My father usually reads the newspaper while he's drinking coffee in the morning. I don't wake up as late as he does on weekdays or as early on weekends, so either way, I tend to miss him, but I'll take the opportunity to speak with him when I get it.

If only I knew how to start conversations. "So, how have you... been?" I ask.

My father lowers the newspaper. People have said my brother and I look exactly like my dad, but I look like a lackluster copy: crisp scruff turned to blonde peach fuzz, cold stare gone lukewarm. "Bad news, in the papers and on the streets. The former doesn't concern you. Don't read the news. It's what gets you down. As for the latter, well, Mr. Gray is in the hospital," my dad says. "The neighborhood is putting together dinner for the Grays while he's out, just to make things... easier. Do you think you might be able to make something?"

"Oh, uh— of course!"

My dad stands up, coffee in hand. "Thanks, Will. You're doing well at school?"

"Yeah, of course."

"Of course," my dad says. He smiles, shakes his head a little. As he retreats back to the office, he says, "Don't you get any older, Will."

I try to smile. If this is my life, now, I can only imagine what getting older will be. "I'm trying." Under my breath, I say, "If my interests haven't already made that obvious."

He doesn't catch that.

I hesitate outside of a portal to the Veins in my room, standing just beside my sleeping brother. He's sprawled out, the covers a blue sea around a white, shirtless body. He looks years younger, which is strange, because Adam Rosenbloom has always been two years older than me.

Is that going to be different when things are over?

As if a light has been lit on a dark road, my musings are no longer my own. They're waiting for you down there.

"Patiently? Together?" I ask. Adam Rosenbloom twitches in his sleep. Does this mean things are better?

Shiloh lowers imaginary eyes.

Fine. I'm coming down.

I descend into the shadows. Sure enough, the team is there, standing patiently, although "together" is a stretch. Amanda is on a beanbag, Karen is practicing in one corner, and Garrett is half-heartedly portalling a pillow around the room. Said pillow hits me in the face. "Oh, I didn't see you there," Garrett drawls.

"Seriously," I say. "Seriously."

"Seriously what?" asks Amanda.

"It's been a week. We're not seriously all still mad at each other," I say.

"I don't know. We might be," Karen says. "Let's get this over with. We might as well go down there, get our ass handed to us by plant man, and go home. Happens every time, doesn't it?"
"You were the one who got that first crystal. We need one more. Any mission could be our last. Then this is over," I say.

"Who says Karen wants it to end?" asks Garrett. "What's she going to take refuge in then?"

"That was petty," I say.

"I can do petty," Garrett says.

"We know," Karen responds.

"And that was mean," Amanda adds.

I close my eyes. "We're going to get in there and get killed."

"By Ignatius? Don't you think you could talk him down, Will?" asks Karen.

"Shut... shut the fuck up."

That gets her to turn around. "Excuse me?"
I'm shaking. Shiloh is two eyes in the dark. He is high beams and I am a deer. I've always been a deer. My whole life is a series of deer-in-headlights moments, and people have always been stopping or careening out of my way. Ignatius is the man who will finally hit the gas and let my body splinter over the windshield. They don't know that yet. They didn't see the body that haunts my dreams, the limbs spread out like branches, the human form gone inanimate. Slackened. I am going to be next. My brother will never know where I went. My family will never know where I went. It will be my fault. "I couldn't talk him down. We're not going there to talk. We're going there to fight," I say. "We are going to finally, finally show him who and what we are. I am-- I've been letting myself get in my own way, too. I ran out on you guys when my leadership was questioned. I haven't been the most open, and I definitely haven't been the bravest. I've never been brave. Well, they say... they say bravery isn't the absence of fear, it's rising up against it. I've never been more scared in my whole life than I am, right now, and I think that means that I finally need to stand on my feet. I can't do that alone. None of us can. So please, please, help me stand."

Karen looks at me the same way she did the night we met, not the least bit impressed.

"I'm in," Garrett says.

"You know I am," Amanda agrees, moving a hand towards mine like we're a sports team. I tilt mine up towards hers.

Karen hesitates. She puts her hand next to Amanda's. Garrett moves to put his in, and the four of us, our hands in a circle, and I say, "On three?"
"No," Karen removes her. "Absolutely not."

"Fine. Let's just... let's just go."
We just go. House is empty on the first floor. Many of the plants haven't been cared for since we last saw them. The parched succulents, oxymoronic as that is, have begun to develop crevasses in their 'heads', so that dark eyes and haunting hole mouths stare out at us. Lines against the walls grow deeper, and we didn't make them. Plants grow everywhere, straining towards the windows, begging for sun. Trampled flowers and plucked, messy foliage covers the cupboards. A few apples grow out of the stove, unattached to a tree. Everywhere are projects that have started, been forgotten, and been left to go back to seed.

"That's disappointing," Garrett says. "All this talk, and he's not even here."
"Is he?" I ask. Is he?

From the darkness, a voice says, "Of course. I'd hate to be an absent host." Vines wrap around my mouth, and I am dragged, violently, into the darkness.

"Luna!" Amanda calls.

I breathe out of my nose. Shiloh is the stick trying to hold up the collapsing cliff of my composure up as a mixture of chemicals flood my body, far past the point of even registering as emotions. I'd love to say I panic, that is to say, but panic is not cutting it. My numb fingers go for my shield, but another vine has me around the waist, and when I feel something close around my neck, I'm trying not to faint. The basement is an overcast sky, a hell that smells like an abandoned underground nursery, and as the shield violently glows, illuminating a man who is no longer quite a man. The labcoat is ragged, and parts of his flesh are overgrown with plant matter. Circulation has been cut off in several places, turning fingers a dark blue, and over his heart is a beating mass of branches that holds the Diosite close to him. Out of broken glasses, her stares back at me, and I see the remains of a daisy chain in his hair.

He smells like death.

The others thunder down the stairs, and Ignatius does not bother with the plants. He holds me close, suspended in a creature that has become him, and flicks open a good old-fashioned pocket knife. "I'll slit his neck."
Tesla raises her hands. The Phantom Loop does not go for his halberds. CMYK drops her brush.

"Good kids," Ignatius says, and his voice rasps a little. He hasn't spoken in weeks, if not months. "Good kids. Always knew you had some sense left in you. Now, I talk, and you don't become the man on the ceiling. Oh yes-- you saw my lawn ornament, didn't you? You did."
"What?" asks Tesla.

"Ignatius killed a man," CMYK confirms. "Probably a politician."

With a nervous, almost frantic laugh, Phantom echoes, "What?"
"You saw. But you didn't say anything, did you?" asks Ignatius. "Teamwork. Marvelous thing, isn't it?"
"Luna didn't want us to kill you," CMYK says. "Now that he's tied up, we might renegotiate. Don't test your luck."

Ignatius's pupils contract, like those of a cat. "Should I? I think it'd kill you to let me kill him. I don't think you'll push me. Let me speak. Consider this a second round of tea. I haven't had much water that isn't from the earth or the river, but... well. Well. Still have a few bags in there somewhere. As for the man... Proposition 1014 for the City Council. A proposed expenditure wherein tax cuts will be rewarded to a major corporation entering the area.

Everything gets defunded. Arts, education, environmental action, all those little, secondary things that truly make society society. Marginal in the face of capitalism. I suppose he was marginal, too."

"You can't just murder politicians for making policy you don't like," Tesla says.

"Can't I? The destruction of evil by any means is good. You're young. One of you probably agrees," Ignatius laughs. It's a truly villainous cackle. The man is years of theatre as he faces us. He's loving it. "Don't worry. I've moved past, if you will pardon the plant pun, small potatoes. I was thinking about evil men. I'm moving up to an evil system. How would you stop all Proposition 1014s? How many people would you have to kill? The answer is all of them. All of us! After all, all the goodness afforded to us, in this environment, was created on the back of suffering. Who makes all these gadgets? What is destroyed to feed us anything we want, whenever we want it? How much do we ravage the planet in the sake of convenience? Nature suffers, or people who you can't see suffer, no difference, but someone pays for everything we take for granted. You're the top of the food chain. You're young. Don't know how the world works. Makes sense, doesn't it? Makes sense. No one learns when they're older, either. They hear how things happen, feel the revulsion in their stomach, and then they put it away. That's growing up. Complacency." He looks towards the ceiling, smiling. "I'm never going to grow complacent now. I'm still evolving. Young again. I never have to stop."

All of us are scared shitless, as evidenced by the total, dead silence. I feel vines squeeze around me with excitement. I hear his breath rasp. I want to cry but my mouth and eyes are drier than the desert.

Ignatius continues, "I'm not close to any of it anymore. I was isolated, and now, now, I'm barely human. I don't need to operate inside of any human system. I can take all my energy from the sun. I can exist without hurting anything. Anyone. It's not too late. If we used our combined Diosite, maybe it could make you something like me. Something that generates out of itself. This mineral takes human desire, human emotion, which is free and abundant, and synthesizes it right back into energy. There's more out there. Has to be. That's what it says. Find more. All of us. Once everything has burned down, we'll... we'll fix it all."

It was so fast and he went downhill so hard.

"No takers?"

"Not on your life," says Tesla.

Ignatius shrugs. "Figured. Figured. Yours hasn't really taken you yet. It will. You'll come around to something. Maybe not the same conclusion I came to, but you'll come to something, as long as it has you. What's holding you right now is a greater delusion than mine... that the four of you, kids in costumes, are somehow heroes. Heroes, by their nature, uphold status quos. They listen to villains sure, empathize with them, maybe, but no matter what a villain says, they are a threat to the glistening city, and villains must be stopped. See, villains... villains destroy the world as we know it. But I don't think you've ever considered the world as we know it is not worth saving."

His vines tense again. I whimper before I know what I'm doing. My hands are still reaching for the shield, but I need a boost. I lock eyes with Garrett. Please.

"So you're going to burn it down?" asks CMYK. "Society functions. It's not... it's not perfect, but people take care of each other. People care for each other. There are all these beautiful, wonderful things that happen because people work together, and people-- people--" she's struggling for words. "We're trying to get better."

Ignatius shrugs. "Guess so."

"You're a fucking lunatic," Tesla says.

"But you are too," Ignatius smiles. "Here's the thing about you. The tricky thing. You could have won a long time ago. It wouldn't even have been hard. I have this deal for you. It's an easy deal, right? So easy. You call the police on me."
"What?" asks Tesla.

Ignatius stares us down. "You heard me. Call the police. If I'm such a threat to security, if this is so easy for you, if society is so good, you should call the police on me. Let them handle me."

"We can't--" I begin.

"Why not?" he asks. "Should be an easy call for you. Shouldn't even have to think about it. Unless there's something else in the game. A reason you haven't given over. Something driving you. In that case, well, I'm not even your enemy, am I? I'm a prison of the same jail you're in. In that case, we are in the same boat, and you should really reconsider... why you're fighting with me. Or at least, what your goal really is. Is it to save people? Or it is to serve a cause you know nothing about, in return for... well. If I was a kid, it wouldn't take much to convince me this whole charade was a good idea."

They're all looking at me. He can not be serious. He can not be serious.

"Two weeks. I won't be so nice after that. I have many, many treants, and many, many rivers to poison," he smiles. "How do you feel about... I don't know, sterilizing the entire population? Maybe paralyzing them? Or perhaps they'll all just drop dead. I don't think it really matters. Just prove to me you really trust society, that you're willing to put its fate in its own hands, and then I'll go willingly."

"We can't trust that," Tesla says.

He laughs. "Of course you can! Keep an eye on me. No activity for the next two weeks. I get the feeling you'll know if I start something, and if so... you're free to hold me to my end of the bargain."

He's not wrong. We will know. Shiloh will test us.

With a snap of his fingers, Ignatius summons monsters out of every corner. At the same time, he drops me. My shield swings up towards his chest, and I'm thrown against the floor. Ignatius looks down at me with undisguised spite. "Phantom Loop. Take them home. Isn't that about all you're good for?"
"I'm not--" Phantom begins.

Creatures begin encroaching.

"Do it," says Tesla.

The floor drops under us.

We sit in the Veins for a solid minute, just staring at each other. Shiloh paces the floor. Every single clip clip clip clip of his hooves ratchets up my anxiety another notch. Still recovering from the little dance with death, if we're going to be honest, but as Ignatius says, that's small potatoes.

"Why do you need it back, anyways? What are you?" asks Karen.

"It's dangerous," Shiloh says. "Dangerous to people, but for us, it's just... we're altruists. We want to protect you. Protect humans! We're your friends. I know right now, this all looks bad, but you need to trust me."
"We can talk this out," I promise Karen.

"Can we, now? He killed one man. What's to stop him from doing it again, in the dead of night?"

"Shiloh will wake me up."

"You'll die alone."

Amanda holds my shoulder. "I've got him," she promises.

Karen sizes us both up. "We're idiots," she says. "Idiots."
Garrett's expression is hollow. "We're not really like that, are we?"
"He's the villain! Everything he says is designed to trick us!" I say. "Everything!"

Garrett puts a hand against his side. "I can feel myself going, sometimes." He puts a hand through his hair. "Will, I'm scared out of my mind."

My face falls. "We're not like him."

Shiloh is by my leg.

"We aren't."