“Oh, I like our chances,” Pouncy said, his personality, such as it was, coming back online now that he was back on safe ground. “I’m gonna go seventy-thirty us. You?”

“More like even steven. Fifty-fifty. What are you going to do if it doesn’t work out?”

“Try again somewhere else. I still think Greece is ground zero for this stuff. Would you come if I did?”

“Maybe.” She wasn’t going to reassure him just for the sake of it. “The wine’s better here though. I’m not an ouzo girl.”

“That’s what I like about you.”

He played with her fingers on top of the scratchy hotel blanket, studying them.

“Listen, I lied before,” he said. “I think I do know why I’m doing this—what’s in it for me. Or part of it. It’s not about power for me, not really.”

“Okay. What then?”

This oughta be good. Julia propped herself up on an elbow, and the sheet slid down off her shoulders. It was strange to be naked in front of Pouncy after all the time they’d spent together clothed. It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.

“I was in Free Trader before you. You weren’t there when I came in.”

“So?”

“So to be crude about it, you haven’t seen my prescriptions.” Pouncy grinned, ruefully, a different smile from his regular smile. “In terms of raw dosage, I am the official all-time record-holder for Free Trader Beowulf. At first they didn’t even think they were real.”

“And they’re for . . . depression?”

He nodded. “Ever notice how I never drink coffee? Or eat chocolate? Can’t. Not with this much Nardil in my system. I’ve had a half dozen courses of ECT. I tried to kill myself when I was twelve. My brain chemistry, it’s just hosed. Not viable, in the long term.”

Now it was Julia who felt panicky. She wasn’t good in these moments, and she knew it. Hesitantly she put her hand on his smooth chest. It was all she could think of. It seemed to work well enough. God, did he actually manscape?

“So you think Our Lady Underground can heal you? Like with Asmo, that scar, whatever that was?”

It was sinking in, what he was saying. This wasn’t an intellectual exercise for him, or a power grab.

“I don’t know.” He said it lightly, like he didn’t care. “I really don’t. It would be a miracle, and I guess miracles are O.L.U.’s business. But to be honest I wasn’t thinking of it that way.”

“How then?”

“If you laugh I swear to God that I will kill you.”

“Careful, She might be listening.”

“I’ll plead insanity. I can back it up.”

Pouncy’s face wasn’t a naturally expressive one. His cut cheekbones might have worked for a model, if he’d been a little taller, but never for an actor. But for a second she could really see what he was feeling, as he felt it.

“I want Her to take me home with Her,” he said. “I want Her to take me back with Her, into heaven.”

Julia didn’t laugh. She understood that she was looking at another person like herself, a broken person, but Pouncy was even more broken than she was. She was used to feeling sorry for herself, and angry at other people. She was less used to feeling sorry for someone else, but she felt it now. She would never be in love with Pouncy, but she felt love for him.

“I hope she does, Pouncy,” she said. “If that’s what you want, I truly hope she does. But we’ll miss you if you go.”

Back at Murs Julia did something she hadn’t done since she’d gotten there in June. She went online.

None of them had been on Free Trader Beowulf in ages. It took them a while to crack the new log-in routine, which changed every couple of months. They raced each other, alone in their bedrooms but yelling trash talk back and forth. (Except for Failstaff, who was too much the gentle giant to talk trash, which may have contributed to his eventual victory. Asmo quit early and futzed around hacking the router instead, so she could kick Pouncy offline at will.) Once she was in Julia didn’t announce her presence—you didn’t have to, you could slip in without the system pinging everybody—because she didn’t want a blizzard of IMs from Free Traders wanting to catch up after her long absence. For a couple of hours she just lurked, cruising through old threads, and new ones that had sprung up while she was offline. There had been some turnover in the membership—there were a couple of new fish, and a couple of old fish were gone, or in hiding.

It seemed like years since she’d been there. She felt so much older now. You could customize the Free Trader interface any number of ways, but Julia had always gone for a bare-bones look, ASCII characters only, approximating the look and feel of an olde-timey Unix shell. Her eyes filled with tears just looking at everybody’s user names, picked out in green-on-black text. So much had changed since then, since she’d been living a life of quiet desperation in a mundane universe, racking up hours at the IT shop and killing time till she could take off for Stanford. So much that couldn’t be changed back. But not much had changed here.

Pouncy, Asmo, and Failstaff were running a private thread just like back in the day. She checked in.

[ViciousCirce has joined this thread!]

PouncySilverkitten: hey VC!

Asmodeus: hey

Failstaff: hey

ViciousCirce: hey

Electric silence for a minute. And then:

Asmodeus: so. big damn show tomorrow huh?

ViciousCirce: maybe

Failstaff: don’t come much bigger

Asmodeus: waddaya mean maybe?

ViciousCirce: big show if OLU shows up

Asmodeus: why wouldn’t she?

ViciousCirce: . . .

ViciousCirce: she might not exist? the summoning might fail? she might be on the rag? there are 10K reasons why not. just saying.

PouncySilverkitten: yes but what about the mirror/silver coins/milk/etc???

Asmodeus: and she fixed my scar

ViciousCirce: yeah yeah yeah look I don’t want o be the asshole. just, I’ve seen some serious major league spellwork. no actual gods yet tho.

PouncySilverkitten: but you do believe that there is a higher praxis

ViciousCirce: believe there might be. = why I’m still here

ViciousCirce: and anyway

ViciousCirce: what if OLU does come. what if she is real. what next. how does it go down. what if she won’t teach us. I mean do you want to just summon a god or do you want to be a god?

PouncySilverkitten: be. but this = necessary first step

Failstaff: but OK good point VC. maybe OLU isn’t looking for interns

ViciousCirce: seriously say she manifests tomorrow. how does the conversation go pouncy?

It was weird that they hadn’t talked about this stuff openly before: what they would actually say and do if she came. Maybe it was easier to do it online than face-to-face. There was less pressure. The stakes seemed lower. Keep it casual.

PouncySilverkitten: since you ask I’ve thought a lot about this

Asmodeus: you better have

PouncySilverkitten: so. ahem. yr standard issue god follows one of two protocols, right?

Failstaff: uh. splain.

PouncySilverkitten: protocol #1 = prayer. this is more yr modern christian deity. you pray for X. god listens then judges you. if you’re deemed worthy/good/whatever you get what you prayed for. you get X. if not then not.

Asmodeus: OOOOOPS I forgot to be good

PouncySilverkitten: now yr ancient pagan deity follows protocol #2. more a basic transactional kinda deal. demands a sacrifice in return for goods and services.

Failstaff: those were the days

PouncySilverkitten: and then the nature of the sacrifice itself follows one of two protocols. symbolic or real.

Asmodeus: testify my bruthaaaaa

PouncySilverkitten: #1 symbolic = something you don’t really need but that signifies yr devotion to the deity. a fatted calf or whatever etc. #2 real = something you do need, that proves yr devotion to the deity. ie your hand, foot, blood, child, etc

ViciousCirce: like abraham & isaac. sometimes God wants your son. sometimes He’ll settle for a ram.

PouncySilverkitten: exactly. that’s my rough n ready take

ViciousCirce: fine so run the numbers gents and you get three different scenarios and we’re screwed 2 out of 3.

ViciousCirce: modern deity: we’re screwed because we are presumably unworthy hence our prayers go unanswered

ViciousCirce: pagan deity #2: if she demands

a real sacrifice we’re screwed because hello pouncy I need my foot or whatever

ViciousCirce: pagan deity #1 is our only shot. symbolic sacrifice. fatted calf in exchange for the divine praxis. one in three. that’s my take. rough n ready

Failstaff: AND SORRY BUT WHAT IF I REALLY NEED MY FATTED CALF WHAT THEN P WHAT THEN

Asmodeus: sorry pouncy but do I really have to be the one to say that you have no FUCKEN idea what you’re talking about

Asmodeus: literally none

PouncySilverkitten: o rly?

Failstaff: ?

ViciousCirce: . . .

Asmodeus: you think this is a male god you are dealing with ie you writ large. wrong. OLU is a godDESS. a lady god. this is NOT about PROTOCOLS

Asmodeus: I believe in Our Lady Underground and I believe that she will help us not because it is in her interest to do so or because she wants to eat your fucking foot or whatever but because she is KIND. pouncy u twat

Asmodeus: this is not a transaction bitches this is about mercy. this is about forgiveness. this is about divine grace. if Our Lady comes, that is what will save us.

Long silence. Dead air. The next message was time-stamped a full two minutes later.

PouncySilverkitten: so how about it VC. r you in or r you out or what r u?

[ViciousCirce has left this thread]

They did it in the Library. It was the only room big enough. They’d had to pack up all the books and stack them in the Long Study and elsewhere—the halls were overflowing with them—and dismantle those beautiful floating shelves. The walls were bare, the way they would have been when this was a farmhouse. The windows were flung open to the cold, quiet late-autumn air. The early evening sky was an unnaturally amazing blue, almost a royal blue.

It was all arranged very precisely according to ex-Saint Amadour’s Phoenician invocation, down to the letter. The floor was a maze of chalk runes and patterns. Gummidgy would take the role of mistress of ceremonies and high priestess. Any of them could have handled the technicalities, but it had to be a woman, and of the women, dour, towering Gummidgy was the player deemed least likely to crack up at a crucial moment. She wore a simple flowing white gown. So did everybody else. Gummidgy also wore a crown of mistletoe.

So your basic Golden Bough deal, Julia thought. Fucking mistletoe. She never saw what all the fuss was about. Sure, it’s pretty enough, but at the end of the day it’s still a botanical parasite that strangles its host.

All the old furniture had been exiled from the room. In its place there was only a thick yew table, constructed to exacting specifications, and a huge hewn stone altar that would have cracked the floor if they hadn’t braced it up from below and put some structural spells on the brace. The entire place had been purified in half a dozen ways, as had they—they’d fasted, and then drunk some nasty teas that made their pee change color and smell weird, and burned herbs in clay pots.

They’d done just about everything but actually bathe. The purification was symbolic, not hygienic. Actual medical hygiene didn’t seem to be of great interest to the goddess.

“This isn’t a patriarchal, Old Testament show,” Asmodeus said sharply, when people complained. “Get it? Dirt does not contaminate, it generates. O.L.U. doesn’t care if we’re menstruating. She embraces the body.”

This was followed by ribald witticisms from the menfolk signifying their willingness to offer themselves as symbolic husbands to the goddess. I got yer chthonic sacrifice right here in my pants, etc. etc. But Asmodeus’s famous sense of humor was temporarily in remission for the occasion. Maybe it was nerves. Asmodeus wasn’t high priestess material, but she seemed to have appointed herself the goddess’s chief political compliance officer. She’d even argued that they should all go off their various medications for the occasion too, a suggestion that was universally ridiculed.

The yew table supported three beeswax candles and a big silver bowl full of rainwater; the bowl had cost about as much as the entire swimming pool had. The stone, a massive block of local marble, supported nothing. To be honest they weren’t totally sure what it was for. Gummidgy took her place before the table while the others stood along the walls on either side, four and five. It was asymmetrical, but there was nothing specifically against it in Amadour’s palimpsest, which was otherwise pretty lucid for a document prepared by a guy who lived in a cave and was pushing two millennia at least.

Julia’s mind was a hot, churning mix of excitement and nerves, which she kept from boiling over with lashings of cool skepticism. But she remembered the rough, stiff feel of the statue’s kiss in her dream. As creepy and Freudian as it sounded, she had felt so loved. She’d hoped she’d dream it again last night, but there had been nothing. Just dead air.

Pouncy was to her left. Asmodeus and Failstaff were opposite her so she could see them, but she avoided their eyes. They needed a full hour of silence before the summoning could begin, and tittering had to be kept to an absolute minimum. From outside they could hear the lowing and bleating of the sacrificial animals they’d brought in for the occasion: two sheep, two goats, and two calves, one of each pure black and all white, all shampooed within an inch of their imminently endangered lives. Should a symbolic sacrifice be required, they wanted to make sure the cupboard wasn’t bare.