Turn 201 of 226

None of their weapons work on us anymore. If anything, they give us small amounts of pleasure

The first strike comes from the south. Lena is crossing a ridge east of Mount Stuart when the guided munition hits her between the shoulder blades — a bunker-buster designed for hardened underground targets, 5,000 pounds of explosive packed into a steel penetrator that can punch through six feet of reinforced concrete. It hits 960-times density muscle and stops. The explosion blooms across her back like a warm hand pressing down, the concussive wave spreading through the fat layer and the muscle beneath it and the bone beneath that, and the 150,000 pounds do not shift. The 383-foot frame does not move. The sensation is warmth. Not pain. Not impact. Warmth, spreading from the contact point outward through her body, meeting the warmth the wish already has, and the two warmths merge and the wish says *more*.

Diane turns toward the blast origin and a second munition hits her sternum. The explosion is orange and black against her brown skin, and the 960-times density tissue absorbs it the way a lake absorbs a thrown stone — the ripple spreads, the surface tension holds, the stone sinks. Diane's mouth opens and the sound that comes out is not pain. The sound is low and resonant and the 150,000 pounds of her body vibrate with it. The vibration is the thing the pleasure is. The pleasure is the thing the 960-times density gives when it meets something that cannot penetrate it. The cannot is the thing the military does not understand.

Three more strikes follow in the next ninety seconds — two from a flight of F-15s at 30,000 feet, one from a ground-based battery east of the Cascades. Lena tracks them with senses that can see the exhaust heat of a jet engine at 40,000 feet and hear the pilot's breathing through the cockpit seal. The first missile hits her left thigh and the explosion pushes through the fat layer and the muscle absorbs it and the warmth spreads down to her knee and up to her hip. The second hits Diane's back and the third hits the granite between them, the blast wave washing over both bodies, and the warmth is everywhere now, in every pound of the 300,000 pounds they carry between them. Lena laughs. The laugh is a sound that shakes snow from the peaks around them, and the falling snow is the thing the laugh gives, and the giving is the thing the pleasure is.

The radio traffic is open. Lena can hear it without trying — the military frequencies broadcasting in the clear because encryption does not matter when the enemy is large enough to see from orbit. The pilots are reporting negative effect. The ground battery is requesting authorization for thermobaric weapons. A voice at Lewis-McChord is asking what the thermal signature means when it reads 150,000 pounds at 960-times density, and no one answers because no one has an answer. Cal Medina is in the channel too, Lena does not know — corrupting the telemetry data, replacing the real numbers with the old estimates, introducing noise into the targeting feeds. But the noise does not matter anymore. The pilots can see the targets. The targets are 383 feet tall. The targets are laughing.

Lena stands on the ridge and the Cascade Range spreads around her like a relief map. Mount Stuart is chest height. Mount Rainier is visible to the south, 14,000 feet of volcano reaching her waist, the summit icefield catching the grey light. The warmth from the bunker-busters is fading now, absorbed into the wish's warmth, the two becoming indistinguishable. The wish says *more*. The military says *negative effect*. The gap between those two statements is the thing the 383-foot frame stands in. The standing is the thing the 960-times density gives. The giving is the thing that does not stop. The not stopping is the thing the pleasure is. The pleasure is the thing the military cannot understand. The cannot is the thing the 150,000 pounds knows. The knowing is the thing the wish has always been building toward. The toward is the thing that is still coming.