it was the closest anyone had ever been to him without dying or being in his thrall. Even his followers, the ones we’d gotten to question, didn’t seem to know much about him.
SENATOR GOO: I understand this is hard for you to talk about, Ms. Andrews. I was hoping that you might try so that the official record can reflect reality as accurately as possible.
SLOANE ANDREWS: Yeah. Well—the real explanation is a little more complicated than the one I’ve given before.
SENATOR GOO: I think everyone here understands that you have shared what you were able to thus far, Ms. Andrews.
SLOANE ANDREWS: I guess so. Well—it wasn’t so much that I thought just any of us down on that bridge would be able to lure him there. And that’s what it was—luring. Figuring out what bait he wouldn’t be able to resist. Which, uh . . . was me. I was the bait.
SENATOR GOO: Because . . .
ESTHER PARK: Because he was kind of obsessed with her, okay?
SLOANE ANDREWS: I think he—he said we were similar. Can we move on? I don’t get it either, I promise. The guy was—
ESTHER PARK: A couple bananas short of a bunch.
INES MEJIA: Or a couple bananas in excess of a bunch.
SLOANE ANDREWS: It doesn’t really matter why it worked, anyway; we just knew it would. So we all suited up—
MATTHEW WEEKES: Which is to say, we got our artifacts, which we had all acquired as part of our previous work with ARIS—
SENATOR GOO: And these artifacts were intended for what purpose?
MATTHEW WEEKES: Weapons. Magical weapons, to be exact. ARIS had outfitted us with objects of legend, most of which had been generously provided by other governments around the world. The Golden Bough and the Ring of Gyges were on loan from Greece; the Gjallarhorn came in from Sweden; the Freikugeln—magic bullets—had been taken from Germany during World War II by [redacted], so they were easy enough—
ESTHER PARK: [redacted] prefers if you say “allegedly.”
MATTHEW WEEKES: Allegedly taken, sure. And Sloane had Koschei’s Needle. It turned out that the Ring of Gyges was useless to us, but the other items channeled magic somewhat reliably, so we figured if we used them all at once, we’d have a higher likelihood of actually doing something. We’d gotten better at consistency, but it doesn’t hurt to have a contingency plan—
INES MEJIA: I stayed where I was, to make sure nobody left the condo. I must have cleaned that window twenty times, almost ran out of Windex—
ESTHER PARK: Matt and I took hiding spots at either end of the bridge. I was in the tower north of the river, and Matt was south of it, on the river walk. Albie wanted to come, but since he was still pretty beat up, we left him behind. Tried to, anyway.
SENATOR GOO: And where is Mr. Summers today?
MATTHEW WEEKES: He’s—he wasn’t feeling well. He was really sorry to miss this, but he cleared me to tell his part of things. Anyway, Esther and I had taken up our positions, and Sloane—
SLOANE ANDREWS: I set out alone, on foot. I stopped in the middle of the bridge. With the Needle. I wanted—my intention was to do something that was hard to ignore in order to lure him out. I wasn’t sure what it would be, but magic sometimes takes a shape of its own, as if it doesn’t matter what we want from it. A bright light came out of the Needle, kind of like—a thread, I guess. Golden. Up to the sky. There’s footage of it in the official record—
SENATOR GOO: Several bystanders submitted footage of this incident in advance of this hearing, and they are labeled Exhibit 23, A through E.
SLOANE ANDREWS: Anyway, it worked. He came down. He wasn’t subtle about it either. Blew open the side of Trump Tower and floated down like he was wire-flying in a stage play or whatever. Landed right in front of me. He spoke to me. I don’t—I’m not sure what he said. Something about me summoning him, about how he knew it was a trap but he needed something from me. But I never found out what that was because—
ESTHER PARK: We weren’t going to give him time to do anything to her; we acted right away. I had the Horn, and Matt had the Bough, and Ines was—
INES MEJIA: Running as fast as fucking possible down five million flights of stairs, because the goddamn elevator stopped working the second he blew out