Book One: A Storm of Glass and Ashes

Chapter Twenty-Seven: We All Fall Down

Hawk was trying to clean up what the Ararat Project had broken, which fortunately did not include a single one of her ant tanks. Her campo girls were winding down towards diapause (her least favorite time of the year), her pogos were happy with their seeds. The latter sat just beside her brand new tank of fire ants. She glared at them as she gave the Pogos more seeds and a chopped up mealworm...and, reluctantly, gave three worms to the goddamn fire ants. Oh, she hoped that Orb was worth giving the invasive little shits a foothold in her territory. Every time she walked by that tank, she dreamed up new ways to get that tank into a deep freeze. She really hated red imported fire ants.

And her honeypots were still at Em's. She'd need to go back and get them. She just didn't have the heart to write her poor, depleted colonies off just yet. She might be able to get them to recover if she babied them. And there was also the vanishingly small chance that Kaiser might get desperate and give her the giant Queen she'd captured at the Zoo. Probably not, but a girl could dream.

But the ants were the only good news. Thewhite-suit's reluctance to dig through ant hills had not extended to the restof Hawk's belongings. Her bedroom looked like a tornado had hit it, with everydrawer out of every dresser, clothes on the floor, on the bed, on every chair.What on earth had these people been looking for? She hadn't done anythingwhen they started doing this. Every cabinet in the kitchen had been rummaged through, and a lot of her plates, cups, bowls and utensils were scattered across counter top and floor. Her computer was gone, and she had no idea what Kaiser's men had done with it before Leo had them all arrested. Hopefully she was going to find it left in a bathroom somewhere. She was too overwhelmed to start picking up her bedroom or the wreck they'd made of her office (she'd never get that paper organized again. The draft was scattered in three different rooms), but she could compartmentalize, and tell herself she just had to do one thing. Just pick up the papers. Just pick up the socks. And to start, just do the dishes. 

So she walked through the house to make sure she'd collected them all, filled as much counterspace as she could with organized chaos, and then began washing dishes.

There was a comfort in chores. A sameness. Sure, the world as she knew it was mortally wounded, a hole was belching out lethal energy, humanoid apes and giant ants, and she had the core of some sort of demi-god in a fish tank full of fire ants, but she also had to do the dishes, clean up the living room, wash the toilets and her laundry...life was normal, she thought, as long as you had a load of laundry you had to do. She could even pretend, for a brief, brilliant moment, that this was all there was. That she and Alex had never met Kaiser, that the old woman and her dog hadn't died, that everything was perfectly and wonderfully normal, and Alex would be through that door any minute.

He might still be through that door any minute. Bittermoss can't possibly take that long. He's there, and he'll be calling in a few minutes, and then he'll be home tomorrow at the latest.

And that was the mantra she repeated as she scoured her violated flatware. She'd made it through most of the dinner plates and was starting on her bowls when the phone rang. She picked it up and smiled. It was Alex, checking in. She answered it. "Hey, Hand—"

"Hawk, you need to listen to me." Alex said, and all fun in the universe evaporated at that tone. The safe panacea of washing dishes was gone; she was back in Kaiser's world. Back to a place where the air could kill you. Alex sounded bad, and the cough he tried to hide from her sounded worse.

"Baby, what's going on?"

"Naomi Studdard just told me that Edgar Studdard attempted suicide by sitting inside the Prism he built for his daughter. He survived the way the Ape survived, except he apparently went off his gord from the isolation. Naomi is the one who has been setting off the Prisms, not Studdard himself." And then Alex gasped.