Nick had yet to give me an answer. He’d walked across the sandbar back toward the bluffs in a hurry and was going over the stony wall with a fine-tooth comb, eyes furrowed as he ran his hands over any irregularity.

“What are we doing?” I asked.

Nick accidentally pulled a piece of craggy stone free and casually tossed it aside. “You said it’d be a net-zero.”

“If we both accepted Hastur’s deal?” I hurried to keep pace with him as he shuffled along the stone base, wildly looking back and forth.

“Right. You become the man who feels too much, I become the rational, unfeeling bastard.” Nick glanced at me. “Sorry.”

I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. Still not following you.”

“Thing is.” Nick pried another piece of rock free with a grunt and tossed it aside. “It’s not actually a net zero. Think about it. Even if I suddenly had your mindset, I’d lack your experience, your history. It’d be like giving someone a gun with no safety.”

It finally hit me. “And I’d be learning to manage a shitton of interference. You’re right. It’s not net zero. It’s suboptimal.”

Apparently not finding what he was looking for, Nick started knocking on the bluffs. “Uh-huh. And you’re the problem solver, so you tell me. Why would a being with god-tier foresight—especially one obsessed with creating ‘a perfect future’—make a gambit with a suboptimal outcome?”

“Maybe he only needs one of us,” I tried. “Or this is his way of making sure we’re beholden to him.”

Nick shook his head. “What do we know about Hastur?”

“He’s an asshole.”

“Okay, yes, but I meant what does he want?”

“Supposedly? Peace.” I frowned and went down the list. “To end the Transposition. And he’s unhappy with the state of the order to the point he’s willing to spill loyal blood—holy shit.” My jaw dropped. “He should have foreseen the conflict between Sunny and Aaron. So he’s not actually omniscient. Or at least, his ability to see the future is far more compromised than he’s led us to believe.”

“We’re off to see the wizard, Toto.” Nick reached inside a crevice, then grunted and withdrew his hand, still frantically moving down the face of the bluffs. “Hastur’s throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks. But it’s not all parlor tricks. He has power, actual power. Question is, how much?”

I remembered, in a moment of discomfort, exactly how appealing the future Hastur described to me had been. How there was a part of me that still longed for it. Then how quickly his power and lucidity had drained away. “He’s insightful enough that it has to be significant. But it’s not perfect. More like he has an idea of what one person’s future will be, and how to change it, but can’t guarantee that any action he takes will bring about his ideal ends. He has to make a change, then look into the future and see how it all pans out.”

“Wanna guess how many people he talks to?” Nick glanced at me, raising an eyebrow.

“Few. One in five?” I guessed.

“Closer to one in twenty,” Nick said. “So, it’s not just bullshit. He needs us for something. If I—” he stopped suddenly, some of his energy draining away, looking vaguely nauseous. Then seemed to gather his courage and started again. “If you didn’t get to me before I... went through with it. With Keith. How would that have affected you?”

“Not well,” I admitted. “Bare minimum, I’d put off revealing my identity. There’d be a lot of lost trust, and an upswing in self-doubt. I’ve already been questioning whether I can play the Ordinator role without going off the deep end, and if I saw you go off the deep end… I’d be much more likely to take Hastur up on his offer.”

“Exactly,” Nick said.

“But that’s only one potential future.” The pieces fell into place. “He had to know he was putting us on a collision course. And if so, then…”

“He knew damn well that this could happen,” Nick finished. “And I’m betting he accounted for it.”

The thought chilled me, and I shivered despite the tropical warmth of our surroundings. But it didn’t seem to bother Nick. “For fuck’s sake, what are you looking for?”

“A ripple.” Nick paused. He’d run out of wall and gone down on his knees, searching where the sandbar met the bluffs. “Or a secret passage. There has to be something he wants us to find with this specific outcome.”

“Nick.” I grabbed his shoulder and stopped him. My friend turned to look at me, a sheen of sweat on his brow. “All you’re doing is strengthening the argument for us to run. Look at what he’s doing to Aaron and Sunny. The knives at their backs. If Hastur’s aware it could play out this way and we might turn against him? Then we are running out of time.”

“I don’t want to turn against him,” Nick mumbled. I processed that in silence, as small waves crashed onto the sandbar and receded into the ocean.

“What?” It was all I could do to keep my voice neutral.

“We’re important, in the grand scheme. That’s why he chose us,” Nick insisted.

“After everything he did—”

“So, when a god’s the one who fucks with people and does morally questionable shit to try to achieve a better outcome, then suddenly it’s not okay anymore,” Nick snapped.

I took a step back.

“You… can’t know what he really wants. No one does.”

Nick smiled, the expression so painful it hurt. “When Hastur told me he didn’t want me to suffer, I believed him. When he said he wanted a better world, a kinder world, I believed him.

That doesn’t mean shit.

“Even if Hastur’s well-meaning, Nick, he’s still…” but I couldn’t bring myself to say it. To point out that Nick was being naïve, foolish. Not after what he’d just gone through. That ground was shaky as it was.

“Calculated.” Nick gave a quick, grim nod. “Which is why I think there are two possibilities. Either he’s fully prepared to squash us the second we come out of the Tower—or this exact possibility was accounted for.” He pointed up to the bluffs. “You confront me up top, defend Keith, blitz me into the water, and we end up here.”

I let my more prominent pushback go for now and instead focused on the obvious fallacy. “Okay, sure. But why are you so fixated on this location? If some god coordinated all this, aren’t we just as likely to find something walking back, or meet someone important on another floor of the tower?”

Nick shook his head. “No. This has to be it. I never felt more strongly about anything in my life.”

It felt more than desperate. Like he’d already shot the dealer and was flipping cards, trying desperately to come up with an ace.

But.

His fixation wasn’t entirely irrational. On the off chance I’d beaten him in a direct confrontation, or used subjugation to bring him into line, there were few alternative scenarios where we ended up down here, if any. And considering the surrounding geography, the sandbar was vaguely crescent shaped, pressed up against the bluffs in a hidden alcove, all but invisible from the summit and surrounding beaches. Anyone searching the area without going for a swim would probably miss it. Hell, I’d missed it. We might find nothing, but if Aaron and Sunny intended to deal with us in the biblical manner, there was no reason to risk aggravating leadership in this region further by sending teams in after us when they could just wait outside. All that said, we needed to do this right.

“Okay. Both the ripple in the forest and the ripple on floor twenty-eight were in plain sight,” I called over my shoulder and crunched through sand, crossing to the opposite side of the sandbar and peering into the water. “If there was something in the bluffs—especially something we’re ‘supposed’ to find, you would have found it by now.”

Finally, Nick stopped futzing with the rock wall and stood at my side. He glanced at me, then the water, and eventually back to me. “Right… but don’t you hate swimming?”

“Yep. Which is why I’m delegating.”

I reached out a hand to summon Audrey—and found to my surprise that I didn’t need to summon her. Her consciousness was so weak I thought she’d died, tussling with whatever was below the surface.

Nick chuckled nervously. “You about to part the Red Sea over there?”

“Just give me a second.”

My eyebrows furrowed. Audrey’s mind felt more sluggish than usual. She wasn’t dying, but I had probably submerged her for too long. When I asked if she wanted me to release and re-summon her, I got a dramatic response as scattered, shotgunned feelings that culminated in a vehement negative.

Okay, then come to the sandbar.

Audrey didn’t answer. Twenty feet offshore, there was an explosion of white bubbles.

“What—” Nick started. But before he could finish, dark-gray flesh breached the surface, water cascading down it on both sides. “—the actual fuck.”

I reached for my crossbow even as a stream of mist sprayed up into the air. It took a second to register the familiarity of something I’d only seen in YouTube videos and ocean documentaries.

It’s a blowhole.

Nick unsheathed his sword just as a soaked, miserable-looking plant broke the surface, her vines looped around the creature’s sides forming half-reins, half-saddle. I caught his arm, signaling for him to wait as I held the crossbow at my side.

“Audrey? You uh, catch something?”

My summon released her hold, and with nothing to keep her balanced, slid down the whale’s rubbery flesh and slapped into the shallow water. I waited long enough to observe the creature’s behavior. It seemed more or less passive, though no less imposing in terms of sheer mass. Once I was mostly sure Audrey’s impromptu mount would not turn around and eat me, I waded in and fished her out of the water, never taking my eyes from the creature as I carried her up to the shore.

“How the hell’d you pull that off?” I muttered, more than a little impressed.

“Made… new friend.” Audrey coughed—ejecting a ridiculous amount of water back into the ocean as we waded back to Nick.

“Again. How?” I reiterated.

“Simple mind… easy to subjugate,” Audrey said.

I was so shocked I nearly dropped her. When she’d said she’d made a new friend, she wasn’t being coy. She was being literal. A unique aspect of my summoner class was that my summons sometimes shared my abilities, and it seemed like Audrey had won the lottery in that regard. Before I could make a comment, Audrey wrapped a vine around my back, using me as leverage to raise herself high enough to look over my shoulder. “Stay close. Eat tiny fish. Be happy,” she barked at the whale with a surprising amount of authority.

A tail bigger than my entire body raised and slapped down on the water in response, sending up a geyser.

Despite myself, I chuckled. “Always full of surprises.”

Nick was waiting for us at the edge of the sandbar, eyebrows raised high enough that it looked like they were trying to jump off his head. “Uh. I keep cycling through one-liners, but I think I’m actually at a loss for words.”

I snorted. “My plant summon mentally wrangled a mammal that outweighs her by a hundred tons or so and bent it to her will. Just business as usual.”

“Uh-huh.”

“No bending,” Audrey protested. “He was scared. I made him less scared.”

There were a thousand questions I wanted to ask her. But only one that really mattered.

Once we reached the sandbar, I praised her first, patting her head and pulling a raw cut of beef from the icebox in my inventory. She scarfed it down and looked somewhat restored.

“Now.” I crouched in front of her, waiting until I had her full attention. “What was the whale scared of?”