She strapped on her sword, then went upstairs to have breakfast with her father.

“Your mom’s back,” he told her as he moved to the oven to pull out plates. “At the clinic, but back.”

“I’m heading over there after breakfast.” She chose juice, as she wanted something cool.

“You need sleep, baby. You’ve been up over twenty-four.”

Eggs, scrambled, bacon, crisp. She dug in like the starving. “You, too,” she pointed out.

“I caught some sleep on the way back—and had a nice porch doze, as my dad used to call it, before you got here.”

She shoveled in more eggs. “I don’t have a scratch on me. Not a single scratch. Soldiers I led bled. Colin bled. I don’t have a scratch.”

“You’ve bled before.” He laid a hand over hers. “You will again.”

“I have to see the wounded, and they should see me. And the rescues. Then I’ll sleep.”

“I’ll go with you.”

She glanced at the ceiling, thought of the soldier who slept. “You should stay with Colin.”

“I’ll pull Ethan back to sit with him. Your mom said he’d likely sleep until afternoon.”

“Okay. Give me a sense of the prisoners,” she said, and he sighed.

“A mix. Some hard-asses with a lot of hate and fear of magickals. They skew older, and it’s not likely we’ll have much luck turning them around. But we may be able to educate a few of the younger ones.”

“They need to see the lab recordings. They need to see people being drugged, strapped down, tortured, experimented on just because they’re different.”

Though what she’d reviewed at the prison turned her stomach, she continued to eat. She needed fuel to function.

“Let that educate them.”

He couldn’t miss the bitterness in her voice, rubbed her hand again. “I agree. It should wait a few days. A lot of them expect torture and execution from us. We show them we treat our prisoners humanely, decently.”

“Then show them proof of the contrast,” she finished. “All right. But some won’t ever change, will they?”

“No.”

She rose, took his plate and hers to the sink to wash. “There’s no point asking why, but I keep circling back to it. Twenty years ago the world you knew, Mom knew, ended. Billions died terrible deaths from the Doom. We’re what’s left, Dad, and we’re killing each other.”

She turned to look at him, this good man who’d helped bring her into the world, who’d loved her, fought with her. A soldier who’d become a farmer, now a farmer who lived a soldier’s life again.

He had no magicks, she thought, and yet he was all the light stood for.

“You didn’t hate or fear,” she said. “You opened your home, then your life, to a stranger, a witch, and one who was being hunted. You could have turned her away, and me inside her, but you didn’t. Why?”

So many answers, Simon thought. He settled on one. “She was a miracle, and so were you, inside her. The world needed miracles.”

She smiled at him. “It’s going to get them, ready or not.”

She rode into town with him, taking Grace to give her mare some attention and exercise. The hills rolled around them, green with summer and surging wildflowers. She smelled earth freshly turned and planted, heard the shouts, the clang of metal from the barracks where recruits trained.

A small herd of deer slipped out of the trees to crop their way along a steep ridge heavy with trees. Above, the sky held soft and hopeful blue after the night’s storm.

The road, cleared of abandoned cars and trucks—all laboriously towed to an outlying garage for repair or dismantling, wound toward New Hope.

Houses, she thought, most in good repair now, and most occupied. Those that couldn’t be salvaged had been—like the vehicles—scavenged for parts. Wood, pipes, tiles, wiring, anything that could be used. On the reclaimed land, beef cattle, milk cows, goats, sheep, a few llamas, more horses grazed behind carefully tended fences.

At a bend in the road, the pulse of magick thrummed from the Tropics her mother had helped create. There grew groves of citrus trees, olive trees, palm, coffee beans, pepper, and other herbs and spices. Workers on harvesting detail paused to wave.

“Miracles,” Simon said simply.

After passing the security checkpoint, they rode into New Hope, once, at the height of the Doom, occupied only by death and ghosts. Now it thrived with more than two thousand people, and a memorial tree honored the dead. The community gardens and greenhouses, a site of two vicious attacks, continued to bloom and grow. The community kitchen her mother had established before Fallon had been born served meals daily.

The Max Fallon Magick Academy, named for her sire, the New Hope schools, the town hall, the shops open for bartering, the homes lining Main Street, the clinic, the library, the life reclaimed through sweat, determination, sacrifice.

Wasn’t all this, she wondered, another kind of miracle?

“You miss the farm,” she said as they guided the horses to the hitching posts and troughs.

“I’ll get back to it.”

“You miss the farm,” she repeated. “You left it for me, so every time I come into New Hope I’m glad you left it for a good place with good people.”

She dismounted, gave Grace a stroke before looping the reins around the rail.

She walked with him to what had once been the elementary school and now housed the New Hope Clinic.

They’d made changes over the years—Fallon had gone back through the crystal to see how it had all begun. The entrance hall held chairs for those waiting for an exam or checkup. A section held toys and books collected from abandoned houses.

A couple of toddlers played with blocks—one had wings fluttering in delight. A pregnant woman sat plying knitting needles and yarn over the mound of her belly. A teenager sprawled in another chair, looking bored. An old man sat hunched, his breathing a rattling wheeze.

As they turned toward the offices, Hannah Parsoni—the mayor’s daughter, Duncan and Tonia’s sister—hurried down the right corridor, a clipboard in one hand, a stethoscope around her neck.

She had her luxurious mane of dark blond hair pulled back in a long tail. Her eyes, already a warm brown, deepened with pleasure at the sight of them. “I was hoping to see you both. We’re swamped,” she added, “so I’ve only got a minute. Rachel has me working with the scheduled patients and walk-ins, but I helped with the first triage on the wounded. We haven’t lost anyone. Some of the people you freed…”

Compassion rolled off her, so deep Fallon felt the waves on her skin.

“Some of them are going to need extended treatment, and counseling, but none of them are critical now. Lana—she’s amazing. How’s Colin?”

“Sleeping,” Simon told her.

“No fever, no infection,” Fallon added.

“Make sure to let your mom know. She does know, but it would help her to hear it.”

In the way she had of offering care, Hannah reached out to touch them both. “You look so tired, both of you.”

“Maybe I should do a—”

As Fallon lifted a hand to her face, Hannah took it. “A glamour? I wish you wouldn’t. They should see the effort. They should know what it costs, what freedom costs. That you pay the price for it, too.”

She gave Fallon’s hand a squeeze, then moved on. “Hey, Mr. Barker, let’s go back, have a look at you.”

He rattled, wheezed. “I can wait for the doctor.”

“Why don’t we go back to an exam room, just have a look? I can get you started for Rachel.”

Soothing, cajoling instead of insulted, Fallon thought. That was Hannah—Hannah who’d been studying, training to be a doctor, essentially since her childhood, and who’d served as a field medic on rescues for years.

Patience, Fallon realized, was just one form of Hannah’s magick.

She saw the girl in the office, working briskly on a computer—a skill she herself had yet to fully master. April, she remembered. Faerie, about her age. Wounded in the attack in the gardens two years before.

An attack instigated by Fallon’s own blood, her cousin, the daughter of her sire’s brother and his woman. Dark Uncannys who wanted her death above all.

The girl looked up, beamed a smile. “Hey, hi. Are you looking for Lana?”

“I wanted to see the wounded—any who are up for it.”

“We have the freed prisoners who were treated and cleared holding at the school auditorium, and the troops treated and cleared sent home or to the barracks. The rest are in the ward. Jonah and Carol are doing rounds, and Ray’s monitoring the ones we released medically. It’s been kind of an all-hands-on-deck morning. And right now?” She smiled her bright, faerie smile. “Rachel and Lana are delivering a baby.”

“A baby?”

“One of the prisoners—”

“Lissandra Ye, wolf shifter,” Fallon finished—she’d read every report. “She’s not due for nearly eight weeks.”

“She went into labor in the mobile heading here. They weren’t able to stop it.” As some worry leaked through, April pressed her lips together. “They’ve got a kind of NICU set up for it, as best they can. But I could tell Rachel was worried even though Jonah said he didn’t see death.

“He’d see it, right?” April reached out for reassurance. “Jonah would know.”

Fallon nodded, stepped out.

“Death’s not the only consequence.” She spoke softly to Simon. “Lissandra Ye was in that prison for fourteen months. She was raped inside there, and they kept right up with experiments on her after she got pregnant.”

“You need to trust your mother and Rachel.”

“I do.”

She walked down another corridor. Classrooms converted to exam rooms, treatment rooms, surgeries, storage for supplies, another for medications and drugs.