Maike pulled the Mobile Cleaning Unit as close as she could to the wreckage of the modern art museum, the van's multiple sets of tires caterpillar-crawling over debris.
       The Emergency Services vehicle moved out, going in the other direction without urgency. Either everyone had scattered in time, or no one had survived the brawling gods.
       Maike grimaced as her boots hit the ground. She'd expected the destruction to be bad--but this bad? Yesterday, the museum had been two acres wide, three stories tall, and held a hundred years of culture. Today, the vast wreckage left her searching for familiar touchstones in a twisted reality.
       That furrowed snarl of concrete, sod, and metal had been the museum cafe--her favorite place to grab a sandwich and sit at tiny tables surrounded by greenery and outdoor sculptures. On days when she felt flush, and the cafeteria didn't run out of food, Maike bought extra sandwiches to leave for the homeless kids who lurked in the gardens' mazes. She hoped they'd survived.
       That starburst of color splintered over torn grass had been a stained-glass window, two feet wide and fifteen feet high.
       That splatter of slagged bronze had been one of her favorite sculptures: a sinewy bronze girl leaning forward, hands fisted, teeth clenched. Tantrum/Outrage, the plaque had read, and the statue's wiry hair had been tangled with symbols, encouraging the viewer to decide whether the girl's temper was justified or not. She hadn't decided in a year of study. Now, she never would.
       Much of this mess was Big Windy's doing; Windy's furious howls tended to rip buildings from the earth. Hadn't Maike cowered in her bed last night, hearing Windy's screams of challenge like a sonic aurora distorting the night?
       Petal had answered the challenge. Tiny, creamy, pink-tinged ovals littered the site like cherry blossom petals... or torn-out fingernails. They were razor-edged--a handful could flay muscle before you even noticed you'd started to bleed.
       Maike sniffed, tasting heat and smoke. Firescratch? Hard to tell if the scent of fire lingered because 'Scratch had left his trail behind or if one of the cars crumpled among the wreckage had burned. If it had been Firescratch, she would have to be careful. Firescratch left invisible trails that burst into flame if chafed, like incendiary cobwebs.
       Some of the damage looked like the work of enormous knives--steel, concrete, glass, sculpture, paintings, and ceramics sliced clean through. Longclaws? How involved had this battle been?
       When the gods battled, they altered the material plane, left behind items transformed. These artifacts sang with magic. Containment swooped in to remove those items before Emergency Services were cleared to approach. And after that came Maike. She hit her sensor app, hunting magical hot spots. Just in case.
       Every cleaner knew someone who'd had a run-in with an artifact--Tiffani, who touched a broken window and had all her bones shattered; Ellen, who dusted a slab of concrete and found a black hole waiting beneath; Consuela, the most unfortunate, who inhaled a strange feather and ended stretched and drifting over a whole acre, screaming until Emergency Services found and stopped her heart.
       Maike put on her goggles and filtration mask and clambered up the thirty-foot-tall front facade to paint the disposal sigil as high as she could. The sigil gleamed a pearly pink that looked like the promise of dawn. Once it hardened, she activated the decay spell.
       The wall hissed, shook off its integrity, and turned to sand, trickling down through the morning light. She tried not to breathe in the sand as she lowered herself to the next big mass to repeat the process.
       Dusting was one of sundry technologies that had developed after the gods burst free from their volcano chain. The decay spell was powered by that same devastation she worked so hard to tidy away. The contaminated objects that Containment removed got turned into this--sigil paint, crush bags, stab sticks--the tools of her new trade in this new world.
       Maike worked her way down carefully but not attentively. Dangerous routine was still routine, and she was grateful for that boredom. It kept her from stewing over the pieces of destroyed artwork she found--a brilliantly-patterned textile embedded in cement, scraps of oil-paint-laden canvas drifting on the breeze, and wood figures charred from the inside out.
       She reached the ground, and her boots skidded in the dune she'd created.
       The last of the hissing sand stopped, and in the silence, a sound reached her. An impossible, horrifying sound.
       A voice. Wailing.
       Maike swore and sent the radio code to summon Emergency Services back--they'd missed someone.
       Her heart lurched. The decay spell didn't differentiate between flesh or stone or grass or anything... If she had laid the sigil in the wrong spot, she could have dusted the victim without ever realizing it.
       She scrambled toward the sound.
       Petals studded her boots like porcupine quills as she chased the sound. A thin layer of rippled concrete broke free beneath her, and she panic-surfed twenty feet over rubble before coming to a teetering stop.
       The shrieking sounded again--pained? Angry? Desperate?
       She found the source just as it faded, sucked back into a deep crevice between two concrete slabs held apart by a melted bronze sculpture and a cracked marble statuary.
       Maike swallowed. "Hello?" She crawled upward and peered inside. Blood. Bone. "Are you hurt?"
       "I hurt," the girl echoed.
       "Okay," Maike said. She squirmed into the cavern and urged the girl closer to the entrance, grimacing as light revealed more.
       The girl clutched her side, blood seeping through her fingers. "That thing poked a hole in me," she said. "When it fell." She sounded outraged and scared.
       Maike peered in--rebar, glistening and wet on the end.
       They should have waited for Emergency Services, but the girl kept wiggling forward, and Maike kept giving way until suddenly, they were both out of the cave, precariously perched on rubble.
       The girl was lean and filthy, her hair a stiff tangle dripping blood. She looked about twelve and vaguely familiar--one of the homeless girls? The girl teetered forward, light as a baby bird--featherless and heading for the ground.
       Maike caught her and slowly brought them down to earth.
       She passed her off to Emergency Services. "How could you miss her?" Her voice shook. She'd cleaned up bodies before, but finding someone she could have spell-decayed to death if she'd started in the wrong spot....
       Essie from Emergency shook her greying head. "It happens. You coming to the hospital with her, or what?"
       The girl clutched the air as they strapped her in, and Maike said, "Yeah. I'm coming."

       Maike was ready to give up on waiting for news when a nurse hailed her. "You're the cleaner who brought the girl in?"
       "Yes," she said. "Did she make it?" She dropped her gaze to the man's scrub top. His name tag read Douglas.
       "She's fine, just fine," Douglas said, his dark eyes impatient. "Bad-tempered and loud, but who can blame her? The wound on her side was shallow, easily stitched, but painful. No broken bones."
       "That's great," Maike managed. Braced for death, life surprised her.
       "Anyway, she's got no ID, she won't give us her name, and we need the room space."
       "You're kicking her out?"
       He sighed. "She's not hurt enough to stay. We're full up on people from the ballpark who didn't think they needed to listen to the psirens."
       She nodded reluctant understanding. There were always people who delayed evacuation, who didn't think the battle would affect them.
       "I could call orphan services, but they're overworked, and she's aging out of their remit, anyway."
       "She's twelve," she objected.
       "Definitely older than that," he said.
       "You want me to take her."
       "It's you or back to the street."
       "Fine."
       The nurse brandished a clipboard. "Thank you. Sign here and here."
       "The Cleaners aren't paying for her care," Maike warned. "Our budget's not that big."
       "No one's budget is that big," Douglas griped.

       Maike was on the phone with her boss, Ginger, when the hospital sent the girl out.
       "You couldn't have washed her face?" Maike said. "Or the blood out of her hair?"
       The orderly escorting the girl shrugged. "Water shortage. After the shut-off last night, we've got to filter it before we can use it. She didn't rate."
       The girl's eyes darted back and forth, settling on Maike as the only familiar thing in the room.
       "You feeling better?" Maike asked her.
       The girl nodded.
       "You got a name?"
       The girl shrugged.
       "I know you've got a voice," Maike said.
       "They wrote Jane Doe Museum on my file," she said.
       "Jane Museum," Maike said. Definitely a runaway, she thought. Definitely one of the homeless girls from the museum. "That's what you're going with?"
       "Why not?" the girl said, jutting out her chin. She barely came up to Maike's shoulder, even accounting for her protective listing, hand hovering over her bandaged side. But Douglas had been right. She didn't look twelve. Her face was sharpening out of baby fat; she seemed past the gawky stage of being unfamiliar with her own bones.
       "You look like you might be fifteen. Are you fifteen?"
       The girl nodded uncertainly. "Yes?"
       "Good," Maike said. "Congratulations. You're now an intern for the Cleaners. First order of business? Get you cleaned up."
       "I don't want to be an intern--"
       "I'm not putting you on the street injured, and no offense, but I'm not leaving you in my apartment all on your lonesome. It's the Cleaners or nothing, kid."
       The girl rolled her eyes and then looked like she regretted it, a hand flying to her head. She wrinkled her nose when her fingers stuck to her hair. "I want to clean up," she said and headed for the door.
       Maike hustled to catch up. She was probably going to regret this. But someone had to step up and deal with the gods' messes.

       Maike took a mostly-tidied teen and put her in one of her spare utility suits. She made a cursory attempt at detangling the cloudy rat's nest of the girl's pale hair and gave up when a piece needled her palm, drawing blood. The gods transformed the world as they fought, and Jane's hair had fallen prey, turning to a cotton candy tangle of spun glass. Some messes were too big to fix without magic, and she doubted the girl wanted her hair decayed straight from her head.
       Jane had complained enough about everything else--the water was cold, the soap was smelly, Maike's clothes were scratchy, and everything was stupid or slow or both. Her whining gave Maike a headache.
       She checked them both in at the office. Terry and Leandra were reporting in from the ballpark, their skin still shiny with fireproof gel. They gawked. Maike shrugged. Word had gotten around about her little tagalong.
       Ginger's voice rose clear through her open office door at the end of the hallway, "You're supposed to double-check! Triple-check! You left a child in the rubble! It's a miracle she survived the battle, and you just left her there for my worker to finish off?"
       Jane squinted at Maike. "Why's she angry?"
       "Because you could have died," Maike said. The idea that she could have killed Jane lingered like food poisoning, sickening her in waves. "Let's go meet Ginger."
       Ginger set the phone down with a disgusted thump. Her attention leaped to Maike and the girl beyond her.
       "Is this the girl?"
       "Jane Museum in the flesh," Maike said.
       Jane Museum? Ginger mouthed.
       Maike shrugged.
       "Maike, do you have plans for your mini-me?" Ginger asked. "We're not babysitters."
       "She's our intern now," Maike said.
       Ginger sighed instead of objecting. The Cleaners were eternally short-handed. The museum site should have been crawling with Cleaners, but the majority of the staff were still cleaning up the ballpark where Bouncer had turned five acres of bleachers, fencing and equipment into a massive tumbleweed that zigzagged over two miles and ended blasted through an apartment building. And every inch of that metal was etched with Firescratch's flammable webbing. They'd be working on that site for a month.
       "I don't want to be an intern," Jane objected.
       "You'll get three meals a day, two utility suits, and get to use magical tools," Ginger said. Her brow creased. "You're not a null, are you?"
       "No," Jane said, "I can use all the magic I want."
       "You can use what Maike supervises you using," Ginger said.
       Jane bridled, and Ginger cut in again, "I bet you're hungry."
       It was a good bet. They were all a little hungry. Six years of battles had disrupted agriculture worldwide. Hard to keep cattle when Longclaws might turn them all into jerky as he passed; hard to grow crops when Petal's sharp edges could strip a field faster than a cloud of locusts. Hard to transport what survived across roads that might burst into fire at any moment.
       Ginger handed out two rare treats from her locked desk drawer--the gingersnap cookies that had led to her nickname.
       Jane took one warily, sniffed it, and then crammed it into her mouth.
       Maike took hers gratefully and savored its crinkled, crisp edges, letting the sugar melt on her tongue. Homemade and fresh. Ginger had connections.
       "Say thank you, Ginger, for the cookie," Maike said.
       Jane jerked her head once and said, "I want another one," through a mouthful of crumbs.
       "Sorry," Ginger said. "If you ask the girls in the hall, they'll give you some egg drop soup and a roll."
       Jane eyed Maike.
       Maike nodded. "Go on, Jane."
       "Okay then," Jane muttered and slunk out.
       "You don't own a hairbrush?" Ginger asked Maike.
       "Her hair turned to glass," Maike said. "It's going to break off at some point, and there'll be tears. Loud tears."
       "Make sure she wears the goggles," Ginger said. "So, which gods hit the museum?"
       "Does it matter?" Maike asked.
       "The theologists are still researching," Ginger said. She sat down behind her desk with a sigh. "Still hoping to find a pattern, so we'll continue to report it."
       "Petal," Maike said. "Big Windy. Maybe Longclaws."
       "Shout if you need help," Ginger said.
       "I don't need help," Maike pointed out wryly. "I've got a shiny new intern."

       When they arrived back at the museum, Maike had second thoughts about bringing Jane. The devastation of the site shocked her breathless all over again, and she wasn't the one nearly killed here.
       But Jane planted her feet in Maike's borrowed sneakers on the uneven ground and studied the scene.
       "It's really... It's big," Jane said. "Bigger than it seemed when I was in it."
       "News flash, kid, the gods suck."
       "This job sucks," Jane said, kicking at a hunk of burnished bronze the size of her head, then hopping on one foot, wincing. "That hurt!"
       "You're surprised?"
       Jane shrugged. Aimed a more careful kick at the bronze again, expressing her feelings.
       "Hey," Maike said. "Be careful with that. We might be able to salvage some of the art."
       "It's broken. It's trash."
       "It can be fixed," Maike said. "Maybe." She studied the fragment Jane had abused and sighed. "See this? It's part of a daisy-chain; and that daisy-chain was part of a sculpture called Tantrum."
       "It's just metal, and it's broken," Jane said, slapping the daisy into a crush bag. The bag crunched around the bronze, dragging it partway out of realspace. More magic. The crush bags stayed portable and absorbed more material than they should be able to.
       "It's art, you brat," Maike said, snatching the bag back. "I liked it. It meant something to me."
       "The artist can make a new one."
       "That's not the point. If you don't respect the time, effort, and learning that went into the artwork, you're no better than the gods. Nothing matters to them except fighting."
       "It's just metal," Jane whined. "Just a thing."
       "It's more than its material," Maike snapped. She reminded herself that Jane had been traumatized, and was so alone that she'd chosen Maike as a lifeline. "It's about civilization. It's not enough to just survive. It's about making the world better. You build, you beautify, you educate, you create--even Ginger's cookies make things better. If you don't create things or improve them, the world would just be savagery. Look at the gods. All that power and all they do is destroy."
       Jane added a chunk of stained glass to the bag Maike clutched. "It's still trash."
       Maike found a drift of canvas flapping beneath a car tire. She freed it and said, "Look at this."
       Jane peered over her shoulder.
       "It's a sunset. Someone studied the sunset long enough to perceive it in separate colors and shapes. Then they mixed pigments together until they got them exactly how they wanted. So they could show you how they see the sunset."
       "I see sunsets every night," Jane objected. "This is trash. Isn't it?"
       Maike bit her lip. "I can't explain it any better." She rolled up the scrap of canvas and added it to the salvage bag--mostly intact, big enough to reframe. "Go dust rocks. Leave me to the salvage work."
       "I don't want to--"
       Maike handed her the paint pack and a brush. "Doesn't matter. You do what I tell you to do. You remember the sigil I showed you?"
       Jane rolled her eyes.
       "Fine. Your job is to go around the perimeter and paint the disposal sigil on any large pieces of wreckage. Do not climb anything. I don't want you falling or tearing your stitches. If you have any questions, just shout. The sigils have a ten-foot diameter; don't overlap them."
       Jane shrugged. "After that?"
       "That's pretty much what we have planned do today. Get rid of the big stuff. Salvage what we can."
       "Boring," Jane said.
       "Destruction is," Maike said. "Get to work."

       Jane painted sigils dutifully. She was good, Maike thought grudgingly. Her sigils clear; her invocation effortless. Under Jane's sigil work, the stone went to dust so fine, it nearly danced.
       Even with magic to help, the work was discouraging. Maike only found three or four items that could be rescued; she'd found a lot of the accessories from the blasted-apart sculpture Tantrum/Outrage, though nothing significant of the girl herself.
       The whoosh and rattle of stone turning to sand receded from her hearing at some point, and at some point after that, she noticed the absence and looked up. Had Jane collapsed? What if she'd managed to dust herself?
       Maike scrambled over rubble and filled crush bags, her footing treacherous in the early twilight.
       She found Jane seated on a wobbling, three-legged bench, looking at something about a foot tall between her hands.
       Maike said, "What have you got there? Something salvageable? Have you been throwing out artwork?" Too many questions, all shrill with worry.
       Jane didn't answer, only leaned away from the object.
       Maike saw a cobbled-together piece of... something. A wild frizz of canvas, a fragment of marble, scaly with Petal's leavings.
       "I made it," Jane said, slowly. "Out of trash. But it's not trash now, is it? Because I changed it. I made it better."
       "Yeah," Maike said.
       She drew closer, oddly pleased when she should have been annoyed that Jane had been shirking. The sculpture--really, she could call it nothing less--took shape before her and made her breath catch. All those broken, disparate elements came together at once. A woman, hunched over, picking up trash. A cleaner.
       The psirens went off--an icepick of sound directly behind her eyes.
       Jane clamped her hands over her ears and screamed back.
       "God alert," Maike said, tension sparking through her spine, "We have to get out of here."
       "I hate them," Jane snarled.
       "You and everyone else. Get moving," Maike said. Her phone fizzed and sputtered as she scrolled to see the map. The psirens were backed by news broadcasts, but out here, isolated in the wreckage, she had to find the news first.
       The map jittered and glitched; the psiren sounded again, louder.
       The gods were returning to the museum.
       "We have to go. Now," Maike snapped. "Let's go!"
       "I'm not finished," Jane said. "I've barely started!"
       "Now, Jane!" Maike said and grabbed the girl. "They come and we're still here, you might not end up with just a little hole in your skin this time."
       Jane abandoned her sculpture, helped Maike grab the bags, and ran for the van.
       They weren't fast enough. Maike's hair streamed upwards, caught in a magic riptide. The ground rippled beneath her feet, tossing her and Jane into the air. The rubble around them bounced; Maike took a stone to her jaw, and her teeth slammed together on the edge of her tongue. Blood burst into her mouth. They fell and tumbled over sharp edges, an avalanche of stone and glass and human flesh. A second bounce came with a massive drop in air pressure, and Maike's ears popped viciously. Her hearing fuzzed.
       Jane shrieked, or Maike thought she did. Even with her ears ringing, the noise of the gods arriving was immense. Bouncer and Petal rolled into the scene and Maike shoved Jane into the van. She pulled the doors shut--not safe, but safer, spelled steel and reinforced glass--and gaped.
       Maike spent her life cleaning up after the gods, but she had never seen them. Petal was a dazzling pinwheel of arc-white light the size of a helicopter which spat crystalline shards as he approached. Bouncer's dirty rumble of movement, more felt than seen, distended the earth. He smashed into Petal and the colors blurred and shook.
       Maike hit the emergency code--cleaners, stuck on site--and tore her burning, streaming eyes from the fighting gods. She clung to the crash cage within the van as the vehicle lurched and hopped, jolting a car's length at a time.
       Beside her, Jane shuddered, her skin scalding hot against Maike's side.
       Poor thing, Maike thought distantly. To survive this once before and to be thrown back into it. Poor both of us, she thought, and pressed her forehead against the edge of the van. Sending the emergency code didn't mean they would be saved. It only meant Containment would salvage their magical tools. It meant that Emergency Services would search for their bodies.
        "I hate them, I hate them, I hate them." Jane's shrieking finally penetrated Maike's ringing ears. "Hate them so much," Jane howled. She vibrated with anger, terror, something so strong that Maike reached out a restraining hand, but too late.
       Jane burst out of the van, screaming at the gods. She fell when the ground jounced, but surged back to her feet, a stone in her hand. She flung the stone right into the brawling tangle of light and vibration. "Hate you both!" Her voice turned shrill and shriller; her words lost cohesion, a wild shriek of rage and loathing. She threw another pair of stones, one after another, though she was blown this way and that by the fighting.
       Maike stumbled out of the van, her legs numb with terror. She had to get Jane back inside. Her responsibility. Her decision to bring the girl back here.
       Two steps from Jane, and the impossible happened. The unspeakable.
       The gods noticed Jane.

       Petal flowed across the site like a tsunami of edged light, and Bouncer rolled beneath him, an unseen horror that scored a path right through the debris field.
       Maike grabbed Jane and felt like she'd grabbed iron. Fury made every scrap of Jane's body rigid.
       Maike wanted to put herself in front of Jane, but... her legs betrayed her. She couldn't make herself move; her heart pounded so hard she felt sick. All it would take was one touch...if the gods' leavings could transform and destroy a person, what could the actual gods do? She didn't want to die screaming, an ant smeared across the landscape by a careless hand.
       The gods peered at Jane.
       Jane shouted defiance.
       Maike's breath lodged in her throat.
       Then the gods... spooked. They vanished, leaving a vacuum that sucked the breath from her throat.
       She curled up in the dirt, letting terror bleed itself out of her bones.
       Jane flopped down next to her, silent and shaking, her fingers scrabbling through dirt.
       Maike forced herself to her feet when the idea occurred to her that she could stand, that her bones hadn't been smashed, that she hadn't been turned into jelly, or her muscles unknit across the landscape.
       All their work had been undone. The van, its doors opened, vulnerable, had been shaken, emptied, and scoured bare by Petal's leavings. Bouncer had raised great hummocks of land; pipes jutted out of the earth like stranded earthworms, and all that they'd salvaged had been scattered or destroyed.
       "Bastards," Maike said, her own voice distant to her damaged ears. "If they were fighting over something. Or for something... maybe we could understand. I think they fight because they can. Because they want to. And they'll never stop, because they never die or change." Tears burned. When she rubbed her wet eyes, her fingers came away stained strange colors.
       Jane made a sound of high-pitched fury and pounced on the rubble. She dragged out the sculpture she'd made, fragmented into pieces. "They smashed it! They didn't have to break it."
       "That's why you got out... That was dangerous," Maike said. So obviously dangerous that she felt stupid even saying it.
       "You came out, too."
       "My responsibility to keep you safe."
       "If they'd broken you, I would have killed them," Jane said. "They undid all our work. Made a mess. And we have to start all over. I'm tired!"
       "Containment will have to clear it again. Then Emergency Services. We'll have time to get dinner and nap before we come back," Maike said.
       Jane wrinkled her nose. "And you just do this again and again."
       "No other choice is there," Maike said bitterly.
       "All of you, spending your lives just to clean up after us."
       For a minute Maike didn't get it, her ears ringing, her lip-reading obscured by exhaustion and dust.
       "Us?"
       "I hate them. But I don't remember why," Jane said. "Our mother created us for a purpose, but we started fighting over... We fought. She locked us away. She was supposed to come back when we were better behaved, but when we broke free, she was gone. All we had left was ourselves and we hate each other. It's all we remember."
       The girl wasn't Jane. Not anymore. Not even a teen. Not even a person. She shifted, her flesh hardening to a sculpture Maike recognized. Tantrum/Outrage. The missing sculpture in her old clothes. How hadn't she noticed Jane's resemblance?
       Maike took a step back as the bronze cracked, something vast and bright slipping free. Her skin crisped--instant sunburn.
       "You should run, now," Jane said, her hair going molten, the utility suit wisping to smoke, her bronze toes flaming out of Maike's second best sneakers. "Run!" Big Windy howled.
       Maike ran.
       She made it about hundred feet before the psiren stuttered into life again; the warning shriek sounding horrified, startled. She slid beneath the remnants of the van.
       There was an explosion of heat and rage and sound. A massive shock wave of destruction rolled over her and she closed her eyes.

       She woke; the sky was black. Everything around her was scoured glass, cherry red, and singing as it cooled.
       Beneath the glass, Maike spotted the ruins of Jane's sculpture, and turned away. She found a mostly safe place and waited for Emergency Services to evacuate her.

       Ginger didn't make Maike go back to the museum site. For a week, she didn't make her do much of anything but sleep off her god burn and shock, though she showed up at her apartment door nightly with some cookies and a lot of questions.
       "Jane was Big Windy?"
       "How do you think that happened?"
       "Why do you think she stuck around?"
       "The researchers want to talk to you when you're feeling better."
       The last one wasn't a question, but it felt loaded with implicit questions, and Maike had no answers. She kept opening the door to Ginger anyway. The woman made delicious cookies, and she didn't cringe when Maike peeled off large sheets of her burned skin.
       "You know, the fights have changed," Ginger said, wiping crumbs from the cookie plate with careful concentration.
       Maike did know. First, there'd been two whole days worldwide without a single fight. A breathless period of hope had been dashed when Petal and Firescratch ganged up on Bouncer and sent shock waves through the sky. That fight had set the sunsets ablaze with unnatural colors and rained salt on the cities below, but the fight itself had stayed skybound, as had the next three battles.
       "Do you think it means anything?"
       Maike thought of Jane's--Big Windy's--brief foray into art and shrugged. "She said she hated them. What can change that?"

       The next day brought the worst battling yet. The fights stretched on and on and the gods swapped opponents like they were on a schedule. Through it all, Big Windy howled and raged and wailed so that you could hear her for hundreds of miles. Maike thought she could hear words in Big Windy's cries now--words, and her own name, shrieked at an impossible volume. She wondered if Big Windy expected her to respond.
       There was a week of non-stop fighting across the skies, the gods touching down like meteors, then launching themselves upwards again. It ended, finally, with a tumultuous clash. Then, a meteoric crash shattered windows for six blocks and sliced through two city parking garages, taking out a dozen buses, one gas station, and a transformer.
       Big Windy fell quiet.
       Maike left her apartment for the first time since the museum and followed the Containment trucks as they screamed by in the dark.
       She got out of the van and leaned up against it, watching as the Containment staff in their white jumpsuits hit the wreckage, sensors extended. Their white suits, magic-sensitive, slowly began to fluoresce dangerous colors--green and pink and peacock blue. She shouldn't be here, not yet.
       But she couldn't pull away, too aware of the silence in the sky.
       Then, a patter of uneven footsteps headed her way.
       She watched him breach the dark. He wasn't anywhere as convincing a person as Big Windy had been. He shone in the darkness; his eyes, his teeth, his scrawny bare chest, his steel blade bones peeking through torn flesh, all of it alight. He healed while she watched, flesh wrapping snugly over a being as sharp as knives.
       Longclaws.
       He spotted her and froze like a cat spotting prey. "You're Maike," he said, his voice the rasp of a honing knife.
       She considered the implications, then nodded. "I am."
       His shoulders lifted and fell. He stamped his foot when she didn't say anything else. "You're supposed to tell me how to be better. To give me something to do other than fighting."
       She licked her lips. Once had been happenstance. To interact deliberately with a god? It took nerve she wasn't sure she possessed. Longclaws could kill her with a touch, a glance, a spurt of careless temper. But someone had to teach them.
       Did it have to be her?
       She looked past the god, and saw the boy. Thin. Bare-chested. The air temperature plunging after his passage to the earth, into this flesh. She took a deep breath. "Are you cold?"
       A pause, a learning pause, as he digested her words, and applied them to himself. "I am cold," he said decisively. "I don't like it."
       "Remember that feeling," she said, even as she brought a blanket out of her van.
       "Why?" he said.
       "Because other people out here are cold, too. Because of you and your family. They don't get a blanket. They have to keep working." She draped the blanket over his shoulders, and his retort cut off as the warmth seeped inward.
       He clutched it tighter, stroking the soft fabric, and she glanced back, hearing Containment approach.
       "Your name," she said, "is Jack. As of now, you're a cleaner."
       She chivied him into the van, and headed for Ginger's house, hoping her boss was still awake. And that she had cookies.