know all. They did not know what the Insurgency’s goals were, or 
where they came from, or what they believed in. The Foundation 
and the GOC were known threats, defined entities that could be 
measured and calculated and recorded. But for all lan knew, the 
Insurgency was driven by an unknown, unseen, malevolent force, 
driving people to kidnap and steal and kill. 


“Because somebody wanted Carlos, and they wanted him alive 

because they have some twisted plan for him,” lan said. “So they 
took him. But us, they don’t need us alive, and they don’t want us 
telling anybody that they were here. And now they want us dead.” 


Kyouko looked away from the man to roll her eyes. “Wants on 
wants, plans on plans. Sounds pretty boring.” 


Carlos was gone. Suddenly, lan wanted to scream. The Insurgency 
had taken Carlos, and now, for just a moment, lan wished that it had 
been somebody else who had taken him, because then, he would 
know why. He wanted to think to himself, /’l/ enjoy watching this man 
die, but he couldn’t. He could not hate somebody if he knew nothing 
about them. There was nothing to despise in the alien, nothing 
revolting in the blank, formless surface of the unknown. There was 
no ideology or motive to contest. There was only fear and ignorance. 


Now, the man’s eyes were half-lidded and glassy. He made muffled 
noises underneath the makeshift gag. Blood from his leg was 
staining the water red. 


“Where do they come from, lan?” 
“The Insurgency?” 
Kyouko nodded. 


lan watched the man’s eyelids fall lower and lower. “Nobody knows. 
Most people think they’re an offshoot from the Foundation. They do 
the same work as the Foundation but on a different side, and they 
do it with less rules and more unpleasantness. And some people 
think that they’re still part of the Foundation.” 


“This one doesn’t seem like a jailer, though.” 


“When you see what they do to people, it’s hard to tell them apart.” 


Kyouko shook her head. “They’re not jailers. They’re prisoners. 
What do you think, lan?” 


“Il don’t care. | don’t care at all.” 


He knew that Kyouko knew he was lying, but she didn’t say 
anything. 


lan sat at the edge of the riverside and rested his head in his hands. 
There were three minutes until they could open the Way. 


The sound of gunfire broke the silence of the night air. Sprays of 
water fell on lan’s face as he scrambled away. The strobe lighting of 
muzzle flashes stabbed at his eyes as shadow and fire played 
across his vision. He had been found, the Way hadn’t been opened 
yet, and— 


The gunfire stopped. Men were beginning to yell. 


Before he could react, somebody shined a flashlight in lan’s face, 
grabbed him, and shoved him to the ground. There was more 
yelling. lan couldn’t begin to understand most of it, but through it all 


“What are you fucks waiting for? Shoot her!” 


lan stumbled to his feet, only to meet the muzzle of a gun pointed 
straight at him. The man carrying it tensed. 


“If you shoot, | am going to kill him,” Kyouko said. 


Kyouko held their earlier prisoner’s limp body upright. She was 
pressing a knife to the man’s throat. Her face was perfectly relaxed. 
Several gunshot wounds marked Kyouko’s body; lan knew she 
didn’t care. lan couldn’t even tell if the Insurgency soldiers 
understood what Kyouko was saying, but the man pointing the gun 
at him had lowered his weapon. 


One man stood apart from the rest of the Insurgency soldiers. This 
one wore a military uniform with a straight back and a cold glare on 


his face. He raised his gun to aim at Kyouko, and then the yelling 
started again. lan looked into the eyes of the Insurgency soldiers, 
and he saw fear. He saw them turn to the uniformed man and 
address him in hurried, pleading tones, while the uniformed man 
cursed and spat at them. They crowded around him, blocking his 
line of fire. Meanwhile, the poisoned man groaned and writhed in 
Kyouko’s grasp. There was foam beginning to line his lips. In the 
chaos, his gag had fallen out of his mouth. He was still babbling in 
the language that lan couldn’t understand. 


Finally, the uniformed man shoved his subordinates out of the way. 
“You dumb bastards are all dead when we get back to base,” he 
said, and then he shot Kyouko. She fell to the water, dragging the 
poisoned man down with her. Her skin began to ripple and distend. 
lan saw that nobody but him noticed. 


The uniformed man turned to lan next. Kyouko’s ploy had bought 
him some time, and now she would buy him some more, but lan 
knew that it wasn’t enough. He glanced down at his watch. There 
was a minute left. 


“Your men wanted their comrade to live,” he said. 


“They’re fucking idiots. Either he’s alive now or he was going to die 
anyway.” 


The man turned to his men and yelled something at them. They 
didn’t respond. One of them had waded down to the water. lan 
watched as he stooped to cradle the poisoned man’s head. They 
had the same dark skin and straight black hair. 


The man turned away from lan to raise his weapon at his own men. 
“Don’t you fucks understand? This is bigger than one fucking 
person. “ 


“Is that what this is about? Some greater cause?” 


“Look,” the man said, turning back to lan. “We're trying to make the 
world better for these miserable bastards while you hide in your 
holes. If we were in charge, the world would be perfect, or at least a 
lot fucking better than it is now. But they’re too stupid to help us help 


them.” 


lan listened to the man’s words. All he had wanted was for the man 
to talk as long as possible, but now, actually hearing what the man 
had to say, he felt all of his concentration and his planning twist and 
snap. He looked into the man’s eyes and saw a shell, filled with 
teeming darkness, a puppet, set in motion by forces that mocked 
and derided the reason of humanity. lan started laughing. 


“You stupid bastard,” he said. “You want a better future? By killing 
off or locking up the strange and wondrous?” 


“We—we’ll make the world safe for you as well! There won’t be any 
more ‘consensus reality.’ We just, we just need—sacrifices need to 
happen.” 


The man raised his gun, and then Kyouko’s body exploded. A scaly 
tail knocked the uniformed man away. A terrible hissing filled the air. 


Eight biting snakeheads, each one as large as an automobile, 
snapped at the Insurgency soldiers, tearing through flesh and bone, 
picking entire men up and then swallowing them whole. Eight 
thrashing tails, each one as thick as redwood trees, smashed and 
flailed at the now-running soldiers, crushing them beneath clubs of 
scale and flesh. Screaming and gunfire assaulted lan’s ears. He 
collapsed to the ground, curled up into a ball, and closed his eyes 
tight. He could smell blood in the air. And through it all, he could feel 
the sensation of hissing, of forked tongues and eyes that glowed like 
rubies in the night, of death and carnage. It was the unseen 
malignancy that animated the Insurgency, come back to take what it 
had given and reap what it had sown. It was Chaos. 


Free of the human mind that suppressed it, free of the human body 
that contained it, the demon snake Yamato no Orochi bathed in a 
river of blood under the moon. 


When lan got to his feet, the surrounding landscape had been 
transformed into a desolated field of toppled trees and split earth. 
Kyouko was human again. She was kneeling over one of the bodies 
of the dead, a knife in her hand, cutting out the man’s heart. 


“Kyouko,” lan said. “I...” 


“| knew...| was probably going to survive,” Kyouko said. “But you 
said that you feared death. And that you did not want to die. So | 
thought that | would not have you die.” 


“Thank you.” 


Kyouko took the heart out of the man’s chest and handed it to lan. 
He checked his watch; Kyouko’s timing had been perfect. It was the 
heart of aman who had died that night, on the Witching Hour, and it 
would give them passage through the Way. 


A commotion drew lan’s attention. It was the uniformed man, a gash 
in his side seeping blood, aiming his weapon at the two of them. lan 
wanted to give the man a medal. After his men refused to follow his 
orders, after being set on by a giant eight-headed and eight-tailed 
snake, he still wanted the two of them dead. So long as there was 
blood in his veins, Chaos would drive him forwards. Now, lan 
wanted to laugh again. There was nothing he could do to stop him 
from shooting. 


The man never fired. He collapsed to the ground, blood flowing from 
a new wound in his neck. In the uniformed man’s place, there was a 
woman in a suit and tie. 


The woman didn’t seem to notice lan and Kyouko. She spoke, as if 
to herself, “He was missing humility.” 


lan and Kyouko ran for the water, but the woman didn’t give chase. 
Instead, she knelt down by the man’s body and started rifling 
through his clothing. Eventually, she procured a vial of red liquid. 
She stood, shook her head, and then walked away. 


lan threw the heart into the river as he and Kyouko dove into the 
waters. The river churned, embracing the two. As lan felt the power 
of the Way pull him into the Library, the last image he had of the 
woman seared itself into his mind. Blood from the uniformed man’s 
neck wound had stained the sleeve of the woman’s suit, and had 
colored her right hand red. 


Cactus Insurgent 


Consciousness slowly prodded at Cactusman's mind. A deluge of 
voices engulfed him in noise, and the unnatural grogginess he was 
bogged down by made it impossible to differentiate between them. 
He knuckled his eyes and groaned loudly in an effort to drown out all 
the noise. The cacophony didn't stop, and most of the voices only 
grew louder. With his palms pressed into his eyes he tried listening, 
and after several seconds he realized several were familiar. They 
were the pair of cacti the doctors had given him, going on about 
being cacti. Two, however, were quieter than the others. And 
unfamiliar to him. 


"You think the doctors gave him too much?" A female voice. 
Energetic, yet somehow brusque. 


"Don't know. Maybe he's just not used to it." Male. Calm and deep. 


Cactusman took several slow, deep breaths to collect himself. He 
should have been fully awake by now, especially with the 
adrenaline. But he couldn't shake this murky feeling sloshing around 
just behind his forehead. He brought the heel of his right hand to his 
forehead as if to jostle the gunk loose, but it did nothing for him. 


After one last breath he steeled himself. His first instinct was to 
extend as many spines as possible and attack, but he realized that 
probably wasn't the best idea. Maybe it was just new medicine had 
some side effects, and these were Foundation guards or something. 
Nothing to freak out about. He relaxed as this realization came to 
him, and almost instantly tensed back up. His bed was too 
comfortable. Maybe he was- no, maybe he was just moved to a new 
cell. Perhaps that was why he was drugged. Cactusman took one 
last deep breath, held it, and cracked an eye open to look at the 
source of the voices. 


Definitely not guards. Or doctors. Both of them were sitting in 
collapsible chairs, facing Cactusman, and were dressed casually. 


Both were staring directly at him, but neither reacted to him opening 
his eye. Cactusman realized they were in a medical ward, and he on 
the hospital bed. He tried thinking back to what might have brought 
him here but nothing came to mind. He didn't feel hurt. Looking 
through the glass door leading into the hallway didn't reveal much 
other than the fact it looked like a normal civilian hospital. 


The woman was perched up on her chair, sitting on her heels. Her 
skin was the sort of brown that made it difficult to distinguish 
whether it was a tan or not. Her hair was brown for the most part, 
with the exception of some green coloring along the sides. Her plain 
clothes hung loosely from her muscled frame. She had what 
seemed to Cactusman like an exaggerated look of curiosity, her 
eyebrows high and her mouth moving from side to side. 


The man was slouched in his chair so much he looked like he was 
about to fall off it. His skin was much darker, and his head was 
shaved. His clothes looked somewhat disheveled and wrinkly 
despite being clean. His left arm was completely wrapped in 
bandages and hung loosely at his side while his right hand rested on 
his knee. A small piece of metal was jutting from under his right eye, 
where the cheekbone was. It almost looked natural. His expression 
was one of utter boredom. 


"Who are you?" Cactusman asked in what he hoped was an even 
voice. 


"Hey," the woman said, drawing out the word for as long as her 
lungs would allow. "Yer awake, boy-o! Top o' the mornin’ to ya!" 


Cactusman stared at her in disbelief. 


The woman giggled. Then she said, "Dude, | worked on that shit for 
hours. Okay, minutes." 


The man lightly hit her in the back of the head. He didn't say 
anything, and his expression didn't change. 


The woman grinned. "Okay, it was spur of the moment. Anyway, hi. 
Good to see you're not brain damaged. Well, more than we already 
knew you were." 


The man slapped his companion again. "Apologies, Mister 
Macintyre, she's a bit manic without her medicine." 


Cactusman pushed himself into a sitting position. "You didn't answer 
my question." 


"So serious, Daniel MacIntyre! Down to business, then." She sprang 
up in one quick motion, standing on the chair that was now leaning 
precariously far back. Cactusman had to at least give her credit, she 
definitely had a certain theatrical flair. 


"I'm Alexandra Radcliffe! And Mister Slappy here is Zacharie 
Langley. We're from the Chaos Insurgency. We rescued you!" 


"Rescued me? What? | know it wasn't the best situation, but | was 
helping-" 


"You weren't helping anyone," Langley said. He didn't say it with any 
sort of venom or bluntness, he just droned on in a tired way. "I read 
your file. They were staged incidents to improve your morale. Minor 
tasks to keep you from hurting yourself. Little more than something 
to minimize the risk of losing one of their contained objects." 


"I'm not an object!" 
"lam aware. They, however, are not." 


Cactusman swung his legs over the edge of the bed and glared 
accusingly. "And how would you know?" 


Langley didn't bat an eye. "Because | used to work for them." 


That caught Cactusman off guard, but it didn't stop him from 
extending spines all along his right arm. He took a few deep breaths 
to calm himself. He took the time to note that he didn't have any 
bandages or stitches anywhere. 


"Doctor Louef isn't like that. | don't know about the Foundation in 
general, but he-" 


"Louef's a pretty chill dude, from what I've read-slash-heard," 
Radcliffe said. "But that didn't stop him from locking you and other 


superhumans up. Because the Foundation is not all that nice to 
superhumans. And | know that because-" 


A ball of fire erupted from Radcliffe's right hand. It was nothing but a 
small belch of flame, but it was enough to put Cactusman a little on 
edge. She grinned and continued surfing on the wobbling chair. 


"C'mon, man, you're from Arizona. You should be used to the heat," 
Radcliffe said as the flame went out. "So, in case that egghead of 
yours Is as addled as | think, being with us already has a leg up on 
your old situation. You get to be a person. And we'll even try to fix 
that fucked up think pan you got." 


"I'm not crazy," Danny said adamantly. 


Radcliffe started to laugh, teetering back and forth on the chair, 
when Langley grabbed her by the wrist and pulled back down into 
her seat. His expression had yet to change, but it looked like she 
was trying to eat her lips.