’re not nice or nasty. They’re barely visible at all. Just generous. There’s no ironic consequences—no monkey’s paw or twisted intentions.” The Baron was trying to give him the crash course in the system of prestige. If Marco understood what was happening, he’d be more likely to help. “You’ve got the basics down. People complete tasks, earn prestige, and spend it on whatever they want—within the bounds of reason. But there’s rules, and the biggest one is that no wish may impede or alter a man’s free will. You can’t harm someone directly. You can’t change their minds.”

“You can heal them though?” Marco asked.

“That’s right. I just healed you.”

An emotion set across the boy’s face, bringing him up to full awareness. It was hope, vague but desperate. “Could we help my father?”

“No. It’s not a matter of cost either. One of the other major rules is no resurrections. Death is forever, which brings me to the stone that your father fed to you.”

Marco was clearly disappointed, but he hadn’t hoped for much either. Dead was dead, even in a world of miracles. He touched a spot on his belly. “You know about the stone?”

“We do. As do the Soviets.”

“It’s weird, you know? I feel it all the time. It’s hard. Heavy.”

“What did your father say about it?”

“He said I wouldn’t choke, so just swallow it, and I’d be tougher. Stronger.”

“He was wrong. It’s an artifact, a product of a very old, very expensive wish to change the properties of an object, and it has a very specific purpose. There’ll never be another one like it.” The Baron paused. Explaining everything—including the Fall of Curses—would take a while, and they were vulnerable if they spent too long at one location. “For now, you’re going to have to trust me. The stone you swallowed—it was carved in the shape of a cat?”

Marco nodded slowly, still reeling from the sudden changes to his personal universe. “All curled up. Like a little kitten.”

“That’s the Cat o’ Nine lives. It’s one of the most valuable objects on the planet.”

“The planet? What?” For a moment, confusion was the primary emotion on Marco’s face. Then belief slowly dawned on him, frightening in its scale. The truth was beginning to penetrate through the unreality of magic, prestige, and parental death. This wouldn’t have been possible if Marco hadn’t already spent years believing in miracles, but that hook—that initial gullibility—was helping him to accept the rest of the occult. “What is this thing? What’s in me?”

Phyllis spoke up. “It’s acquired immortality. If you’ve swallowed the Cat and you receive a fatal wound, you won’t die.”

“If a man shoots your head, you’ll live,” the Zombie said softly. “Even with the bullet buried in your brain and a hole in your face, you will live.”

“You’re granted nine more lives,” the Baron added. “The Cat will save you from nine fatal injuries, barring its early removal.”

“There are limits,” the Zombie noted with a grin.

“Yes…” The Baron sighed at the added complication. “There are limits.”

The Zombie grinned wider, admiring his own grotesque thoughts. “Imagine someone shoving a grenade in your mouth, or crushing you under a wall, or pulling out your intestines with a hook.”

“Yes, uh, certain kinds of trauma will count as multiple injuries,” the Baron explained. “If the damage is egregious enough, it can qualify as more than nine at once and kill you outright. It’s not perfect invulnerability.” The Baron could practically feel the Zombie’s expression of triumph, glowing like a heat lamp at his back. “Regardless, Marco, it’s an incredible artifact. Nothing else defies death in the same way. If you die, you survive.”

“If I die,” Marco echoed.

“You survive,” Phyllis finished. “That’s the rub. That’s power.”

Marco blinked wearily. “Jesus Christ.”

“They’ve killed almost everyone who’s touched it,” the Baron concluded. “Your father is just the latest victim, and if you don’t come with us, you’ll be the next in a long line of dead men, leading from here to the end of the world.”

Understanding settled like dread upon the young man’s slumping shoulders. “Okay, man, I’ll come with you.” He planted his face in his hands and mumbled, “I don’t want to die.”

“With my help,” the Baron said, “you won’t.”

Author’s Note:

We’ve found our innocent man. Now, we must find a way to save him.

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

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July 5, 2026