"I killed somebody." That didn't happen next but Kyle can't keep not talking about it.

"He was sitting on the beach of that lake, I don't even know which one we saw so many. His hair was gray, all slicked back. He had this bowl with four little fires in it, and the water kept rolling out of the lake in these big waves and washing over him, and his pants were getting wet but he just kept sitting there. No towel or anything, no jacket. Or wind either, except something kept pushing the different smokes together, and you could almost see these different animal faces, or human faces, or..." Both of those are false, and he flails a moment trying to say something true, but...keep going, just keep going.

"But he was looking out at the lake, so I could walk right up to him and he didn't see me. He had a big circle with these spiky little teeth on it, drawn in the sand, and I stepped over it really carefully and walked up behind him and took this big wavy knife I had, I don't know where it came from it was just in car, and I took it and I stabbed him in the back, right through his shirt.

He tried to stand up but I grabbed him and we kinda fell over sideways. The fire bowl got knocked over. He was fighting but not that hard, and he had this look on his face like 'what kind of idiot tries to kill someone with a knife', only when the next wave came it rolled around him, just parted so it wouldn't touch him. Or his blood. He was so surprised, and he tried to say something but I couldn't hear it, and then he fought a little more but I was sitting on him and he couldn't get me off of him and I grabbed his wrists, and he got weaker and weaker and then he died. It was so clear. It was so obvious when it happened.

I just watched a minute, and when the blood stopped flowing I grabbed his body and wrapped it up in a tarp. I didn't take the knife out, I guess it's still there.

I think that was yesterday."

That's an awful story, but Sophie has apparently had too many emotional shocks today; the horror of it, and even her concern for Kyle, have this weird distant quality, like she's watching them through binoculars. The thing she's feeling most clearly is relief; there was apparently a part of her that was expecting something worse, even if she can't pin down what exactly right now.

She'll pet his hair some more. "It wasn't you," she says again, really trying to make him believe it. "It was the Juice Man. I'm going to - " kill him crush him force him to submit " - do something about it. I can, you know. I have superpowers now."

She's feeling pretty good about that, as seconds pass and the Juice Man (or the ghost/demon/whatever that possessed him?) doesn't reappear. And that means she should probably bring Kyle to school, like she did Emily. He doesn't have superpowers, and if he used to have some kind of magic storm protection he probably doesn't anymore.

"Do you think you can walk? I want to hear the rest but I think we should get under cover."

He nods a little, but it turns out to be very much a lie: when he tries to stand he winds up on his hands and knees. His left side really hurts, he's noticing, above and beyond the crushing dissociation and fatigue.

Not a problem, Sophie will just scoop him up in a bridal carry like she did Emily. It's a little awkward since he's taller than her, but she'll fiddle with it until they find something comfortable.

"Comfortable" is probably too ambitious right now, but he won't complain as long as there's no pressure on his broken rib.

And he thought he'd be cold, but: "Your skin is warm. Really warm."

"Like I said, superpowers."

"No. You were always hot." It's a feeble joke, but it makes him feel a little more like himself.

It's always disorienting, waking up in a new body. Everything's the wrong color, the wrong distance from the floor, feels wrong against the skin. The three souls share sense perception in a way that's hard to disentangle or get used to. Nico deals with this by not switching bodies more than he can help, but right now he can't afford a distraction.

Is he still in that hut by Pawtuckaway Lake? Is Adam here?

Yes, to both. The power's out, though, and the rain is falling in sheets. Adam is in a chair by your bed, reading a paperback book by flashlight; the lightning flashes are down to every five seconds or so.

Adam comes alert as soon as he sees Nico stir. "Boss? Are we done?"

What a question. "I need a map. How far are we from Lane's corpse?"

This only rates about a 2 out of 10, on Adam's internal weird-requests meter. He'll dig through the New Hampshire maps until he finds the one with all the river systems drawn in, but he doesn't need it to answer the question.

"Forty, forty-five minutes, if no one's found it."

He glances at the window, pointedly, and adds, "And if we drove."

Oh, right, that. Whatever they're doing, they're pretty much stuck doing it here. But it ought to be all right, so long as...

"Lane had a close personal relationship with the Merrimack River water system. It could have protected him, if we hadn't gone to all that trouble screening it out, and it will definitely try to avenge him once it realizes he's dead."

Adam knew that already, or at any rate had heard it before, but sometimes Nico just needs to think out loud. He nods.

Nico takes the map and the flashlight, and starts tracing lines down from Lake Winnipesaukee.

"My original idea to get it to come after me was to throw the body in the lake. Can't get any clearer than that, right? If only I'd left one of you there! But it would take too long to get there even if we could drive, which, you're right, we can't. But Pawtuckaway Lake is right outside, and it's..." Nico stutters as he finds the right part of the map, "...not, in fact, part of the Merrimack River system, and so it's useless to us."

A brilliant plan, ruined by brute geography.

Cycles of elation and despair are part of Nico's process. It's not, Adam judges, time yet for him to say anything soothing or reassuring, and not time to worry about the "get it to come after me" part of the plan either.

Nico keeps tracing. "The closest is Onway Lake, which is - " a quick finger-walk to estimate the distance " - fifteen minutes away by car. And then more, to find another safe place."

...still not time, he doesn't think. He doesn't say anything. Doesn't move. Doesn't even change expression.

"Yes, yes, you're right, we can't risk that either." Nico puts the map down, and settles back onto the bed. His sense of urgency is fading a little, now that he's away from Kyle's teenage-body hormones. His own adrenaline glands are getting old, and weren't there for scariest parts anyway. He doesn't have hours to solve his latest set of problems, probably, but he does have minutes. He can take a moment and think. What does he actually want?

Sometimes even alchemists have a hard time answering that question, but right now the answer comes immediately, with no resistance: to finish my ritual in peace. Sometimes at this point Nico likes to stop and double-check that his answer makes sense with his other goals, but here he figures he can skip that step. He's so, so close to changing everything.

Finish the ritual. What does that imply? What steps does he have to take to make that happen?

First, to kill the thief. There's no getting around it: she's strong, she can find him through his connection to the card, and she's already mad at him. At the very least she can sell him out to the Masons, or maybe even cut a deal with the Salt. She could easily kill Kyle, too, though it didn't look like she wanted to. At least she can't sneak up on him.

Second, to get the rest of his cards back. He'll certainly need them to finish what he started, and they'll draw attention if they're left lying around. What if the Tower is just sitting face up on someone's lawn somewhere? Most magical tools don't look like anything special when you're not using them; pieces of the Adam deck can attract a news crew all by themselves. They won't know what they're looking it, but if it's strange enough they'll just report on it anyway, and in effect will sell him out as completely as the thief could, completely by accident.

Third, to work uninterrupted for a few days -- or, fine, maybe as much as a week. That, at least, should be easy to arrange, once he can fade into the background again.

Now, what are his major constraints? What are the boundaries of the space he has to work within?

First, the thief probably can't cut his connection to Kyle's body completely (unless double-secret super alchemist, et cetera), but it would be easy to stop him from finding it at a distance, if she thinks of it and has enough nerve. If he wants to do anything with the Kyle body, it probably has to be in the next few minutes.

Second, he can't move around much or call anybody, thanks to the storm (and why was there such a big storm anyway? it's not later enough for that yet, save it for step three).

Third, Kyle has no weapons and just normal teenage boy strength. Nico has a gun, but no way to get it to where it needs to be (and guns are chancy weapons against alchemists anyway; too many ways for small forces to interfere).

Those...are some pretty sharp constraints. The sand is falling, Nico. Think!

The thief is the most time-sensitive part of this, he decides. If he can just deal with her, he'll probably have a day or two to gather up the cards, and then as long as he needs to fill out the rest of the puzzle. How can he win that fight decisively, right now?

Steal a firetruck and spray her with the hose? Requires a little too much going outside.

Get her inside that school and set off the sprinklers? Requires lots of things to go right and then probably isn't strong enough anyway.

Get Adam to -- probably Christopher and Adam shouldn't be involved in this. They didn't help kill Lane exactly but they drove him around and fetched things while he set it up, and even that much strained his old agreement with them. Better to leave them out completely, unless it's down to his life or hers.

Try to get them both struck by lightning? Could work, very bad if she survived, and he'd have to get the card away from the blast site first. Call it plan C.

What if he did some more experiments with the wire? That's the kind of thing he's supposed to save for step three, but maybe his thinking here has been too rigid. That's...not usually Nico's problem, yes, all right, fine, and he's trained himself to be suspicious whenever he starting thinking he should bend his checklist a little, but it's been a deeply unusual morning and he's not getting anywhere.

...

It doesn't seem like it would help. That thing he summoned before wasn't all that threatening, and it didn't especially obey him, either, did it. He could get a tree to reach out for him, maybe grab him, but what would that accomplish? He needs something bigger; to summon the discipline and valor of a whole legion of Roman soldiers into the trees of the forest, say, so that they'd all march against the thief at his command. He doesn't know how to do that, but maybe he should try having a major alchemical insight, right here on the spot, with no safeguards or backup or understanding of what exactly he's doing.

...yeah, no.

This is infuriating. His original plan was so good!

As soon as the Merrimack realized he'd killed Lane, it would rise up from its various banks and seek revenge. But it was Kyle's body that did the killing, so it would naturally follow and attack, drowning him and anyone near him. Nico would probably have to be in Kyle's body at the time, but that's fine; he could help distract her, and then get out of Kyle for good before he completely died. Even better, with all the chaos this morning no one would even be suspicious of the unusual flood! By Nico's normal standards it was, admittedly, a rather stupid and insane plan, but for something made up on the spur of the moment to beat an almost entirely unknown adversary it was brilliant. It would have worked! Probably!