up. Cocky, laughing. I got you, didn’t I? The asshole. Just the kind of thing he would do. Die on her to prove how impossible the idea of living even a single day without him was.
He wasn’t gone. He couldn’t be gone. She threw open her power, ripping down every wall, every defense, blasting them all to pieces until she was wide open and the slam of her own power hitting her nearly made her vision go black. But she didn’t let it roll her under. She threw herself into the chaos of it willingly. In this moment she was bigger and badder than it could ever be. She shaped it, wielded it and flung it into Prometheus, willing his blood to flow, his lungs to breathe.
Nothing.
There was a vacuum where his power had been, sucking down all she poured into him and giving back no flicker of life in return. Damn it, Prometheus. You get back here, you bastard. I’m not done with you. She felt it then—not in him, but in her. Deep inside her soul some piece of him was still attached to her. She saw it with the eyes he had opened, the power he’d taught her to see, that string of power connecting them. It stretched out from her into his chest, vanishing into the wormhole that had consumed his power and left him for dead. But it was attached to something on the other end, inside that empty, incomprehensible space. He still existed. Somewhere in the planes of energy and time, he was still there. She would open a channel, blast open that wormhole and do whatever it took to haul him back through it by the string that connected them. They were fighters. They fought for what they loved. She would fight for him.
Rodriguez shouted, dragging at her shoulders, but Karma wasn’t in the physical world anymore. She unleashed the power she’d denied her whole life and crashed through the wormhole into the netherplane, chasing the nebulous thread that was her internal tether to Prometheus.
Her first impression was of a vast sense of space, but it was layered on top of itself—no laws of physics applied here. A thousand objects could occupy the same space at the same time. It was like being inside a universe on the head of a pin. Her regular senses were useless. She was blind and dumb, relying entirely on the sixth sense she’d always tried to cage. She clung to the tether, as much as she could cling without hands or eyes.
Even her sense of self was distorted, emotions blurred and dulled until the sharpness of her desperate grief and need for Prometheus was hazy and soft. Was there really any hurry? She could float here, drifting along, and things would right themselves eventually.
A burn started against her sternum—but she didn’t have a sternum, no body here—intensifying until the pain penetrated her pleasant, floaty inertia. The protection charm. Prometheus’s yin-yang. It was still around her neck, rubbing against her sternum. Warning her.
The lethargy wasn’t natural. Someone or something was slipping her a metaphysical mickey, trying to slow her down and keep her from Prometheus. She pulsed her power around her, the angry surge burning away the fog until her real emotions flared back full force. Pain. Desperation. Fear. Prometheus. She reached for that internal tether, tracking him through the layers of nothing and everything.
What she found at the other end of their link was barely identifiable as a person. It was barely a spark, more an idea of existence than an actual life, but it was him. At the most basic level, the inviolate core that had been at the center of all that wild energy. His soul. And it wasn’t free.
Someone or something had bound him there, trapped in a net of power that gleamed silver against her inner eye, and Karma had a pretty good idea who was responsible. Hang on, Prometheus. I’m gonna get you out of here. She began to tease at the moorings of the net holding his spark in place, operating on instinct and hope. This had to work. She’d free him, bring him back and he’d be fine. Alive. She hadn’t been able to resuscitate him with her power because his soul was missing, but if she brought it back, it would work. Please let this work.
The first of the slick silver moorings came loose and his spark stirred, thrashing itself against the net— that’s it, fight for me—even as the edges tried to reseal themselves. His cage had a consciousness and it wanted to stay closed. By the time she released a second and third mooring, the first had reattached. It became a race to stay ahead of them—a race she was steadily losing. Prometheus’s spark stopped shifting and twisting inside the silver net, falling dormant again.
No no no. She would get him out. She tried pouring energy through the tendril that connected them so he could fight his way out from the inside, but to no avail. She could try slicing her way through the net, but she wasn’t exactly a precision machine with her powers. What if she sliced right through and hurt him? Too risky.
If only she was inside, with him, she could burst them both out. She was sure of it.
As soon as the idea took root, she set it into motion, pouring herself down the thread connecting her to Prometheus, she slipped beneath the net and the edge of her soul brushed against his, causing latent instincts to screech out a warning. No going back from this. If you link to him fully and he stays here, you stay here. But Karma was already wrapping her amorphous self around his spark. They should have fit together like two puzzle pieces, but his piece had shrunk and she had to puff up her power to fill in his blanks. The link locked into place with an ominous finality.
Karma turned her attention to the net, slicing without mercy, and it fell away. They floated free— too easy, that devil bitch would never let it be so easy—and Karma began dragging him toward the surface of their reality, like swimming through pudding. Prometheus’s spark still lay dormant. Come on, you bastard. I know you’re in there.
Another presence erupted into the netherplane, yanking on Prometheus’s soul so hard it ripped half-free of Karma. She hissed with pain and clung. A thunderous message crashed into her consciousness on a tide of heat. “He belongs to me.”
Deuma. Only then did Karma notice the other tether attached to Prometheus. If the one linking Karma to him was a delicate silken thread, Deuma’s was a steel-core cable.
“I won’t let you take him,” Karma replied, hanging tight to her silken thread.
“Oh? Try to stop me.” Deuma jerked his spark again and Karma could only fly along with him, holding on for dear life, as the devil hauled them back to the glittering silver net. The cage was alive again, rebuilding itself, wrapping around them with liquid, tensile strength.
Karma tried to keep it from reaffixing, but it was stronger now and the more she fought, the stronger the cage seemed to get, feeding off her struggles. The futility of it seeped to her core. They’d lost. She’d come here to save him and only wound up damning herself.
“No.” It was so soft she almost didn’t hear it, a whisper, not even words really, but a faint scratch at the back of her mind, so deep it couldn’t possibly be real. Then she heard it again. “No. My Karma doesn’t give up. She’s invincible, if she would let herself be. She can Hulk-smash the hell out of that puny demon bitch one handed.”
“Prometheus?”
But there was no reply. Only Deuma’s taunt as the last of the net’s moorings slid into place. “Two-for-one special. I hadn’t pegged you for such a fool.”
Had she imagined him? Hulk-smash the hell… Was there really still a part of him alive enough to believe in her? Invincible, if she would let herself… Karma stopped struggling, falling down into herself to that deep, dark place, the wellspring of her powers that had always scared the everloving shit out of her. She’d pulled down her walls, but she’d left this dam in place, too terrified to contemplate letting the power truly have free rein. But fear had no place here. Prometheus believed in her—even if it was a hallucination of him. It was time she started believing in herself. She looked with her inner eye to the angry red energy of Deuma. “You can’t have him. This soul is mine.”
The dam exploded.
She was power. She was light. She was particles and chain reactions. The net evaporated. No bounds could contain her. She launched herself upward, cradling Prometheus’s spark protectively, but the steel-core cable was still there, dragging him back. Oh no you don’t. She reached through the two tethers, through Prometheus and down the cable until she felt Deuma’s power, the wild, foreign pulse of it, slippery and dark. It was insidious and corrupting, but she didn’t fear power. She was power. Deuma shrieked and thrashed, but Karma dug her hooks in deep and she pulled. All that power, stolen from thousands of
