Master of Puppets

Radiance #5: Secret societies, playing house, and answers in the blood.

Radiance is a lighthearted fiction serial about one of Earth's darker timelines. It takes place around 2013 in a world where atypical abilities have become increasingly common, with the storyline following a group of minor-league superheroes based in Washington, DC. Our protagonist is Lady Radiance, former teen sensation, aka Christabel Jones, professional ray of sunshine—or, at least, she's trying her best.

It has been a minute, but we are back! Previously, Hades has begun behaving oddly, while Christa found herself blindsided by the need to balance Lady Radiance’s mission with her own very human desires. This time, one revealing conversation changes everything.

<#4 // To Science! Girl #6 || Directory || #6>

“My Lady, you must be the last person under fifty who carries a handkerch—aagh.”

“What’s that?” Lady Radiance said sweetly, pressing a hand to Lord Hades’ forehead to tilt his head back. “I told you, I can’t understand you with the blood running into your mouth.”

“And whose fault is that?” he gasped under the cloth clamped firmly around his bruised nose.

“Mm, I think it’s yours. You normally remember to duck when I swing at you.”

“I did duck.” He breathed slowly through his mouth, far more comfortable than she would have thought with exposing his vulnerabilities. The Lady had expected him to vanish by now in a flash of cold fire under her hands, but her shadowy nemesis remained kneeling in front of her, obeying the silent orders of the bonds of light wrapped around him. His breathing was the loudest thing around them; the city noises were muffled back here, in a dead-end alley that had been boarded up until he’d dodged what should have been a dignified tackle. The place had a habit of sewage flooding, if the stained concrete and lingering, odorous ooze around its edges were any indication. Her Lord was good at finding these sorts of places.

Overall, the night had been completely ordinary by his new standards—fewer showy set pieces, more dark and isolated corners where neither of them felt the need to call in backup. But she’d never actually beat him badly enough to catch him before. What now?

“I knew you were becoming stronger, but I did not think you vould so soon surpass me,” Hades said.

“It was a lucky hit,” she said. “I’m sure you’re making it easy for me, my Lord.”

“Now, vhy vould I do such a thing?”

Lady Radiance moved her left thumb almost unconsciously across the gauzy mask covering the upper half of his face. It would be trivial, with him at her mercy, to pull it back and see how close to human he was. The breath from his mouth was icy as it hit the glove covering her wrist, and the blood seemed to be warming only from her touch. He felt almost like a dead thing, but still…not quite. “I can think of any number of reasons,” she said. “I suppose it’s most likely that you’re trying to take my guard down.”

“A reasonable enough assumption.” The outline of his slackening eyelids somehow expressed all the thought his solid glowing eyes couldn’t. She found herself agreeing with them that there was no need to decide her actions right away. “So. Continue, my Lady. Vhy vould I do that?”

“Well…you must need to get me in very close to you.” She pulled her handkerchief back to check the bleeding, studying what she could see of his face. “You’re not planning to carry me away to the underworld, are you?”

Hades laughed softly, but darkly, his lips barely parting. “Vould you like that?”

“No,” Lady said, despite the sudden rush through her body of something like a thrill. “No, I wouldn’t.”

His eyes flickered. “That’s a shame. The Lord of the Dead kneels only to the Queen.”

Hades’ whole aspect darkened even further, suddenly, and a spectral, agonized shriek knocked Lady Radiance back with her hands on her face, fingers digging into her temples in an instinctive attempt to make it stop. When it faded and she was able to open her eyes again, he was gone, of course. The cloth was still on the ground and she picked it up, folding the blood to the inside, and tucked it away so as not to leave evidence behind. She felt suddenly exhausted.

It wasn’t easy to find her way back. Lord Hades had dragged her out to a new part of the District this time, beyond anywhere she normally went during the day. The unfamiliar streets were even harder to try to navigate from the rooftops, but she couldn’t fly until she got her bearings and didn’t really like the idea of walking through a strange part of town as Christabel, either. A blaze of daylight flared up on the far corner of the crumbling cement ahead, and she slowed to a more cautious pace, step by step, squinting against the light. As it receded, she saw a human form within, and then recognized the rich high contrast of the golden-orange costume and dark skin. Everybody knew about Sundancer—she’d been policing Ward 7 as a vigilante since the Seventies, unfazed by official efforts to bring her in—but they’d never met personally.

“Sundancer, good evening,” Lady said, hoping to cover her nervousness with respect. She really didn’t want to get chased out of somebody else’s territory after everything else tonight.

“Good evening,” the older woman said, nodding slightly as she came closer. “Interesting to see you on this side of the river. But, truth be told, Lady Radiance, I’ve been hoping to.”

“Oh?”

“Oh, yes.” Sundancer motioned her in, and she approached to a more conversational distance. Up close, with both their auras turned down, she had a much more grandmotherly air than Lady had expected. “We’re both very busy women, so I’ll make this straightforward. I know how difficult it is for a hero to be out here on her own.”

Strictly speaking, Lady Radiance wasn’t, but it had started to feel more and more like that was the case. She didn’t correct her. “I manage,” she said.

“You’ve been doing very well. That’s why I wanted to talk to you—to make sure you know that you don’t have to.” Sundancer produced a small card from under her flowing robes, holding it up to show the image of a lighthouse. “For some years now, I’ve run a small league of independent operators in the area. We share resources and information, and we work together on more serious problems. It’s quite secure. Secret identities only, and no personal business.”

Lady Radiance nodded. “I appreciate the invitation, but—why me?”

“I’d like to retire soon,” she said. “Spend more time with my grandchildren, you know. I have eyes on the neighborhood, and my lieutenant at the Lighthouse should have no trouble taking on administrative duties, but my specific skills—our skills, I should say—have been very useful to the team. I’ve been looking for someone who can replace them.”

“I see. I…I might be interested in that kind of arrangement.”

Sundancer smiled. “I thought you might—but I won’t press you for an answer now. Take this, and stay in touch.” Lady accepted the card, turning it over to see a QR code printed on the back. “If you decide to stay on, we’ll consider you a provisional member until you’ve been through a trial or two and had your application voted on. The others liked the idea, so as long as you acquit yourself well, I don’t foresee any problems.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome. Until next time, then.”

✨✨✨

The house was dark as she approached it, except for the porch light she’d only just remembered on the way out the door. Jacob had left yesterday, off hiking with a couple of friends in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and wouldn’t be back for a few days yet. She didn’t grudge him the trip, but even for an introvert like her it’d been a lonely weekend. Most of her work friends were on vacation already, and Marissa was in Houston for her sister’s wedding, hopefully allowing Sebastian to keep her out of trouble. It would have been nice to have somebody to come home to.

Well, she and Jake had been talking about selling the house and splitting up their living arrangements again. Maybe if she didn’t have to account for his allergies, she could finally get cats. She wasn’t sure how much that would really help, but surely it would be better than nothing—maybe, at least, she wouldn’t look to her Lord’s corner as she came in and kick herself for wanting to talk to him already.

Christabel changed, went into the kitchen, and made herself a cup of cocoa while disinterestedly clearing out the notifications on her phone. She had one missed call and a voicemail from Marissa.

“Hey Christa, don’t worry about returning this, just letting you know we got back okay. Um, the wedding was nice. Again, I’m fine, but the OWA did show up last night and they regretted it, so that’s—(oh my god, STOP)—tha—that’s, um—(STOP IT)—I’ll catch you up next time I see you or whenever. Have a good Christmas, bye!”

That didn’t make any sense. Making two attacks back-to-back wasn’t like her Lord at all, even if he could easily portal between cities. Besides, if he had been there with his minions, Marissa would have said so—if only because the “Lady’s boyfriend” joke had so unfortunately become endemic. But she’d never seen them attack alone before. How could they do anything without him?

She listened again to check the exact words, this time catching a Metro announcement and stifled baritone laughter in the background. Better not to think too much about that. Christa dropped her spoon in the sink and took the cocoa into the living room to sit alone in the Christmas tree’s yellow glow, feet tucked up under her heavy plaid skirt. After a minute of feeling like it wasn’t enough, she switched on the TV and pulled up a fireplace livestream that didn’t help either. Even that made her think of Hades.

The thing was, perhaps she couldn’t rightly say anymore what was like or unlike him. Her Lord had changed so many of his strategies recently. He was colder, in a way more distant, and yet—more vulnerable. More true to who he really was. Or was that an illusion? It didn’t seem she could know him at all, with their masks in the way.

And yet…and yet. There was something paradoxically honest in the Lady’s boldness. She never second-guessed herself now, but spoke freely and didn’t hesitate even to force Death to his knees in pursuit of what she wanted. Was Lady Radiance the mask, really, or was it Christabel? And, then—what of Lord Hades?

For the space of a breath, she hadn’t doubted at all that he would take her away with him if she agreed. Demons did that, and fey things, and men. He seemed to be all three. In that moment, though, he’d seemed more a man than ever.

No, that thought was too much to examine closely. Christa shivered and pulled a blanket over herself, reaching next for the remote to switch to some mindless and utterly unromantic distraction. Crafting videos? Crafting videos would do.

When she got up to go to bed, she set her empty mug on the kitchen counter and saw that she’d left the handkerchief sitting out there too. The thought suddenly struck her of the astonishing amount of information that had come back just from testing the clones’ degraded bodies. Hades should never have left such power in her hands. Was he only manipulating her—or had he made his first serious mistake?

Christa made a note with the date, double-wrapped it in plastic zip bags, and tucked the bundle away at the back of the freezer. If this worked, she might not be so far from understanding her Lord, after all.

✨✨✨

To: cjsparkles89@gmail.com
From: mcotlin@difusionlabs.com
Subject: Fwd: Requested chemical analysis and hello

Hey Christa, this is re: that unknown molecule from analyzing the clones. Just a quick layman's summary + my findings + a question.

This week has been all kinds of crazy, so sorry I didn't get to bring you up to speed yet. I'm pretty sure I did tell you we ran into the OWA Saturday? Just the clones, not Hades. Also, our old local hero (The Wizard) turned up and that...that is its own thing we will have to talk about, okay. My life. What even is my life, Christa?

Anyway, you will see the original email's from my dad, Dr. Cotlin Sr., space chemist, man of mystery, etc. Based on the new samples from last weekend, he's identified iR46-C as a new entry in a family of compounds produced in the brain under the influence of a strong psychic force. Basically an inflammation/detox response. He says that the levels he found are all 8-10x the highest published examples. This could be why the clones keep falling apart and might indicate extended periods of direct psychic control. That's a guess, though. Nobody we've ever heard of has that kind of power level.

Because you three are the closest thing I have to an in vivo study, I pulled out the stored blood samples to compare. Yours from July and Nov are both clean, so proximity isn't a factor. Sebastian's last six months are clean but I did another draw Monday and there are traces of iR46-C. Apparently he did get splashed in the fight and The Wizard did something to mitigate it. He seems all right, for whatever that's worth coming from me.

Jacob is the interesting one. Remember he had confirmed exposure to the effluvia? Immediately afterwards, he had a low but clinically significant level of iR46-C in his bloodstream. It's comparable to the range for isolated moderate influence. I'm waiting to find out if the molecule itself permeates skin or if something else is going on. Because we were still testing the long-term effects of Formula 85, I have a sample from 2 weeks later where the levels are subclinical and one from 3 weeks where he's down to traces, then it's clean at 4 weeks. Do you remember how he was acting? He said it's kind of fuzzy, but he had the idea you were angry at him and being unreasonable the whole time, which we agreed doesn't sound like you.

Hope you're doing well. Text me if you want to go ice skating, I found a good rink out here and I'm about to go live on it. <3

Thanks, 
Marissa

(FOR THE RECORD, I am NOT "working on Christmas" either currently or at all this year. It is Dec 20, I'm clocking out in three minutes, and I won't be back in until Jan 6.)

To: m.cotlin@difusionlabs.com
From: cjsparkles89@gmail.com
Subject: Re: Fwd: Requested chemical analysis and hello

Hi Marissa,

Enjoy your holidays and don't check this until you get back from vacation. :-) I already texted you because yes! Skating!! Always!!!

Oh goodness, that was so long ago now. June. Wow. It's possible I was being unreasonable! He was just so insistent that I shouldn't be helping you out, and I think that made me dig my heels in so I could prove myself. I probably could have let it go and stayed out of all this if we didn't have those arguments. But I don't remember anything seriously odd about his behavior.

And that reminds me, when you get back, I have another sample that I was hoping you could look at? I don't want to bother you yet but it sounds like it could be helpful to studying your molecule. Just let me know. 

Thank you,
Christa

✨✨✨

iMessage: Dr. Marissa Cotlin

Marissa: got ur email and uhhhh, YES. i will look at whatever this is. (details??? u did try to preserve it?)
Christa: >_> It’s not much. I have a handkerchief with some of…my friend’s boyfriend’s…blood on it. Frozen, yes. I’ll send it with Jacob tomorrow.
Marissa: oh NICE. tell her good job, lol. yeah obv might be limited by the sample size/quality but ill see what i can do!

That had been sent at 8:03 on the sixth. Christa would never have believed that Marissa could go two weeks without checking her email, except that they’d met up at the skating rink just after Christmas and had a very interesting conversation (to say the least) over hot chocolate at the railing. The part about Marissa’s estranged father having secretly been a superhero all along didn’t surprise her, somehow. She’d even maintained enough presence of mind to tactfully not say that it might explain some things psychologically. The part where her friend admitted what kind of leverage it’d required to make her take an actual vacation hadn’t gone quite so smoothly.

Not to say that it had gone badly, thankfully. Marissa’d seemed to find her surprise amusing, and didn’t take it personally that she preferred not to hear the details. They had debated for a bit about what really counted as ‘official’ for a relationship now, decided that she and Sebastian hadn’t really talked things over enough yet to count, and left it there.

She seemed very happy. That was nice. Of course, Christa still couldn’t work out what they actually liked about each other. (Jacob assured her she just didn’t know anything about relationships. But what did he know, either?) And it wasn’t anyone’s fault, but the thought of her Lord tugged persistently at her subconscious when contending that people in love really should be gentler about it. Those weren’t thoughts Christa wanted. She didn’t love him—couldn’t love him, wasn’t that obvious?—and the accusations needed to stop.

Maybe in another life, she could have. If they had met at school, in the park, a checkout line…if she didn’t know what he did in his spare time…maybe. If that little flash of awe she saw sometimes came from a face that wasn’t always halfway to twisting into a wicked sneer. If he really were a man, and not the Devil.

Maybe.

But she had chosen to become Lady Radiance, and she wasn’t sure that choice allowed her room to fall in love at all.

So, although it wasn’t exactly gracious of her, she allowed her discomfort to keep her from following anyone else’s business too closely. When Marissa texted to let her know the results were done, it was a surprise to show up just after five and actually meet her on the way out the door.

“Oh! I’m sorry. Isn’t it Friday?” Christa said, stepping back. “I thought you’d at least be here until six.”

“Nope. The doc’s training Intern Josh, so I finally got to negotiate my way out of the unpaid overtime.” Marissa blushed a little. “And, uh, my boyfriend expects to see me sometimes.”

“I see how he might.” Christa smiled, pleased to hear something official. “Don’t worry about it! It can wait until next week.”

She was already unlocking her phone and pulling up her recent calls. “Oh no, trust me, it can’t. Hold on… Yeah, hey. I’m bringing Christa over, so you’d better be decent. …oh, still? … Uh-huh. I see how it is. Well, we will be home when you get in from work, and next time I’m late to supper, you can just deal with it. Bye, nerd.” She looked back to Christa. “It’s cool. I have keys.”

That skeptical look had been intended as a commentary on nerd as a sign-off, but Christabel let it go. “Oh. Already?” she said. That was slightly more official than she’d expected after a month at most.

Marissa shrugged. “It’s an hour and a half back to my place on transit, remember? Besides, he cooks breakfast. Like, in a pan. I’m a simple woman.” …again, that actually raised more questions than it answered, but there were only so many details Christa really wanted to know. She made some noncommittal noise and followed Marissa to the sidewalk.

She remembered vaguely that Baz lived in the neighborhood, but she’d never taken the bus out that way and hadn’t realized how close ‘the neighborhood’ was. Their building sat right at the edge of the commercial zone, and you only had to make a couple of turns heading south before emerging onto an older residential street. They didn’t build neighborhoods like this anymore, she thought, at least not around here; the houses were small, but the yards were huge compared to her own postage-stamp rowhouse garden and the tiny strips on new-development lots. She could hear dogs and children off down a side street. Overall, it couldn’t have been more than a ten-minute walk, and a pleasant one at that, despite the cold.

“So,” Marissa said, getting the front door open. “Hades.”

“Yes?” Christa said.

“I had enough material to do a full genetic profile, so I did, because that’s my favorite part.” The door opened straight onto the living area; Marissa dropped a stack of papers on the coffee table before hefting a basket of laundry off the couch. “You’re welcome, by the way. It’s the black folder.”

Christa sat down and flipped it open to the printout of an unfamiliar and unreadable visualization. “That’s…DNA results, right?”

“Oh, yeah. One hundred per cent human. No relation to either profile from the clones, and completely typical.”

She looked back in surprise. “What do you mean, ‘completely typical’?”

“Exactly that,” Marissa said, coming to take the seat next to her. “Typical. His DNA says he should be around 5’8”, with dark hair and hazel eyes, and he isn’t predisposed to developing atypical abilities. So, you and Jacob have some matching tweaks on the X chromosome—which is its own kind of weird, by the way, since obviously you’re not identical—anyway, that basically ensured you’d both manifest something or other. But there are plenty of typical people with similar but less pronounced mutations, and I have some affected subjects whose genetics are normal, which is why we ended up moving away from the gene therapy route. There’s a couple of blood proteins that ended up being way more reliable as markers for inclusion.”

Thinking of her magic as something physical, rooted in a bodily defect, always made Christa uneasy. Of course Jacob had brought up the chromosomal issue before—had even considered trying to track down some of their maternal relatives for comparative testing, she could only assume at Dr. Marcos’ behest—but she was hardly any more at ease thinking about her dead and beautiful mother, a ghost buried beyond even the reach of memory. Instead, she was trying to imagine her Lord without the trappings of villainy, with human eyes in a less deathly face. Somehow, her mind insisted on making him attractive. “And you found those, then,” she said.

“Well, that’s really what made this so important. I didn’t.”

Christa frowned. “He has no powers?”

“I didn’t say that,” Marissa said, putting her hands up quickly. “Don’t quote me on that. Unless the eyes and height are all illusion work, he still has physical mutations, remember? I just didn’t find any evidence that he has abilities to go with them.”

She twisted her fingers together in her lap, picking at a cuticle even though she knew better. “But there has to be something. There’s the portals, and I—the Lady—we were fighting just a minute before that.”

Marissa shuffled through the stack until she found another folder. “You need to see his iR46-C results.” She met Christa’s blank look with a raised eyebrow. “The marker for psychic influence?”

Christa felt her mouth open a little, but she didn’t know what to say.

“Yeah. It’s…pretty high.” She tapped a finger against a bar chart. “His numbers weren’t as bad as the levels we found in the clones, but this is still way more than anything produced in a registered lab. Christa, I think something’s very wrong here. I mean, I hope not. There could be other explanations. It could just be a flaw in the test, or the metrics—”

“He’s not alone,” she said.

“What?”

The cuticle had ripped, a little drop of blood welling up over her fingernail polish. “He—he told me once that he wasn’t alone. Not really. I assumed…he talks so much about the dead. But maybe that’s not what he meant.”

Neither of them spoke for an uncomfortably long time. Marissa finally said, “You know that’s really creepy, right?”

Christa was still looking at her hands, unsure why she felt her defenses going up. “It’s Hades. That’s fairly mild, for him.”

“I don’t like it,” Marissa said seriously. “I mean, I know I’m just a glorified lab tech, but this isn’t simple attention-seeking villain stuff anymore. If we’re right, those kind of psychic powers would be stupidly dangerous for you to be around, even by proxy.”

“I’ve been fine so far,” Christa protested. “Jacob thinks it’s okay.”

“I know. But…” She fiddled uncomfortably with the chart. “Look, honestly, I can’t tell you for sure how much Jacob was affected by his exposure. His perceptions could be way off base.”

“You said it was a temporary effect!”

“I said that one compound wasn’t persistent,” Marissa said. “All that indicated was that his thoughts weren’t actively being influenced anymore. Didn’t you say he was more protective with you than usual? A few well-placed suggestions could have been enough.”

Christa tightened her hands into fists and then tried to relax them, hoping it would help. “Enough for what?”

“I don’t know. But it’s not adding up, and that bothers me,” she said. “Looking into the original OWA was a dead end, but I don’t know why else everything we find on these guys would be such old tech. And there’s no pattern in the attacks, besides occasionally trying to check up on the treatment we’re working on. Whoever Hades’ puppetmaster is, I can understand why he might want to be able to depower any hero he’s up against. I’d just expect him to have made it more of a priority, if that’s what he really wants. It makes me wonder if we’re not, you know…being played too, somehow.” Marissa pushed a hand up her face in frustration, and Christa realized suddenly how anxious she looked beneath the bubbly veneer. This was serious—really. “I'm not going to tell you what to do, and I’m definitely not telling you not to trust your brother. I’m not. But I want you to be really careful. At least make sure you don’t touch any decomposing clones.”

She nodded reluctantly. “So you did confirm the mechanism?”

“Yeah. I exposed a biosynthetic simulation to a spare sample, and it went straight for the brain. It’s not just produced under psychic control, it’s a vector to allow it.”

Marissa’s phone chimed in another room, and she got up to find it, leaving Christa with her thoughts. Well…she had been wondering, if only half seriously, if her Lord could be a demon. But what if he were possessed by one?

Was that possible? It hadn’t seemed right that someone so cold, so consumed by death and agony, could by turns also be so warm and human. She’d started to wonder, too, if she were only imagining the goodness in him. If all the darkness she saw in him were the force of one personality, and all the light another…then, maybe not. And maybe it would also be possible to free him from the darkness.

“Hey, do you want to stay for dinner?” Marissa said, leaning out of the kitchen. “I’m getting apology tacos.”

Saying yes seemed like it would be the good and friendly thing to do, but Christabel just didn’t think she could stomach that right now. This seemed like such a beautiful life, and she didn’t want to make herself jealous of it. She declined with some excuse about Jake waiting for her at home—he wouldn’t have cared, really, but that was beside the point—and thanked Marissa for her help before leaving to walk to the bus stop.

While she was waiting, she pulled out Sundancer’s card and turned it in her hands, letting it catch the last lashings of winter evening light. If Lady Radiance were really who she wanted to be—if she really wanted to build a life of her own, and disprove Jacob’s idea that powers like theirs were less of a blessing than a disease—it was hard to imagine any better of a first step.

The QR code worked, launching her phone’s browser and a series of rapid redirects until finally landing on an instruction page for securely requesting access to a private Telegram channel. By the time she was home, she had it. Lady Radiance was now a provisional member of the Lighthouse.

✨✨✨

The letter looked almost too beautiful to open.

Christabel didn’t know how it had survived the process, but it had been mailed normally, the New York postmark duly applied over two pastel seashell stamps—the second to account for additional weight, and no wonder. The seafoam-colored envelope was made of a heavy, textured linen paper, decorated with the faint outlines of waving kelp, and sealed with green wax stamped onto a sky-blue ribbon. There was no return address, but her own full name and address were handwritten across the front in soft cursive and dark blue ink. It looked like something she might have put together herself if she were in a mermaid mood, except that the design stamped into the wax was a pair of fairy wings.

Eventually, curiosity overcame admiration and brought her to pick up the letter opener to pop the seal. The matching paper inside, a shade darker, was only a single half-sheet. Christa pulled it out and silently read the short message in gathering surprise.

I know who you are. We need to talk about Lord Hades.

I will meet you at 10:30 next Sunday morning, February 16, in the First Ladies’ Water Garden. Until then, please keep this between us. He cannot know that I’ve found you.

—Sylph

She heard Jacob’s footsteps and hastily dropped the letter into a desk drawer.

“Hey, you checked the mail, right?” he asked, pausing in the hall. “Was there anything?”

“No,” she said, too easily. “Sorry.”

“Oh. All right, well, thanks.”

Christa pulled the drawer open again and looked down at the paper. He wouldn’t have cared about her mail, anyway, so surely there was no reason she needed to mention it. It wasn’t really a lie, right?

No, it couldn’t have been a lie. She would never have lied. It wasn’t because she thought of herself as a good person—just that she’d never really understood how the world could function without the truth. Lies destroyed everything; they couldn’t possibly be worth it…that was what she’d always believed, at least until recently. That belief was hard to reconcile with the dissembling required by her double life, and maybe the tension was just getting to her.

She shut the drawer one last time. In any case, this meeting was a welcome development. Christabel had more questions than she knew what to do with, and perhaps this Sylph would be able to give her some answers.

<#4 // To Science! Girl #6 || Directory || #6>

Thanks so much for reading! Radiance #6, Where The People Are, is scheduled to go up on November 14. In the meantime, you might consider brushing up on your Hans Christian Andersen...or you can just follow me and my big mouth on Notes.

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