A/N: Chap 44 review responses in my forums as normal. With this chapter, we have finally reached the beginning of the end. There are only four more chapters and a short epilogue. As promised, posting will continue on Saturdays and Tuesday evenings until complete.

Thank you for reading.

Chapter Forty-Five: Turning

His name was Craig. Craig Sanchez. He was a senior, and had ambitions to play soccer before blowing out his knee his junior year and realizing that there was more to life than sports. He enjoyed playing video games and watching soccer games from around the world.

He also enjoyed reading, dancing and building toy models. He had models of every airplane and jet to ever fly, including some of Dragon's suits, hanging on strings from his ceiling. And in her year of attending high school in Seattle, he was the only boy who had ever asked her out on a date. He was the only boy who didn't look at her in fear. Instead, he looked at her with fascination and, if she were honest, more than a little lust. He was handsome, intelligent, and as far as her telepathy could tell, kind.

And as of five minutes ago, he was her first lover since Yuki.

So why didn't she feel anything?

The act itself felt...good. More than good, if she were honest. He was a little more experienced than her, and more importantly, considerate of what she wanted. He was as good a lover as she could have asked for.

But as he curled beside her with a contented murmur, spent and satiated, she stared up at his models and realized that she didn't love him. She liked him, and even lusted after him as well, but after the itch was scratched sufficiently, nothing else remained.

It took barely a thought to send him into a deeper slumber. He wasn't even dreaming. She sat up and stared down at him-he was still lithe and strong from his last semester of soccer, but his dad had a pretty huge belly and she had a feeling in time, removed from his sport, he would develop one too. She knew that when he called and said his family was out of town.

She knew what he was hoping for when she rode her motorcycle over. She wanted it too, and didn't regret a moment with him. But now, staring at him, she was at a loss for what she wanted next.

She stood and padded into his en suite bathroom. He moved into a former in-law suite when his grandmother died two years back. The bathroom, like the rest of his home, was modest but clean. His parents were both public employees-his dad with the City Utilities, while his mother was a police dispatch operator.

A good family. A good kid. Everything a girl could want in a boyfriend. Unless that girl was a cape.

Sighing, Taylor stared at her reflection. The woman in the mirror resembled the Taylor of old only in the general shape of her face. She now wore her hair shoulder-length to better fit her tactical helmet. She'd lost her baby fat, which changed the shape of her face, and put on muscle through a solid year of drilling and seven deployments. She would never be beautiful like Mujaji or Insight, but the closer she came to looking like her mother, the prettier she thought she was. At least she'd grown into her mouth.

"Happy birthday, Taylor," she whispered. She was now seventeen years old, and as of two weeks ago, a high school graduate.

She took advantage of Craig's shower before getting dressed quickly. Coming back out, her boyfriend for the past three months had rolled onto his back, snoring gently from a deviated septum. She sank down on the bed and felt a stinging in her eyes as she realized what she was going to do.

Blinking, she leaned over to kiss him. He had very soft lips for a man, she thought. Softer than Yuki's. His almond-colored eyes snapped open and he grinned like an excited puppy. "Heya, beautiful," he whispered.

"Heya back, pretty boy," she said. She placed a hand on his bare chest-it was so smooth he must have waxed it. "Listen, I...I received a message from one of my team."

His eyes widened and he sat up. "Cape stuff? Are you safe?"

"I am, yeah. But...Craig, there are some pretty rough capes that would love to take me out. You know I've asked we keep this on the down-low because of it. But Insight just...the Elite knows I'm dating. They don't know for sure who, yet, but if we keep going, they will."

"What does that mean?"

The worst part of being telepathic was she knew that he knew exactly what she meant, but hurt so bad he needed her to say it. She leaned forward and kissed him again, because he deserved to hear her say it.

"You were the first boyfriend I've ever had," she said. "You were perfect. But I just can't…. I can't put you at risk. They'd use you to get to me. I'm sorry, but… I think we need to end this."

"I don't care!" he said, his cheeks flushing with anger. "I don't care if I'm in danger, I can take care of myself!"

"I know, Craig. But could your sister? Could your parents? That's how the Elite works. Believe me, I know. The nice ones try to recruit you, but their enforcers will hurt anyone to make you do what they want."

The idea of his family being hurt chased his angry flush away. "Was...was it good?"

Damn it. She laughed bitterly and wiped away a tear. "It was perfect, Craig. That's...that's why it sucks I can't stay. Just...be safe. Find a girl that won't get you or your family killed, and be happy. Just be happy for me."

He couldn't find any words to say as she walked out of his room, down the stairs of his home, and out the front door.

When she got home, she found only Sarah in the house. She took one look at Taylor's face, then shared a sad grin. "Me or Dinah?"

"I pinned it on you," Taylor said grumpily.

Insight sighed, opened her mouth, then stopped. She couldn't help, and anything she said would only make it worse. They both knew the Sarah of a year ago wouldn't have been able to stop herself.

Taylor hugged her, recognizing the struggle to not be a bitch that her friend had to go through almost daily, and went upstairs. She didn't get half-way up before Horizon burst into the house. "Suit up, we've got a briefing in ten!" she called.

Rather than be upset, Taylor clung to the distraction for all it was worth.

~~Quintessence~~

~~Quintessence~~

Ten minutes later, Taylor watched as a disheveled man with a shock of unkept gray hair sat in the driver's seat of an old VW van. He was smoking a poorly rolled joint with hands that shook with palsy. He parked in the dirt and gravel parking lot of a small church, unconcerned with the tank-sized, six-legged, acid-spitting tentacle beast that was slowly ripping the arms off a screaming, three-year-old girl not twenty feet from the VW.

"Pause, please," Taylor said.

The footage came to a halt.

In the new briefing room of the now expanded Joint Operational Rapid Deployment Team headquarters, Taylor turned to see how Dinah was taking the footage. The thirteen-year-old looked pale, but met Taylor's gaze solidly. The rest of their team looked sicker than she did.

Daymore, sitting beside one of their new recruits, looked as if he were going to be sick. "Who the f…hell is that guy?"

Dragon turned on the lights. Taylor noted that just in the six months since she'd had her body, she'd already adjusted and refined her programming sufficiently that her movement seemed almost completely natural. If Taylor watched her eyes enough, she did notice that the gynoid blinked every ten seconds, six times a minute without exception.

When confronted with a particularly vexing situation, she tended to go still. In a human, it might be considered freezing, but with Dragon it was a reallocation of processing power from her body. She and Taylor were already talking about an autonomic secondary node in her neck to govern the appearance of bodily functions.

Still, the overall effect was of a reasonably attractive woman with shoulder-length oak-colored hair, elegant brows and a slight blush to her cheeks that she could vary by up to 40% whenever she and Defiant spoke privately. And with the joint Guild/Protectorate nature of the JORD team, she was a frequent visitor. She seemed to thoroughly enjoy briefing them in person whenever she found new information.

"Dr. William Manton," Dragon announced with a slightly elevated blush to her cheeks and a 10% increase in her diaphragm movement.

"Holy shit," Insight said.

"Don't cuss, bitch," Mujaji said. "There's kids present."

"That's right!" Daymore said, having almost slipped earlier.

Dinah turned around in her seat. "You know she was talking about you, right?"

Daymore fell out of his chair as if shot, while the others abruptly laughed.

"Jeeze, Daymore, how many does that make now?" Davis muttered. "You got any skin left after all those burns?"

Taylor couldn't help but feel grateful to the young pre-cog for breaking the mood after watching the death of Dunning, Nebraska, at the hands of the Slaughterhouse Nine. She left her own seat to join Insight in front of the monitor.

"Are we talking the same guy who discovered the Manton limit?" Taylor asked.

"Yes," Dragon said. "We're 94% positive it's him, despite reports of his death to the contrary."

"Oh, it's him," Sarah said, before cursing again. "Dragon, do we have any images of his daughter, before she disappeared?"

"I see where you're going," Dragon said. She brandished a small remote, a hint of a smile as she manipulated the device with her fingers, rather than through direct neural interfaces. Taylor knew that Dragon enjoyed the little physical interactions with her world more than anything.

The screen switched to show an attractive young blonde, maybe sixteen or so, in a bikini at the beach.

Using the keyboard at the briefing podium, Dragon next brought up another image for a side-by-side comparison. The image of the Siberian was taken by the same one of Defiant' s probes that captured Manton smoking.

With some quick digital magic, Dragon removed the black and white stripes, overlaying a natural skin tone and adding blonde hair. In fact, she was copying from the old picture of Manton's daughter.

"Force," Taylor whispered. "The Siberian is…what, a projection? Manton's a master?"

"Master 12, I'd bet money on it," Sarah said. "That explains so much. It's why she can violate not just some, but all the laws of physics. It's why she's unstoppable, even to Eidolon and Alexandria. God, could you imagine what Manton could do to Leviathan, Behemoth or the Simurgh? Instead, he sits in a church parking lot getting high while his projection and her friends murder children."

Scapetti joined them. "So, we take Manton out. What about Crawler? We don't have anything that could take him."

"Trap him," Taylor said. "I've already been thinking about him. A series of repulsor coils and forcefields. Get him contained in something non-physical and off the ground so he can't use his strength. Then we strap him into a rocket and shoot him into the sun."

"You can do that?" Scapetti asked.

She gave him a flat look. "You have a jetpack and coils that let you fly a hundred miles an hour."

He shrugged. "You're the not-a-tinker," he said with a sing-song voice. "This is big, though. The Siberian has even beaten Alexandria."

"It's what the team was created for," Taylor noted.

"We still can't go after the Nine without approval," Scapetti answered. "The collateral is always too high."

"Still, the whole thing is weird," Sarah said. "No one has seen or heard of Manton in years. Why now? If he's seen, he wants to be seen."

"The Nine have had unusual behavior lately," Dragon said. "Mannequin has always specifically targeted Tinkers, but in the past four months they've changed from killing them to abducting them. They even attacked Brockton Bay again last month."

"Who'd they grab?" Taylor asked with the morbid curiosity of someone who would never go back to that town again.

"Squealer and a new Tinker named Chariot. Kid Win managed to escape only because Defiant happened to be there, and Legend provided back up. However, with previous attempts they now have ten tinkers."

"So, they're up to something," Taylor said. "Trap or not, this is too big an opportunity to miss. We need to decide."

Horizon stepped up beside Scapetti. She had her phone in hand, scowling. "We may not have to. Alexandria and Legend are both their way."

"What?" Taylor asked.

Their team lead held up her phone. "This information came straight from Washington. Costa-Brown said Legend and Alexandria wanted to speak to us. They'll be here in a few minutes. They want to talk to you, Quintessence. Alone."

Sarah looked a little shell-shocked, but only for the length of time it took her to process through the various reasons why the two leaders of the Protectorate would be coming at that moment. Then her countenance turned furious.

"Those fuckers knew," she said, almost choking on the words.

Dragon reduced her blush until she paled, as if absorbing a shock. "That's a provocative statement, Insight."

Taylor allowed her eyes to drift to Manton, smoking in his van, while hell played out around him. "They know," she said. "But I don't think that's why they're coming. Horizon, you're team lead. If you want to be there, I'm fine with it."

The older woman shrugged. "I'm your team leader, but they're the generals. Remember, though, even though you're full Protectorate now you're still under 18. We can always bring in the Youth Guard if they try to pressure you into anything."

"When have they had to pressure me?" Taylor asked.

The last two Endbringer fights Taylor might have helped with were Simurgh and Behemoth. However, the Simurgh attacked an airliner over the Pacific Ocean. As always, Eidolon was there to fight her, with Legend and Alexandria reaching the plane shortly after. But it was for nothing—the whole incident took only moments. She crushed the hull of the airliner, killing all 200 passengers in a split second, before returning to orbit.

Taylor was ready to deploy, along with Mujaji, Flechette and Insight, but they never had the opportunity.

The next was Behemoth in North Korea. He set off the small, rogue nation's burgeoning nuclear arsenal (an arsenal provided by the Chinese Imperial Union) within ten minutes. There was nothing left for anyone to defend. Taylor read that the nuclear fallout had covered much of the southeastern Asian continent and reached as far west as Europe and North Africa.

The only members of the team that weren't ready to help with Endbringers were Campanile, because his mother ordered him not to, and Triumph and Dinah. Because Triumph was Dinah's legal guardian, they all agreed as a team that he needed to stay to protect her.

"I think I'll be okay," Taylor assured Horizon, when she decided to meet the two Protectorate leaders alone.

She left her teammates using the back entrance from the briefing room and walked down the hall of their admin offices. Amanda Calhoun was fast at work, organizing shipments for Taylor's lab, food for the cafeteria and trying to force through the hazardous duty bonus Horizon authorized for Scapetti's team during their operation Tampa.

Taylor took the spiral staircase to the second floor instead of the elevator, and walked out onto the reinforced landing pad. She had her first atmospheric jitney done, and a second just a day away from deployment. Taylor was tired of Strider.

Legend arrived first; though he had to cross the country from New York, he could go the speed of light if he pushed himself. Alexandria arrived moments later. The two leaders of American heroes just stood studying her for a long time.

Legend broke the silence. "You're looking well, Quintessence. All healed from Tampa?"

"Yes, sir," Taylor said. "I'm assuming you'd like someplace private to talk?"

"We have some place in mind already," Alexandria said. "Door."

Taylor sank herself into the Force with a mental cantrip, using it to calm herself as a dimensional portal opened right behind the two senior capes. Beyond was a long, unremarkable corridor with smooth, featureless white walls as recessed lighting set in the ceiling above.

Alexandria spared her just a hint of a smile before turning and leading the way through the portal. Taylor followed, and Legend brought up the rear. Her ears popped at the sudden change of air pressure. But it was the sensation in the Force that made her stumble and then fall to her knees, gasping.

"Quintessence?" Alexandria said. Her voice sounded distant—a fragile, hopeless beating in the sudden, cloying darkness that crowded around her in the Force.

Leviathans move upon the deep. She could have covered her eyes and ears, wrapped her head in a thousand blankets and hidden in the deepest hole, and still she would see them.

Larger than planets and yet able to perch on the head of a pin, the leviathans move through the void at speeds beyond imagination. They warp not just space but dimensions and time itself with the ease a man would have walking down the sidewalk. Behind them is only the vast emptiness of intergalactic void, ahead the sparkling hope of energy and life. A spiral galaxy, pristine and untouched.

DESTINATION.

AGREEMENT.

Not words. Not thoughts. Billions of minute nuances of a similar concept, like a single word expressed and understood by a billion different people. The communication rips into her being at wavelengths beyond understanding, stripping away all coherent thought except for what her puny consciousness can translate as two nuanced words.

They are too impossible to be false—more real than reality itself. All existence seems a lie compared to the horrifying, agonizing truth of the leviathans as they oscillate toward the galaxy. Living beings, but not alive like any sentient being she can imagine. They fold in among themselves, in and out of space as if they are crossing into higher and lower dimensions at will.

If a nebula lived—if a galaxy lived—it would be like these monstrous beings. Devoid of goodness. Devoid of light. Alien beyond measure. There is only hunger and death and an entropic circling toward nothingness. She does not feel awe as before the gates of heaven, but rather terror as before the maw of hell. These luminous beings are not creatures of creation or life; she knows this with every iota of her being.

They enter the galaxy, traversing its vastness with the same speed with which they traverse the void between. In a single gestalt instance, they absorb information from across the entire galaxy. They drink the various electromagnetic spectrums like men lost for days in the desert, and with the energy and light comes information. Worlds beyond human counting they account in a nanosecond. Moons and stars and everything in between.

DESTINATION.

AGREEMENT.

TRAJECTORY.

AGREEMENT.

The course is set. A small world around an unremarkable sun with a species similar to ones they have encountered before. A promise of conflict to restore the lost cycle. To grow strong. They cross the oceans of time and space, planning and preparing as they grow closer.

Abruptly a third entity appears, emerging from a higher plane of existence almost on top of the other two leviathans. This one is smaller, leaner. Starved of energy and yet expending more energy as it moves. It flies toward the two larger creatures.

EXCHANGE.

AGREEMENT.

The newcomer crushes against the two leviathans. The joining is sinuous and beyond imagining in its violence. Pocket dimensions form and collapse with expenditures of energy that could outshine whole suns as they writhe around each other like nebula-sized lovers. They rip each other apart with force to crush moons into dust. The paired leviathans flounder as the newcomer bloats itself on the shards of their being, while sharing few of its own in return.

ATTACK.

REPULSE.

The paired leviathans strike at the third, emitting energies that make a pulsar look dim. The attacker contracts and withdraws only a distance.

PROTECTION.

REJECTION.

All three entities seem almost to bleed. The second of the original pair flounders, writhing in a thousand dimensions at once as it struggles to restore it's lost mass, power and self. It's blood- like shards of neutron stars shower across the many earths below.

The Third Entity too is bleeding from its encounter, though not as much. It bleeds out energy, but only a single shard of its body falls. It is that lone shard, glistening not with light but with something beyond description, that falls so quickly toward her.

Blinking back tears, she saw Alexandria staring back at her, both of them kneeling in the corridor. "What did you see?" the elder cape asked.

"It's here," Taylor said. "The second leviathan. This is where it fell."

Behind them, Legend audibly gulped. After a moment, though, Taylor realized it wasn't because she knew about the fallen monster. Over Alexandria's shoulder, Taylor saw a beautiful, ageless woman dressed like Carmen Sandiego step into the hall out of seemingly nowhere, complete even with the fedora. Blue eyes studied her from a Mediterranean complexion. She wore a spotless, long-sleeved white button-up blouse with a khaki-colored skirt that hung down to her ankles.

In her eyes, Taylor saw a memory. A forest of living flesh; of human parts free of any humanity. Of confused, terrified people from a multitude of cultures, nations and even worlds.

She saw a little girl with a fishing knife, and a young, attractive black woman standing next to a half-formed silver avatar.

"I- I have seen visions," the little girl in the memory said. "Things I was not meant to see, things this… godling wanted to keep to itself. I… have to stop it."

The girl could not move, but she could speak. The black woman listened, glanced at the moving forest of flesh, and nodded. "I believe you. It's dangerous?"

The little girl nodded.

"Are you sure?"

"I- I would stake everything on it. Everything ever."

"Where were you going to stab it? Where?"

The Avatar moved forward. The woman grabbed the little girl and they both stepped back. They would have fallen, if the girl had not steadied them both.

Even as they moved, the avatar formed more of its own body. Legs, a sexless groin, more of the arms. Long, silver hair flowed free. It bent over, head hanging, arms suspended to either side as it continued to struggle with its own injuries, inflicted by the shaped entity of Taylor's past visions.

The little girl pointed at the nape of the half-formed avatar's neck. The woman wrapped her own hand around the hand the girl used to grip the knife, and almost like an extension of the girl herself, guided that knife hand down until it plunged into the exact spot where the half-formed spine met the half-formed skull.

When Taylor emerged from the memory, the little girl grown into a woman knelt on both knees in front of her. She held Taylor's shoulders in her hands, and a single tear ran down her cheek.

"They took everything from you," Taylor whispered, her throat almost closed from emotions she could barely understand.

"And you," the other said. "Each of us had a path to this moment. Come."

She stood and, holding Taylor's hand, led her down the hall. Alexandria and Legend followed behind, somber and silent.

Shaking, and feeling somehow that she was in a dream, Taylor let the woman lead her. All around, the Force clung to her skin like a miasma of old death and despair. The woman's hand was smaller than hers, but felt cool and dry and served as a tiny pinprick of life against the death that dominated the atmosphere of the place.

They walked in silence for a long time until they reached an elevator that took them down an impossible distance. The door opened into a small, featureless white room. She couldn't see the outlines of tiles or any other sign of construction—just a plain white room.

The air felt heavy, with a strange scent that reminded her of the ocean. Not the clean, salty smell of a good day, but the mild putrescence of a coast at low tide. It smelled faintly of rot and dying things. The Force was so thick she found herself pushing it away from her senses.

Alexandria and Legend both stepped to a point in front of them, as if they knew just where to push. A seam appeared in the featureless white wall; the seam expanded into doors leading into a vast space.

The space within defied description. Like a football arena made for giants. Powerful lights lined a ceiling so high she could barely make out the mechanisms for them. The far walls of the space were lost in a haze. Plain white, like the floor she stood on. If the Grand Canyon were built by humans, this would be it. Catwalks lined the walls, stretching off into the distant haze toward the far wall, dozens of them like the lines of a child's drawing.

Her eyes skimmed over what filled the space to the opposite wall. The structure was far longer than it was wide, but even so four football fields could have rested end-to-end within the width of the space.

She forced her eyes back to what occupied it, but her mind and soul resisted and she found herself looking up.

"Taylor, you need to look." The woman's voice was low and calm; assuring.

"I can't."

"You've already seen it."

Taylor's whole body trembled. Her eyes would not move of their own, so through a force of will that left her shaking, Taylor moved her entire head until at last she saw.

She did not see any scintillating, shifting points of light dodging in and out of dimensions. What she saw was firmly, and wholly in her plane of existence. It was a mountain of flesh, a misty gray that defied any better description. Under the unsparing light she could not see any lines or features at all over the mountain of soft gray flesh.

Except, whenever she focused on anything close to the vast floor, her eyes could slowly make out details that didn't seem to be there moments before. From the flesh she saw protruding body parts. Arms, hands, legs. The outlines of torsos both feminine and male. A forest of them came into focus, as if her eyes refused to see them at first. Each body part was exquisitely formed, like hand or foot models. Each torso was sculpted and perfect, the feminine with beautifully shaped breasts, the masculine with sculpted abs and broad shoulders.

As if breaking through a veil, suddenly Taylor could see it all. Past the perfect parts she saw the imperfect, the in-progress. In some spots, she saw limbs connected to each other in grotesque fashions, in others places she could see only stretches of skin, veins, muscles or exposed bone, as if something had been experimenting or building those various parts. The force rebounded from the monstrousness of the being, rushing past her like a harsh wind or a tsunami that left her not numb, but raw and broken.

When she reached the end of those sections and saw the organic melt into fractals of crystal that seemed to stretch off into the infinite, she turned away from the woman, fell to her hands and knees, and promptly lost her breakfast.

"Are you okay?"

It was Legend who asked. And in that one instant, Legend sounded so like Taylor's father she felt tears well in her eyes and her nose instantly start to run again.

The woman in the fedora knelt down beside her.

"Your name was Fortuna," Taylor said.

"It was, once. Fortuna died with her people and her village. My name is Contessa. My power is to always walk a path to achieving my goal. And yet, Taylor, every path I follow now leads just to you. To this moment, this place. When I ask my power how to save the world, my answer is always you."

Pieces began to fall together in Taylor's mind as she knelt between a pile of vomit and the mostly-dead remains of a fallen god. "Alexandria told Gabriella where to find me. Because of you."

"Yes."

"And Overmind?"

"Yes."

"Coil?"

"You had to find Dinah."

"My Dad?"

"The path was out of focus—I didn't know it would be you until it was too late. There were others the power could have fallen to. I don't always know the specifics of why I do what I do."

Pieces continued to fall into place. She pushed herself to her feet. Contessa rose with her, standing beside her as they stared at the fallen entity. She stood level with the top of the woman's hat.

"You brought me here, now, because of Manton. Something you knew we'd find out about. He was one of yours?"

Contessa answered. "Before Mother and I struck the godling, she blunted my vision. My path. So we did what we could. We could grant powers from this body, and Manton was our chief researcher. He took volunteers from the dying of a hundred dimensional earths; and when that wasn't enough, he kidnapped them. All Case 53s are his work, but so are the Triumvirate. For every two hundred monsters, he created an Eidolon or a Legend. He refined it further and further until instead of two hundred monsters for every hero, we produced a hundred, then ten, then five, until now it's only one out of four that turn bad."

"We created the Protectorate and PRT," Alexandria said. "The Kingsmen and the Guild. The Suits and every other stabilizing parahuman Force outside of China. We created the Rogue program and helped fund the Youth Guard. And yes, Taylor, we created monsters and destroyed untold lives. And every day we told ourselves it was a price worth paying if it meant saving humanity. Not just our humanity, but all humans, in all dimensions."

"Manton tried vials on his daughter," Legend explained. "When it killed her, he stole an entire case of powers and fled. He took one of those vials he took, and Siberian was born."

"Why didn't you stop him?" Taylor said, too stunned to be furious yet.

"Because of the slim hope he'd help us in the end," Alexandria said. "At least, until you arrived on the scene."

"And now?"

Contessa took her hand again. "Now? My paths end, Taylor. The end is here, now, because he is the end of everything. We don't know how, or why, but when you go after William Manton, the world ends."

"But…then…what if I don't?"

"It'll end next year instead," Contessa said. "Either way, he's involved, and you are too. If you don't go to him, he'll come after you. This? We showed you this so you'll understand why. Alexandria will approve your request, but now you'll understand why we do what we do."

Taylor stared from the leaders of a conspiracy theory that Sarah all but confirmed existed, to the mountain of twisted flesh beyond. "There was a third. He attacked this one and Scion. I know that somehow Abaddon was shaped. That the people of the last galaxy to fall found a way to turn one leviathan against the others. But I don't know how they did it!"

"You will," Contessa said simply.