What are we going to do now?

The question was a record stuck in a loop in Alejandra's head as she led her eldest daughter and the girl she was fast coming to view as her adopted daughter through the ruins of an ancient village recently turned into a battlefield.

What are we going to do now?

The War had no answer. This was a situation beyond what she had trained for, beyond what she had encountered in the Desert, beyond anything she had even imagined. Even as she stalked through the village, cornering rubble mounds and tracking through bug guts, the question hammered at her.

What are we going to do now?

If this had been the Desert, the answer would have been simple. Sweep the battlefield, collect data, retrieve prisoners and wounded and dead, pile back into the transpo and get out of Dodge and back to base. There they would have entered the 'Stand-down' phase, where they would process reports, vent excess energy, and rest up before their next deployment. And the next squad in line would take their place on patrol until the stand-down ended.

They would be able to rest, safe in a secure base, where men and women with very large guns indeed would be standing watch over them, providing safety and security for them while they recovered.

But here? There was no base. There were no sentries. There were no walls. There was nothing except six exhausted people and a handful of barely-loaded civilian firearms. And out there, in the bushes, could be lurking any kind of huge life-ending monstrosity that would just love an Albright Sandwich with nice fresh Dinah for dessert.

What are we going to do now?

Could they fortify the clearing? Maybe. But their enemies could fly. Could they return to the Dilligaf? Yes, but their enemies could track them. Stay here? They needed rest and had no way of safeguarding themselves if something else came at them. Leave? Who knew what was lurking in the bushes. And even if, by some miracle, they found some place that they could fortify… They still lacked sentries, lacked weapons, lacked the ability to make any place truly safe from whatever this damned island was going to throw at them next. And they needed rest. They needed a place of safety.

And she didn't know where they were going to find one.

What are we going to do now?

"Mom? Are you okay?"

Bel's words intruded on the loop, and forced her to come up out of her own mind for air. She realized she'd been silent for the last ten minutes, walking like she was alone in Indian Country.

"Yes, Mija, I am–"

"Mom, don't lie." This time Bel's words were like a slap across her face, and she turned, her rifle lowering, to stare wide-eyed at her eldest daughter.

Her eldest daughter who was covered in slime and bug guts, holding white-knuckled onto a pair of spikey faux-swords she had torn from the living bodies of her enemies. She was trembling, her eyes were wide, and her pupils were pinpricks. She looked about two steps away from a complete breakdown.

"Please," Bel continued, her voice strangely flat. "Please don't lie. I am barely functioning right now, and I have this thing about people lying to me, so I really can't handle it right now. Okay? Please?"

Alejandra let out a long breath and nodded once.

God, please tell me, what are we going to do now? This time the words came as a prayer.

"I am… Functioning," she said finally, a tired corner of her mouth lifting at the admission. "But I am worried. Scared. I have training, I have abilities, I have skills. But so many of them are useless right now. But that is talk for another time. Come, we have to finish making sure this place is clear."

"Okay. Yeah." Bel nodded, and Dinah nodded as well. The younger teen had never lowered her rifle, and was tracking the barrel all around the edge of the clearing, keeping watch.

Dinah, who had destroyed the strange orb thing with a single shot as it fled. Who had taken the shot that had wounded the thing in the first place and likely saved them all. If this had been the Desert, she would have been buying the teen a beer right now, age limits be damned.

But for that to happen, they would have needed a base. And an O-Club. And Safety.

What are we going to do–

"We need to figure out some way to keep those fuc–those stupid bugs from getting to us again," Bel said as they started walking again.

"Walls won't work," Dinah said as they rounded another stone rubble pile. Surprisingly, a wounded Mosquito was there, trying to slither away with its lower half missing. Bel stomped on it like it was a cockroach, getting more guts on her Trainers.

"Yeah. Fuc–bastar–Y'know what to hell with it, these fuckers can fly." Bel said, glaring at the pile of goop on the grass. "Other stuff probably can too. We'd need a castle."

"And guards," Dinah pointed out. "With big guns. Or maybe ballistas. Or some kind of magic mosquito netting."

"Think maybe Dad's consul stuff might be able to do something like that?" Bel asked as they rounded the rubble heap and into what Alejandra was fairly certain had been a village square back when this place had been bustling.

"Maybe. He said it was like construction stuff, right?"

Alejandra tuned the girls out as they moved. They would all need to examine their powers soon, to get a handle on what they could and couldn't do. They couldn't do another one of those 'find things out in the middle of a battle' revelatory incidents.

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But to do that, they needed a safe place where they wouldn't fear interruption or attack.

And she was back in the loop.

The trio covered about half of the village, poking around ruin mounds and covering the jungle outside the clearing. The whole place was bigger than Alejandra had originally thought when she'd first found it. There had to be almost a square mile of cleared space festooned with ruined buildings and covered-over pathways. If she looked carefully, she could see the outlines of paved roads overgrown by centuries of grass on the ground. And several of the ruined buildings had obviously been multi-story, based on the amount and shape of the rubble. Maybe some kind of civic structures?

And in the center of the clearing, towering above everything, was that tree. The patrol pattern she'd selected had them moving towards it. And now that she had the time to actually look at it without having to worry about dodging gator-cats or bug monsters, she found herself impressed.

The thing was a hundred feet tall if it was an inch, with silvery bark and blue-tinged leaves and at least a dozen trunks all as big around as her and Matty standing side by side. It reminded her of the Banyon trees from Hawaii, except larger and there was more space between trunks and branches. Had she been ten years old again and faced with this tree, she could have spent weeks climbing it, investigating every single nook and cranny, running along branches almost as wide as sidewalks, and–

"Stop!"

Dinah's curt command cut through Alejandra's thoughts and made her freeze. The girl sounded almost exactly like her old squadleader when he'd spotted something dangerous on their foot patrols.

"What do you see?" she asked, rifle tracking around, seeking the danger.

***

The Zone was cracking. Dinah could feel it, fraying at the edges like an old dishcloth. All the emotions she was keeping stuffed down deep inside her, all the fear and rage and despair and hopelessness and pain… Everything she'd been holding in, everything since the very instant Olivia's mom had come into the media room on the Mrs. Dilligaf what felt like years ago and told them to lock the door.

The longest she'd ever kept it up was for two weeks, back in the Bad Days, when her mom and dad had been fighting over custody of her and her brothers. And at the end of it, she'd locked herself in the bathroom for three hours, only one of which had been spent screaming.

But it hadn't been as bad back then as it was now. So much was piling up against The Zone, against the mental walls, against… Everything.

She was starting to feel again. She knew it even as she fell in step behind Mrs. Albright, her eyes wide open and looking around for more danger that might come down on them all. She was feeling the fear, that had come from the battle. She was feeling tired, so tired. And she was feeling–

"Stop!" The word was out of her mouth before she realized she'd spoken.

"What do you see?" Mrs. Albright asked her, curt and commanding, just like her oldest brother when he was making her chore lists. He had been in the army too. Maybe that was a thing that soldiers just learned.

"Nothing," she said, rifle tracking around. She didn't know why she had said something. There was nothing immediately wrong, nothing was coming at them, but she had felt…

She stopped then, and realized that's what it was. She had felt something. Something that had triggered off her instincts and made her stop in her tracks.

"There's something out there," she said, and tried to focus on the feeling. It was hard. It was always hard separating emotions and feelings out from cold hard data when The Zone was on. And because of that, it took her a long moment, full of tense silence as Mrs. Albright and Isabel both kept their weapons up and ready before she figured it out.

She was feeling something touching that strange power that she had connected with back in that weird hallway with the doors.

No. No it was the other way around. The power was reaching out. And touching… Something. Something nearby.

Absently she took a scroll from the swarm of bee-things that swarmed out of the jungle and unrolled it, glancing at the words while still trying to suss out what she was feeling right now.

Consul Dinah Costigan, Custos Naturae - Custodian Of Nature

Sphere Of Influence: Nature And Its Resources

Powers:

Rich Harvest: Increase the yield of all thy serfs and subject assigned to resource collection(ERROR, [Fields Of Kumquat] not connected. Interlocks disabled. Alternate [Kumquat] source required. [Margarine] infusions enabled.

Revelator's Eye: Examine your immediate surroundings for untapped resources or hidden treasures. (ERROR, [Fields Of Kumquat] not connected. Interlocks disabled. Alternate [Kumquat] source required. [Margarine] infusions enabled.

Ally Of nature: Summon the spirits of nature in the immediate area for aide. (ERROR, [Fields Of Kumquat] not connected. Interlocks disabled. Alternate [Kumquat] source required. [Margarine] infusions enabled.

As she read the third power, she felt something inside her shift again. The power of the coins, everything she hadn't used in that final shot against that weird Zerg thing and probably everything she'd gained from killing it. It was calling to her.

Hesitantly, she touched the power.

[Consul Arts: Revelator's Eye.]

Power didn't rush out of her like it had when she'd used her Deadeye art. Instead, it pulsed, expanding out from her in a gentle ring. Mrs. Albright and Isabel both let out startled noises, but maybe their bar for strangeness was getting lower because other than that they didn't react at all.

The bubble of golden light flowed out from her, washing over the mounds of rubble, over the ground under her feet, through the air. And where it touched, information was returned. She knew, like she knew the feel of her own tongue, that the nearest rubble pile to them was made up of stone and trace amounts of iron. She knew that a single worker extracting the minerals unassisted could produce one modius of stone every day, and one modius of iron every five.

She did not, however, know what the heck a modius was.

She knew the trees of the jungle could be worked by up to ten workers continuously before deforestation started to be a problem. She knew the wood was good for constructing not only houses but also weapons. She knew that buried under the ground, too deep for unassisted workers to reach, was a vein of silver that if mined could bring the empire ten denarii a week.

And then the bubble touched the tree.

A hundred feet tall if it was an inch, easily twice that in circumference at the base if you added on all the trunks, and only God knew how big it was above the trunk with all of its branches spreading out in every direction. It looked like something out of Star Wars. It looked like you could build a city in its branches, and have room left over for a good-sized subdivision.

And that entire tree lit up like someone had decorated it for Christmas.

The three women paused, staring, as the tree glowed with the same color light that had come from Dinah when she pulsed her power. Its leaves began to shimmer with a cerulean inner glow. Its branches were limned in gold. Some of them, the smaller ones on the outer edges of the tree, rustled slightly and began to wave as they were stirred by the breeze–

There was no breeze.

"Hail Caesar," a breathy whisper of words came to them, floating through the air like petals pulled from a flower. It was soft and androgynous with just a hint of tremble in it. "This one is of the lineage Kel'Darshein, third of its seeding. He has waited many annum for this day to come. How may he serve mighty Caesar's emmisaries?"

Dinah stared.

"Well there's something you don't see every day," said Isabel.

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