It's the middle of the night when I wake in a warm sweat and a searing pain wrapping around my leg. It's like a Charlie horse, but so much worse, burning with the heat of a thousand suns and scorching through the my thin summer blanket.

I've felt it all before, it's just so stunning to be feeling again. We're through with this! Aren't we done with all the pain? Who is it! What happened?

The bedsheets will combust if I linger too long, I know this, so I throw them off of me and roll onto the floor, clutching at my ankle. I just have to see it, just have to.. see it.

Four tan rings, scars, around the base of my leg, and one new, bright yellow one, slowly oranging. It glows as I see it now, the light spraying out of it and pouring over the dust particles that infect the air that I must've thrown up in my flurry to escape the bed.

My fingers touch it, rake over it, feel it. I had thought that my lumen would save me from this burning pain, but I'd have been wrong on that account. For the first time since… since Chicago, I feel the heat, the red-hot heat against my fingertips, and I pull them away half in shock.

Who is it? What the fuck happened?

I hear a thump from outside my door as it's thrown open- Marina charges in and collapses against the front of my bed, still gasping. "I thought it was you," she breathes. "I thought it might be you."

The pain starts to die down now, enough to let me think without the heat protruding into my thoughts. "Where's the phone? Fine a phone…" I plead with her, but she just looks at me, still dazed.

My bedstand. There's one there. The landline. I reach up from the floor onto the stand and feel around, my shaking hands searching more out if instinct and sheer force of will than anything. The lamp gets knocked off and it slams into the carpet, but doesn't shatter; and then I feel it, the phone on its charger. I try to grab it but it falls off that charger, and I feel around more and there it is, I've got it!

"Who do I call," my mind asks out loud. Nine or Six. Who is it? The voice in the back of my mind screams of another possibility, but I don't let it out. Not yet. Not yet.

"Six," she whispers. "Make sure it isn't… make sure she's still here," Marina struggles to get to her feet, but settles for her knees as I dial. I'm still slumped to the floor, head in the crook between the stand and the bed, but I don't care a whole lot right now.

The line only rings once. "John!"

I let myself breathe a little more easily. Just a little. The sound of her voice- while it usually isn't exactly comforting, it definitely is more comforting than the alternative. "Six, Six, Six, it's not you."

"Is Marina there with you?" Her voice is shaky.

"She's here," I say. "She's fine." I hear her gulp and breathe for a few seconds before saying anything.

"Check Nine," she orders, her voice stern, powerful again. "If he answers."

"If he doesn't…"

"Don't jump to conclusions."

She hangs up on me then. I look back to Marina, who's still gasping, but who looks… calmer. Her hair is a tangled mess and she has bags under her eyes, but she'll be okay.

Nine mentioned something about a business conference in London, so I make sure to call his cell.

Nine's place picks up after three rings, and it's not even him who answers. It's some girl's voice.

"Is this the police!" she shouts. "I need the police!"

I look to Marina. The intensity in her eyes is back, as strong as ever. "No, this is John Smith," I say, evenly as I can. "Why do you need the police? Did something happen?"

"Yeah!" She shouts, sounding more pissed off than anything. "My lay just set the bed on fire! I think he tried to kill me!"

"Your lay…" I trail off, almost, almost laughing. "Would that be Nine?"

"The fucking Professor at the Garde Institute, yeah! I thought he was acting tipsy last night, but this is… is he a psychopath or something?"

There's a muffled sound I can't identify, and then the in the background I can hear Nine's voice chastising the girl for answering his phone. And then he talks in earnest.

"Johnny Boy, it's not you?"

"No."

"Too bad, too bad," he mutters. "Marina and Six?"

"They're fine, Nine," I say. "And you are too. Well… mostly fine."

"I don't judge you, you don't judge me, that's the deal, right?" He reminds me. "You said that. I want you to remember you said that."

"I remember, I remember!" Marina looks more concerned now, but I nod in her direction and focus back on Nine. "So, you got the scar, too."

"Why wouldn't I, John-Bon?" He groans. "I might be an armless freak, but I'm still one of the charmed."

"You know what that means, then, as well as I do."

"To be quite honest, I don't even feel that bad," he sounds resigned, as if he was expecting it. "After you and Mar told me that he was hiding out on that scratch of land in the middle of nowhere, looking like a holocaust survivor more than anything, I figured we didn't have long."

"He died alone and in pain," I say, but I'm not sure that I believe it myself. "No one deserves that, least of all enemies."

"Most of all enemies," he corrects me. "Well, if you all are alright…" He's putting on this show of bravado, I can tell, but under that I can hear something else in his voice. A gentler tone. He cares. Even if he doesn't want me to think he does.

"Call Six," I tell him. "She'll want to talk."

"Whatever you say," and he hangs up all the same as she did. And then I'm left with Mar's piercing stare.

"It's Five," she says. She's smart enough to figure that one out, based on what I had said. Anyone is. I nod.

"We don't know what happened, but… yes."

She leans back on her haunches and looks around the room, probably thinking. "He was supposed to be mine."

I ease myself into a sitting position and stretch out my right leg, inspecting the fifth scar. It's already cooled to a muted red color, and as I watch it settles down into a pink hue, a tender ring around my leg. "I thought you were over that."

"I was," she says. "But he was still mine."

"That doesn't make any sense, I hope you know that."

"You'd understand if you hadn't already killed Ra," she snaps. I say nothing, I do nothing, I just wrap my fingers around my newest scar and let her think it over. That's always the best option. She looks down at her own, the same pink color, the same four dark marks below it. One of those was supposed to be mine. And yet here I am.

"I'm not sleeping any more tonight," she declares. "In fact, I think I'll go out."

"Mar, it's," I glance over to the clock on my TV. "Five in the morning."

"Nothing new, then," she says. "In Spain I used to get up at five every day, religiously, and go do the chores of those stupid nuns. I'm used to it."

I pull my knees up to my chest and ask, "Alright, alright. Where are we going, then?"

I had asked her where she wanted to live, since all the blood and pain was supposed to be over. We were basically royalty to half the planet, we could go wherever we wanted. Since she had always been in such isolation, she decided upon a city; but which city, that was the tough part. She didn't want anything that reminded her of Chicago, or Spain. That narrowed it down. And she wanted something close to the loralite stones, so we could jump if we needed.

I had pulled that atlas back out and we had poured over it for a week before we decided. There was a stone just across the water from us, on the other continent, half an hour away if we drove quickly. That's good enough.

The biggest city in Europe, the heart of empires, the Queen of Cities itself. Istanbul.

My Turkish could really use some work.

We step out into the crisp autumn air- at least, as crisp as it can get on the coast of the Mediterranean. In the distance, various pillars of imperial mosques jut out of the cityscape and tower high above, and across the strip of water, the Asian half of the city glows with life, even if it is the early yet.

I let her lead me, like I usually do. She takes my hand and drags me through the streets, still crowded, but less so now than last night, to the very edge of the water. The old city- where we found our penthouse- sits on a peninsula, with the end of it jutting into the water pointing towards Asia. We have to go around the old residences of the Sultans who used to live here, but that's really not a problem after everything we've been through.

Mar leads me to a rocky beach at the head of the water, the stones crunching under my boots as I move. She drops my hand and takes off her own shoes and socks, and rolls up her jeans, and then sits down on the shore and lets the water lap at her feet. I don't make to follow her, because these stones always bother my feet- they're so sharp, and in the summer heat they usually burn, too. I find a place back at the edge of the beach, under a tree, and watch her watching the scene. And I do a little reflecting.

It's September. As the trees begin to turn back home, it's been four months since I came back. Four months since I found her on that boat. Sixteen months since the world changed forever. Sixteen months and eight days, to be precise, but who's counting? Sixteen months and eight days since we came out to the world, sixteen months and eight days since the invasion. And I don't tell her this, but today marks two years since Henri and I arrived in Paradise. That seems so unimaginably long ago that it isn't even real anymore, but I know that it was. It was real. To me then, to him. It almost makes me sad, reflecting on the past.

And then I remember the future that we still have to build.