Chapter 33

  Heidi

  “Do you want to go home?” asked Ruth. His voice was a consolidation of hundreds, maybe thousands, of rapid high-pitched clicking sounds. The sound grated on her ears like nails across a chalkboard, as though someone had intentionally designed the most unbearable voice. It was horrible to listen to. But Heidi liked Ruth. Twice her height, his gleaming insectile body curved backwards and up like a scorpion’s tail, his many claws clicking and his fierce mandibles constantly chewing, Ruth was nevertheless the most human thing she had met on her moon.

  Heidi nodded in response to his question, knowing Ruth would detect the movement even though he watched the other direction. She took the opportunity to readjust her body armor. It fit her almost too well. It had evidently been fitted for her before she had even arrived at the prison. She didn’t like that thought.

  “We need you,” Ruth chattered back. Each of his words was like a multitude of cold skittering legs in her ears. Heidi suppressed the urge to cringe every time he spoke.

  She shrugged instead. It didn’t look to her like any of them needed her for anything. She still had no clue what she was doing here. A prison, they said. But for whom? No one knew, or if they did, they had yet to tell her. She, who was supposedly the Warden.

  “What about you?” she asked. “Home.”

  Ruth chuckled, and this time Heidi could not avoid a shiver of revulsion at the sound. Her hands twitched; they wanted to cover her ears by reflex. “This is my home now,” he said. Heidi’s brows drew together at this. Ruth, like the rest of them, seemed to hate this place.

  Heidi raised the lantern as the blue gorilla returned. She had given up on his name; she swore it changed every time she heard it. He was now just “the blue gorilla,” though this was hardly an adequate description. It did not account for his scales, his claws, his fangs, his extra arm. The lantern, a wire-mesh basket of glimmering pink crystals suspended by a leather strap, created only a weak circle of dim, flickering light. They all had headlights, but using them risked drawing in the rue. Their surroundings were not all dark; some clusters of lorn shards up ahead glowed like the lantern, revealing small sections of the hard, angular corridor.

  The blue gorilla adjusted easily as gravity shifted. In this enclosed space, no one could discern the reason for such shifts, nor predict their arrival. Maybe a huge lorn was drifting past, pulling this smaller cluster into its field. Maybe the corridor in which they stood was rotating. Maybe one of the frequent collisions that shuddered through the area indicated that it had been knocked off course. No one could say; they could only adapt. Heidi was already getting used to this. Sometimes she hardly noticed when gravity moved around her.

  With the gorilla returned, nodding his scaly head silently to indicate that the way he’d scouted was clear, they moved off. The gorilla loped along smoothly on his five remaining limbs. Ruth slithered after him, two dozen legs tapping softly on the almost-metal surface. The creature called Fifteen by the others stalked after them by rolling its spherical body through the air, supported by many whiplike tendrils that flashed out to catch its perpetual fall. Heidi followed after them, feeling clumsy by comparison. Bahamut, her eight-legged serpentine shadow, moved silently behind her. Severard, the tall faceless mannequin-thing, its eerily thin and many-jointed body wrapped in layers of parchment, brought up the rear. It stooped low to trail after them, for its full height must have been eleven or twelve feet. Yet Heidi had seen it fold up to fit easily into a gap through which she herself could barely squeeze. The others didn’t seem to like Severard, not that it mattered.

  Four freaks, and herself and Bahamut. Freaks yes, without a doubt, but she was comfortable around them. Perhaps they were all so far-off from being human, both physically and mentally, that she felt no pressure. She could be anything. She could be anything she wanted to, around them, and they would not judge her. There were expectations; she was, after all, their leader. Or so they said. But the strange sense of freedom stirring within her could not be quelled.

  They turned down another angular corridor, then traversed a wide pit of razor-sharp spines the size of palm trees. Heidi floated across by manipulating gravity, but all the others demonstrated an ability to get across just fine on their own. Despite her strange gravitational powers, she was still the weak link in this squad.

  They delved down, deeper into the Metal Moon. Things narrowed as they went. Distances shrank. It became darker, the air colder, the spaces claustrophobic. More rue prowled here; they cried out periodically in the distance. Every wail of the rue was an icy knife caressing her heart.

  Heidi’s team stopped to investigate any remains they came across. The first was a set of long-dead corpses, desiccated nearly to dust, any useful valuables long since taken. Bale thorn grew on their bones, dangerous to touch. The sight of the bodies shook Heidi, though not as much as it would have if any of the bodies had been recognizably human. It reminded her of their raid on the Darkworlders the day before. Or had it been just a day? There was no way of knowing for sure. It felt like a week. But she didn’t like to think about that. She had killed someone, or something, and she didn’t want to think about it. She wanted to act, not think. Stick to what she was good at.

  The second remnant they found was a crashed vessel of some kind, its charred wood and scarred metal wounded and twisted in among a tangle of lorn shards. It was more recent, though there was no sign of either bodies or survivors. It looked oddly like a large sailing ship to Heidi. At least, it had something like a sail–a metallic sheet which now draped over the wreckage. And why was it partially wood? Where had it come from?

  Such questions flitted briefly through her mind and were at once dismissed as irrelevant. There was too much strangeness here to be concerned about every detail. She needed to focus on what mattered. She needed to emulate Ruth, Fifteen, Severard, and the gorilla. Out here in what they called the Depths, she needed to focus on survival. Don’t ask why, that was the rule. Do or die. Act. They just did what they had to, and that was all.

  No, they also did whatever she told them to, though she had yet to take advantage of this loyalty. She had never been in command before. She felt entirely unprepared. Besides which, it was simply idiotic that she, somehow, was in charge here. Fortunately, her guards knew what to do without her telling them.

  They scavenged the ship. Ruth discovered a stockpile of stored food in rectangular cans. It was a thick brown soup, and to Heidi’s delight it was very spicy, with a strong fishy taste. They ate together inside the groaning wreckage of the ship. Severard kept watch outside, presumably because it didn’t eat. How could it, without a face? She watched the others curiously to see how they handled eating the soup. The gorilla ate by slurping down the soup as though the brick-sized tins were spoonfuls. It was he that cracked the cans open for the rest of them, his fearsome strength easily able to pry back the tough metal lids. Ruth’s consumption of the soup was frightful to behold, and Heidi had to look away when it occurred to her that it looked like Ruth was chewing up bloody gore. Only Fifteen ate neatly. The creature extended several thin proboscises into an open can. It didn’t look to Heidi as though much food was actually consumed, yet at the end there was nothing left in Fifteen’s can. It was, in fact, perfectly clean.

  Heidi finished first, scarfing down the fishy soup. The intensity of the spice made her wipe tears from her eyes. Ruth paused in the midst of his grisly evisceration of his soup can and turned his multi-faceted gaze upon her. Each of the many facets glinted with a purple reflection of the lantern. His mandibles worked, clicking and sawing. Heidi had to put a hand to her mouth and look away from that unsettling sight. Words coalesced from the manifold chittering of his voice: “…something amiss, Warden?”

  The gorilla grunted, his gleaming golden eyes flashing at her from the darkness. “Tears,” he said, his voice a wet rumble. “Sorrow.”

  Ruth nodded in understanding, then extended himself toward Heidi in what was probably a show of concern, though the sight of such a creature approaching in such a way awakened a primal dread in her guts. “No,” she said. Her voice sounded plain and small compared to theirs. “It’s just the soup. It’s hot.”

  All three of them stopped and scrutinized their cans of soup. Their visible confusion made Heidi smile. Even Fifteen reacted, which constituted the first proof Heidi had seen that Fifteen could actually understand her. “I mean, it’s spicy,” she clarified.

  The gorilla grumbled something in a language Heidi did not know. Ruth made a rattling, sighing noise (of understanding?) and turned back to his food.

  Heidi wrapped her coat tightly around herself as she watched them. As the heat of the rich paste faded, the chill returned. It was cooling as they descended; she should have put on another layer under the armor. None of her companions seemed bothered by the cold. She watched as Fifteen finished its soup, then rolled through the air to Ruth and began climbing all over the monstrosity. Fifteen’s tiny supporting filaments darted and whipped through the air. Ruth mostly ignored Fifteen, but intermittently swatted at the much smaller creature with his formidable claws. Twice he made contact, and the black mass of Fifteen tumbled through the air to softly strike a wall before rolling back onto Ruth. Heidi watched this interaction closely in an attempt to understand it. Were they playing a game? Having some contest? Was Fifteen annoying Ruth like a younger sibling? Or were they fighting? Heidi had no idea; she knew so little. Whatever it was, they did it silently, and it did not interrupt Ruth’s meal.

  Everyone searched the rest of the crashed vessel after they ate. Parts of the ship were locked off. Instead of cutting through with lasers, which would risk attracting the rue, the gorilla simply broke down the doors. His strength was something terrific. Heidi watched in awe as he punched a clawed hand through an inch of corrugated metal barring them from the lower levels and then peeled it back the way that Heidi might rip up thick cardboard. This creature had torn apart Darkworlders, though she didn’t enjoy that memory. This had attacked her when she first met it. And this is what Bahamut had literally disarmed. She wondered whether Bahamut had just gotten lucky in that fight, or had simply been too quick. Anyway, Heidi felt bad about that arm now. But as always, as with everything, the gorilla just didn’t seem to care. No fucks to give. None at all.

  Something odd happened while Heidi investigated a disorderly cabin near the hold. Papery curtains hung throughout the room, and one of them caught fire while Heidi pushed through them, gun-first. It flared abruptly into a bloom of lurid flame. She fell backwards with a yelp of surprise. The room went from dimly-lit by her lantern to glaring brightness in an instant.

  Heidi rolled to her feet and aimed frantically with her weapon, seeking the source of the fire. She saw nothing; the room was too small to hide another person. Bahamut appeared, coiled between her and the fire, risen up like a giant cobra with deadly claws. He hissed at the flames.

  The fire went out as swiftly and unexpectedly as it had come while Heidi backed to the door. It had consumed only a small part of the curtain.

  A slithering, skittering rush of clicking legs and glistening carapace. Ruth was there, his strange body arched and ready just as Bahamut’s had been, though several times as fearful. Ruth towered protectively over Heidi as she stood in the doorframe, and he peered into the smoky room.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Fire,” she said. “It came suddenly, then stopped.”

  “The Script?” he cried, alarm evident in his hideous voice. Claws closed around Heidi’s limbs and drew her back into the hallway with irresistible force. He spoke urgently. “Was it purple?” He sounded afraid, and he still interposed himself between her and the empty room as though it might contain a bomb.

  “Um. No?” It had not been violet. “Just normal fire. Well…”

  Ruth sighed (clicking, rasping) in relief, and he leaned forward to peer into the smoky room.

  look, came a faint whisper. the curtain.

  Nearby, Heidi perceived the vague blackness of Fifteen’s body. She still could not tell what kind of creature Fifteen was, or even what it felt like. If she touched Fifteen, would it be fuzzy? Hard and scaly like Bahamut? Would she get a handful of tiny quills? Would she…not touch anything at all? She didn’t know, and the curiosity passed in an instant. It didn’t really matter. It mattered that Fifteen could talk, though. That was new.

  She heeded Fifteen’s words and investigated the burned curtain. She stepped through the smoke and held up her glowing pink lantern for a better look. The fire had burned a strange angular symbol into the curtain. It was about the size of Fifteen, sea-turtle-sized, but beyond that…

  “What does it mean, Warden?” Ruth chittered.

  She reached out and touched the symbol. It looked too irregular to be a pattern, too complicated to be a letter. Maybe it was a word in some language. Fifteen whispered something behind her, but it was too quiet to make out.

  “It’s not the Script,” replied the deep, grating voice of the gorilla. Heidi nearly jumped. He was so big, so why did she never hear him coming? “We are safe. The Burning God, looks like.”

  “Yes, the Bloody Serpent,” agreed Ruth. “Can you read it, friend?”

  The gorilla, who apparently had a gift for linguistics, could not.

  Heidi raised her phone automatically to take a picture, but hesitated. Should she risk it?

  “Do it,” said the gorilla. “It might matter.”

  “Might?” said Ruth. “If it is from a god, it matters.”

  The gorilla’s disdainful grunt showed what he thought of that idea. Fifteen said something, but Heidi could not hear it. Ruth nodded, and the gorilla grunted again. Even Alan did not have such expressive grunts. Heidi thought that the gorilla could hold an entire conversation without speaking a word. And had Fifteen been speaking this whole time, but Heidi just hadn’t heard it? She guessed her ear had to be nearly touching the creature for her to discern its speech.

  She took a picture and used the flash to make sure she got a good one.

  They waited a bit longer. After all, there was still a lot of free curtain-space in there if the Burning God was interested in continuing to communicate. But nothing happened. They continued through the ship.

  Heidi descended with Ruth to the hold. “I didn’t know there were gods,” she said as they picked through the mess of broken debris for anything useful. Heidi didn’t know what she was looking for, and merely trusted that she would know something useful when she saw it.

  “There are,” said Ruth. “Or were, according to some.”

  “What…” Heidi wondered what it was she wanted to ask. “What…do they do?” That was probably not the best way of phrasing it, but if she waited around to think of non-stupid ways of saying things, then she’d never speak.

  “Nothing,” said the bone-rumbling voice of the gorilla, nearby. This time Heidi did jump, and more embarrassing, squeaked in alarm at the sudden sound. God-dammit, how did he do that? “Waste no thought on their like,” the gorilla continued.

  “Well…what about this Burning God?” she asked. “Clearly…um, he just…I can’t just ignore that, right?”

  “The Serpent is strong,” said Ruth. “Passionate.”

  a fool

  “A destroyer,” said the gorilla, “of friend and enemy alike, as much by arrogance as by her blade. Spare no thought, Warden. You are better without her words. Ah…here.”

  Heidi turned to look at the gorilla as he pulled something from the wreckage.

  “The gods matter, Cshlatksht,” Ruth said. “They have a role to play yet.”

  “With luck, that role will be to perish in the Void, Ch-grean,” the gorilla replied. ‘Ch-grean’ was what the gorilla called Ruth. Heidi did not know if this was the name of Ruth’s race, a title, a term of familiarity, or possibly an insult. It could have been any of those. The only thing Heidi was sure of between those two was that the gorilla gave the orders.

  The gorilla heaved up a chunk of metal from among the debris. It was a flat, smooth, oblong strip of steely metal. Stood on end, it was a bit taller and wider than Heidi, though parts of the edges were jagged and torn, marring its shape. The gorilla held it out flat and let go. The metal remained in the air and slid gently to one side with the subtle shifting of gravity.

  “Noqual,” said Ruth. “The Bleak Machine is built of it.” Ruth reached out with a sinister claw and tapped the metal. It rang lightly at his touch and spun like the compass of a needle, but remained level.

  Heidi realized what it reminded her of: a surfboard, floating on the waves.

  “This is useful,” said the gorilla. “Especially for you, Warden.”

  Heidi nodded. She reached out and laid a hand upon the grainy grey surface of the cold metal. It quivered, slightly vibrating.

  Something crashed at the other end of the hold. Everyone reacted in a flash: the gorilla raised up a large piece of scrap metal for shielding; Ruth placed himself between Heidi and the noise; Fifteen remained unseen in the darkness. Heidi crouched and aimed her weapon, the one that shot crystals suitable for harming the rue.

  It was Bahamut, and the crash came from him dislodging broken crates that had piled up against the wall near an exit door. He had found something written on the wall. The others gathered around to have a look as Bahamut cleared away the rest of the debris. Four lines of text had been scrawled near the hatch, hastily smeared with some thick black substance that smelled like motor oil. Heidi cautiously reached out to touch it. It did seem like motor oil. Thick and black. Knowing the Metal Moon, it was probably something’s blood.

  The text read:

  go back

  go back

  he’s coming

  Abraham Black

  Heidi knew about Abraham Black. She recalled, with an uncanny perfection of memory, being there when Black had killed Alan. It had only been a dream, or some kind of vision, yet the experience remained clear and real in her memory. She herself had been partially shot, and the wound on her side was still tender.

  Fifteen had drifted close to the words and appeared to be testing them as Heidi had done, when without warning they caught fire. Not all at once; the bottom right corner, the ‘A’ in ‘Abraham,’ caught first. Since it was the lowest letter in the set, its flames spread as they grew to the adjacent letters. The oily substance burned weakly, the flames dull and red, yet they eventually consumed the entire message. Dim though the fire was, it did not decrease the dramatic effect of burning words on the wall.

  “Is this,” asked Heidi, “also the Burning God?”

  Ruth skittered forward and tapped the wall right through the flames, his chitinous claw unharmed by the weak fire. “I do not understand,” he said, “but I believe so.” His words, calm and sensible, were at odds with the horrific sound of his voice.

  The gorilla grunted. “Is the Bloody Serpent in the habit of scrawling warnings on walls, godseeker?”

  ‘Godseeker’ must have been an insult, or perhaps a challenge, because Ruth became very still at the word; even his ever-chewing mandibles stopped.

  “I know this Abraham Black,” the gorilla continued.

  Fifteen said something. Heidi, though listening carefully, only caught the words “ the Darkworld? ”

  The gorilla nodded his scaly, crested head. “A feared man.”

  “I do not understand,” Ruth repeated to himself, bowing his head down until it nearly came level to Heidi’s.

  “I know Black too,” said Heidi. They all looked at her: the fierce golden eyes of the gorilla and shiny multifaceted eyes of Ruth, and the eyeless yet still heavy gazes of Bahamut and Fifteen. It occurred to Heidi that if she from a few days ago was suddenly here, with these creatures peering intently at her in just such a way, she would be terrified. They were all monsters. Had she forgotten? Had she already gotten used to it?

  “I saw him…” she continued. She had more than just seen him. She had experienced his presence in a way that gave her nightmares. “If he was here, there would be bodies. Bullet holes. He uses guns.” She looked at her own gun, a weapon that shot crystals. Her actual gun was still with her, in her backpack, its ammunition low. She had three knives now, because you could never have too many. Her greatest weapon and surest defense by far, however, crawled silently alongside her on eight deadly clawed legs. None of the monsters with her carried any weapons that she saw, except for a small wire-covered cannon strapped to the gorilla’s back that she had yet to see him use.

  The gorilla grunted. This may have been a command, because Ruth and Fifteen headed back up to the top deck. Heidi followed while tugging the ragged shape of floating metal behind her. It came easily, sliding through the air like…well, like a surfboard across water. The gravitational tides made it pitch and roll as they went.

  Near the upper deck they met Severard. He had folded himself up into a Heidi-sized packet that picked carefully through the corridors on spindly many-folding arms and legs. Each of his pale spidery fingers was longer than her forearm. Ink stained those fingers, and Heidi saw for the first time that Severard had drawn eyes of all shapes and sized onto the parchment which wrapped his entire body like a mummy. She saw half a dozen eyes, some on his elbows, a couple on his body, and one on his blank face–this one centered but sideways. He was actually seeing with them; he moved so that the drawn eyes looked all around.

  Severard pointed a crooked, spindly finger at something behind Heidi.

  Bahamut hissed. Somewhere above, Ruth made a furious, and curiously piercing, screeching sound.

  Another sound drowned out all others: a deep rumbling cry. If the keening of an enormous whale, deep and resonant, had been distorted with audio editing software such as Eric had shown her, until the sound was twisted and tortured into an almost-human wail of sorrow, that was this sound. It petrified her; it shook her through. She could not move. It wouldn’t have mattered.

  …AFRAID…

  Everything shook. The battered, broken craft groaned, splintered, shattered. Something altered gravity with a suddenness and violence far beyond Heidi’s abilities. She just had time to be surprised that something other than her was changing “down” before the panic of falling overtook her.

  Metal, wood, canvas and paper, bolts and splinters and bits of broken lorn shards, all of it swirled around her, filled her vision. “Down” changed again, turning her fall into a swinging curve. The sound of the great lorn shards crashing and chiming thundered so loud that she clapped her hands over her ears. She felt them colliding, cracking, breaking, shattering. It sounded awful, the very essence of discord.

  Plummeting into darkness, not knowing where she went, not able to see, not even able to tell whether she was crying out in the chaos, she reached blindly and tried to negate her fall, to make a compass. It was futile. She lacked the control.

  Lorn shards loomed like mountains in the distance, their deep purple and blue and black sides as smooth as glass, hard as metal, vast as plains, marked with forests of metal, fractured chasms, hard edges. Beyond glittered lights–not stars, but tiny specks of glowing bale-thorn, the kind that grew on dead bodies and remained even after the bodies had vanished to dust. They made their own pinkish galaxies in the distance.

  Gravity shifted again, this time naturally, as she fell into the oddly-shaped gravity well of another shard. Her course arced, her vision twisted. Somewhere, something burned. Somewhere, something screamed. Maybe it was her.

  She saw a great darkness, not the darkness of shadow but the essence of darkness itself. It was a rue, far away now yet clearly visible, outlined in fire, the remains of the strange sailing ship crunched apart in its fathomless jaws. It was big, far too big, and a golden eye glared at her across the kilometers now separating them. That eye was a color that Heidi knew: the sickly golden-orange of the Bleak Machine. And the rue, like Bahamut, did not have eyes. Yet she saw, looking into the glimmering gold there in the deepest darkness, a passionless threat. Had she been there, instead of far away across a sea of open space now littered with debris, she would be dead. Bahamut or no Bahamut, gorilla or no gorilla, Ruth or no Ruth, she would be pierced to nothing in that blackness. It hated her; its hate slithered under her skin and trembled in her fragile bones.

  She landed slantways on something, slammed into it on her side. A lungful of air left her in a pained gasp. She wondered whether she had just dislocated her shoulder, then spun through the air for a full second or two before landing again. Momentum and the angle caused her to skid along the slick surface. She tried desperately to catch her breath, to see what lay ahead. She didn’t want to die impaled on a random spike. Where was Bahamut?

  She saw the glowing crystals only a moment before they tore into her right calf. The bale thorns, the ones you weren’t supposed to touch, smoldered with pinkish-purple energy.

  The pain shot up her leg and into her chest. She still couldn’t breathe. Everything went empty grey: her vision, her hearing, her smell. All calm. All silent.

  He had earned every moment of his pain. Adrift on a dark sea, afraid and alone in a tiny vessel, dying, he sobbed. His tears trickled into his blood.

  He had betrayed his sister, the Countess of Ulreach, for a love that proved false.

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  He had manipulated his best friend, thinking himself a great tactician, yet his pride had gotten that friend killed.

  He had murdered his own brother in an attempt to undo what he had done. An evil man, his brother? Yes, some said. Yet it had been in vain.

  How had this happened? A simple lie, a single moment of arrogance, a rash decision. Perhaps, one lustful thought. But how? How could something so small become something so great? At what point could he have no longer stopped the terrible cascade of events?

  At any point, he whispered to himself. You were never in control, but you could have ended it at any time. But how? By telling the truth at last? He was too much of a coward for that, and too much of a coward to kill himself. And how many had paid for his cowardice? How many paid still? The city crumbled, aflame.

  He wished for nothing more than a chance to change it, to change everything. He would have given anything, anything at all, to go back. To undo what had been done.

  But there was none of that. No redemption for him, no succor, no spark of aid or light of hope. He did not deserve them, and he understood that for once the gods had given what a man deserved.

  He sobbed in the bottom of his boat, pitiless stars above and equally cold waters below. It hurt. It hurt so much. He couldn’t tell the difference anymore between the pain of the wound in his chest killing him and the pain of guilt. Both pains consumed him; turned him into an empty shell. He desired only an end; he wanted that darkness, the relief, the respite. Yet it did not come, and all he had done played in his mind over and over again, relentlessly, tormenting him.

  He wanted to go back. He wanted it to stop. He wanted another chance. He wanted it to end. He was sorry. He wanted to tell them he was sorry. He wanted to tell everyone. But there was no one to tell, not anymore, and even if they lived, they weren’t here to watch him die. No one would ever know, nor care.

  Around and around, again and again. It seemed interminable. It did not stop, nor did it end. Why didn’t it end?

  He wept, and each sob wracking him with pain, each a reminder.

  Heidi shivered and sobbed onto the cold floor. So cold. So cold out here on the dark sea. Dying…?

  The tides of gravity tugged at her, both like and unlike the rocking of waves at sea. Wait. Where was she? Who was she?

  Wait.

  “Lookth like it wath a nathty one,” said a voice.

  Heidi reached up a trembling hand and wiped tears and snot from her face. She opened her eyes and saw only meaningless angular shapes the colors of tar and blood and coral. She was lying on her side on one of the shapes. It was hard and cold. She was not at sea, not dying cold and alone after having betrayed everyone, lost everything. She was cold, though.

  “Heidi,” she breathed as she wrapped her coat tight around herself and shivered into it. “Sheppard. Csezlaw. Chess-waffle.” She feared the image of a stack of waffles playing chess would never disassociate from her name now. But she was in no mood to smile about that. She hurt everywhere. She couldn’t see. What had happened? She had been someone else. It had been awful.

  “Ith that your name?” asked the voice. It was a girlish voice, but something was off about it. She sounded unconcerned, yet there was a harsh edge to her words. She was tense. “Tho she wathn’t lying.”

  Heidi, not yet sure whether she could stand, rolled herself over to face the speaker, grimacing at the pain in her side. Just a bruise, she thought, but it was right on top of the gunshot wound. Her calf burned brightly with pain, but Heidi could tell that it was little more than a flesh wound. Blood still leaked from the gashes there, but slowly. The girl who had spoken was only visible as a black mound huddled beside a pile of the glowing thorn as though it were a campfire. Something else moved in the darkness behind the shadowy figure. That creature was as big as a horse, with a feathery wing, a long serpentine tail, and a half-dozen small dark shapes drifting in the gloom.

  “What…happened?” Her voice cracked, both from dryness and from crying. Heidi pushed herself to a sitting position and resumed her efforts to make herself presentable by wiping away the tears and buttoning her coat over the body armor. Maybe, she thought, the body armor could be made a little more…thorough.

  The small huddle by the fire reached out a gnarled, knotted hand and gestured at the glowing pile of bale thorns beside it. “You mutht have touched a memory. Thethe are regretth. Thorrowth. Painth. They fethter here. Ath I thay, it lookth like it wath a thtrong one. Too bad you didn’t bring any with you. I would have liked to try it.” Her lisp and her way of speaking were at-odds with her youthful voice. The figure turned toward the glow, and a mouthful of crooked teeth glinted along with the dark gleam of an eye from under the hood.

  Heidi shuddered involuntarily just thinking about the experience. It had been so horrible. Such sorrow. She now felt the same mingled relief and horror she did when waking from a terrible, terrible dream. The despair lingered.

  “You are thirthty,” said the huddled creature across the glowing thorn. “Here.” She reached for a lidded mug at her side without taking her eye off of Heidi. She shuffled over the ground, her movements painfully awkward.

  The figure offered the ceramic mug when it came close. Steam curled up in the darkness, lit pink by the thorn-fire. Something hot, thank god. The mysterious figure’s gnarled hand trembled, and Heidi took the cup with an equally shaky grasp. The stranger’s hand snapped back as soon as Heidi held the mug, as though fearful that their fingers touch. She shuffled clumsily to where she had been sitting. She nearly fell, and beat savagely at her own body with a small fist before collapsing with a clatter.

  The drink was hot and sweet, with a spicy undertone. Heidi gulped it down without hesitation, holding the clay mug close as though to leach out all the warmth she could. Her trembling slowed, the urge to weep lessened, and even the pain in her abdominal muscles from keeping her sitting upright faded. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Not very cauthiouth, are we?” the stranger asked. “That kind of carelethneth will get you killed here. Well. It already hath, I thuppothe.” The figure reached carefully into its robes. The way she moved made Heidi wonder if she was badly injured. It made Heidi wonder, in view of the ominous statement she had just uttered, whether Heidi could take her in a fight, even in Heidi’s current condition. Heidi tensed when the girl revealed a small dark object, but it was only a pipe. The girl put it to her shadowed mouth, and thin lines of dark smoke trickled up into the greater darkness around them. The scent reached Heidi: sharp, acrid, pungent. A battery-acid smell.

  “What is your name?” Heidi asked, trying to figure out whether she had any of her weapons. It didn’t feel like it. She had very little with her. She couldn’t even find her phone.

  “My name ith Vyricth. And thith ith Cathie,” she gestured with the pipe at the larger pale figure, watchful and silent in the darkness beyond.

  “I’m Heidi.” She tried to sound friendly and non-threatening.

  “I know who you are, child of gravity. Heidi Theppard Cheth-waffle.” She put the pipe back to her unseen mouth, and with her other hand held something up to the dim light, something pale and bright.

  Heidi started, and with a fumbling hand checked for the hexagonal pendant around her neck. It was gone. “That’s mine,” she said, trying to stay calm.

  “Wath.”

  Heidi struggled to her feet, fighting the pain.

  “Thorry, but you’ll thtay right there.” Heidi’s feet clapped together, and before she hit the ground her wrists met painfully behind her back. She grunted when she fell upon the hard surface. Her shoulder–but what was one more bruise? At least it wasn’t the shoulder that might be dislocated. At least she was spreading the injuries around.

  Heidi struggled against whatever force bound her, but all her strength only served to hurt her wrists. She growled and glared at the figure by the fire. Vyricth. Or was it Vyrix, because of the lisp?

  “We’ll have none of that, now,” the girl continued. Her ugly hand reached down beside her and showed Heidi a crooked metal blade. Cold fear washed over Heidi, and she stilled at once. The figure turned the blade to make sure Heidi saw the pink light glinting off of it.

  “I exthpect a good prithe for you,” she said. “It would be a thame to have to thtab you.”

  Price? Shit. “What do you want?” asked Heidi. And where is Bahamut?

  “Your little friend can’t find you here,” said the girl.

  Heidi paused in her struggling. Could this Vyrix read her thoughts?

  “Only a little. Not the thubtle oneth. But you don’t theem to have many of thothe.” Again Heidi saw the shine of a mouthful of crooked teeth.

  “What are you?” asked Heidi. She had to keep Vyrix talking. Wait, the girl would know she was thinking that! Damn it!

  Vyrix chuckled. “It’th no matter. I can anthwer your quethtionth.” She leaned closer. “I don’t mind.” She reached up a hand and pulled back her hood. The thorn-fire glowed brighter with light.

  Vyrix was horribly ugly, the more so for being so nearly human. Scattered growths of cracked black stone like volcanic pumice marred her dark brown skin. Her misshapen hand was entirely made of pieced-together chunks of this black rock. Her broad gash of a mouth held only half her teeth, and those crooked few that remained were nearly as darkly stained. Only one of her dark eyes peeked out through the coral-like protrusions, and it gleamed with a pinkish light. Her hair tangled down around her in clumpy, uneven braids that twitched of their own accord. Yet were it not for all this, she would have looked like a young black girl, the kind you might see on Earth. Heidi could not look for long at that leering grin, and Vyrix let out a hacking cough of triumph when Heidi turned her eyes away.

  “Yeth, that’th it. Turn away. Join the rankth. I’m only a curthed witch.” She pulled the hood back over her face and Heidi let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

  “What…are you going to do?” Heidi tried again to pull at the invisible bonds which held her, but to no avail. She was helpless here, alone with a madwoman armed with a knife.

  “I won’t kill you. The Dark World can handle that well enough, I think. They want you, you and your friendth. I will give them you, and in ecthchange get thomething I want. Bathic economicth, yeth?”

  The Dark World? Heidi felt a chill wash over her. She didn’t want to go there. She couldn’t.

  The creature that Vyrix had called Cazzie suddenly moved. A wing flapped, claws scraped, a tail slithered. It whistled a soft, weird warble that vibrated in Heidi’s teeth. One of the objects drifting in the air around it came into the light and approached Vyrix. Heidi saw with mild shock that it was an eye. An eyeball the size of a golf ball, dry and veiny, floating through the air. It turned to look at Heidi as it passed near the light and into Vyrix’s hood. A moment later, two eyes glinted out at Heidi from the witch’s shadowed face.

  “They are near,” said Vyrix. She put away her pipe and Heidi’s pendant, and gripped the crooked knife. She now seemed on-guard.

  They waited in silence. Heidi desperately tried to think of what she could do. Surely there was a way out of this situation; she just had to find it. She couldn’t move, she had no allies…

  Oh. Right, of course. Stupid! Stupid, stupid…

  “Thtop that,” said Vyrix. “What are you thinking of?”

  Vyrix didn’t know.

  “What don’t I know?” the witch demanded.

  Don’t think about it. Think about thinking about it instead. Think about not thinking about it. Think about anything but the thing you’re thinking about. Think about thinking.

  “I thaid thtop! If you try thomething clever, you’ll get uth both killed.”

  “Are you the one?” said a deep, masculine voice. It crackled as it came through an audio channel and made them both jump in surprise. A new figure stood just beyond the light, visible due to a single glowing red beacon at head height. He took a step forward into the light, revealing a tall, muscular body in heavy high-tech armor. He carried some kind of energy weapon in both hands, pointed casually down. More footsteps and lights behind him told of several more. Heidi knew what these were. They were Darkworlders. She had fought them earlier, and had even killed one. If the guilt from doing so was still on its way, it was taking its time.

  Vyrix composed herself quickly. “Yeth,” she said. “I thent for you.”

  “This is the one, then?” The armored figure gestured with the gun at Heidi. A random alteration in gravity made them all lean aside, like they were part of a choreographed dance routine, which in her panic struck Heidi as absurd and hilarious.

  Vyrix still sat facing Heidi, her back to the newcomers. Vyrix coughed. It might have been a laugh. “Thtop it,” she snarled softly at Heidi. Then she turned to the Darkworlders. “It’th her. Where’th my pay?”

  “Pay?” said the man, sounding genuinely confused.

  Vyrix leaped to her feet, and would have stumbled right back down to the ground had not her knobbly cane flown to her hand and planted itself in the metallic surface so hard that chips flew. Yet she fearlessly flashed the dagger at the man several times her size. “The curthe,” she snarled. “We made an agreement. I am owed for thith.”

  “Black is coming,” the man said, undaunted by the small crippled girl waving a knife at him. “Take it up with him.”

  Vyrix froze in place. “Black? Abraham Black?”

  The armored man shifted uncomfortably. “Who else? He wanted to deal with this personally. We’re just here to–”

  Heidi made a sphere and flung gravity up and away into the darkness. Better anywhere else than wherever Black was going to be. She left Vyrix and the Darkworlders behind as she dropped up into the sky.

  She could move again; the invisible bonds vanished. Her legs and arms flailed as she fought to stabilize herself. What next? It was dangerous to fall where she couldn’t see, and she saw nothing but darkness in the direction that she had made ‘down.’

  Gunshots sounded above her, accompanied by the crackling hiss of energy weapons. Heidi’s blood ran cold. Was it Black? No–Black’s gunshots sounded like thunder. These sounded like her own weapon. But she made herself small anyway. No sense in being a larger target.

  The Darkworlders shouted and cried out, and their weapons roared, but another sound emerged and superseded all else: Vyrix’s voice, like a distant echo, croaking out harsh words that made Heidi’s hair stand on end. Her gravity vanished; the darkness swirled; men screamed.

  Heidi barked a cry of alarm as her fall slowed, halted, and then reversed itself back to where it had originated. She tried to alter gravity, but could not. She fell, accelerating back to the cold metal, trying to think clearly: what next? She had no way of arresting her fall.

  A winged shadow swept toward her from below with a reptilian squawk. It caught her gently with soft padded feet, scaly and flattened like a gecko’s. It lowered Heidi back down to a scene of chaos. Three agents of the Dark World lay sprawled out around the glowing thorn-fire, the small shape of Vyrix among them.

  Cazzie deposited Heidi softly onto the ground, and then softly pinned her down with a weight that Heidi could not resist. Heidi bit her lip to keep from crying out at the stabs of pain that snapped throughout her body at this treatment. The creature pinned her arms at her sides, but Heidi wriggled into a position to get a better look at what was going on.

  Vyrix hissed harshly, then spat on one of the fallen Darkworlders. Her hood had fallen back again, and Heidi could not help but turn her gaze away from that ruined face. Vyrix held a gun, Heidi’s gun. She dropped it. Her cane flew back into her hand, and with it she limped over to Heidi.

  “You,” Vyrix snarled as she approached. “I…I warned you. Look at thith. Thit! Thit, thit, thit!” She struck out with her cane at each exclamation, cracking the glowing thorns, shattering the clay mug she had handed to Heidi, beating the corpse of one of the Darkworlders. Her tantrum ended when she lost balance and crumpled to the ground, growling in pain. Rock clicked against solid metal as Vyrix fell.

  A long, scaly tail slid into view from somewhere above Heidi. Thin and flexible, its tip slipped beneath the grumbling pile that was Vyrix and lifted her back to her feet. Several floating eyes approached close to Vyrix in concern. Another descended to watch Heidi, drifting distractingly only a couple feet from Heidi’s face. This eye had two pupils, and they were green.

  Vyrix groaned as she steadied herself with the help of the tail. She crutched over to Heidi and struck her across the face with her cane before Heidi could think to say anything. Heidi’s vision broke apart into pale shapes, her thoughts stunned by the sudden impact. “Perhapth,” she hissed, “I thould have killed you. Perhapth we are both dead now.”

  Vyrix turned and limped back to the bodies of the Darkworlders. She muttered to herself as she knelt down beside one. The pain from the blow to her face made Heidi groggy, but she did her best to watch. She had to know what was happening. Vyrix’s disgusting knotted clumps of hair rose and drifted as though weightless, twitching in the air.

  “The rue…” Heidi managed, tasting blood in her mouth. “They’ll come…”

  “Yeth indeed. I wath jutht thinking…” Vyrix grunted as she did something to the corpse of the Darkworlder, “how I long for thomeone to annoy me with obviouth factth. Cathie!” The weight atop Heidi stirred, crushing her even harder into the cold metal. “We’re leaving.”

  Cazzie warbled her weird keening cry. The beast’s head descended into view, and Heidi saw dark blood glistening on a fanged feathery jaw. No eyes.

  “Yeth, we’ll take her,” said Vyrix. “I don’t give up tho eathily. Thomeone elthe will trade for her. There are plenty of otherth.” Vyrix turned and held up a thick hand made of porous black stone. It glistened in the light. Blood? “Ath I thought,” she said. “Thith one wath cold.”

  Cazzie cried again. A noise nearby made Vyrix jerk her head around so quickly that she would have fallen over again if the feathery tail hadn’t still been there for support. “Already?” she said, and again Heidi heard fear in her voice.

  Heidi heard it a moment later: footsteps approaching, boots on metal. Many.

  “Do not thpeak,” said Vyrix, but her voice sounded as though it was an echo from far away, barely heard. Heidi tried to respond, but could not. No sound came. Her throat suddenly felt dry and cold. It would not work. Her heart galloped in her chest.

  A troop of Darkworlders came into view. Heidi tried to count them, but most were in shadow, difficult to see. She guessed eight to ten. Too many.

  “What happened here?” demanded one of them, a creature with half of his body much larger than the other half. He, and all the others, had their weapons variously trained on Vyrix, Cazzie, and Heidi. Somewhere nearby rang out the heartbreaking cry of a rue, as if in punctuation to the scenario. The sound made some soldiers shift and gaze about nervously.

  Vyrix spread her hands apologetically. “It theemth our prithoner got…carried away. My thintheretht apologieth.”

  “Is that so?” spoke another voice from somewhere back in the darkness. The sound of hard-heeled boots clicking against the floor rang out in the sudden quiet. The Darkworlder troops parted as a figure emerged from behind them. He wore a long black coat, a broad black hat, black boots, faded jeans, and a dirty white collared shirt. He had a big black belt with a shiny silver buckle and two enormous silver revolvers holstered at his thin hips. His face was pale, his eyes dark, his nose and jawline sharp, his smirk wide, his teeth perfect white.

  Heidi felt her mouth hanging open. This… was he Abraham Black? He was, somehow. She could easily see the resemblance to the monster in the vision back in the Museum. But this was the non-monstrous version. Sinister, yes, and still frightening, but…well, he was human. Almost handsome, even . And oh, so dangerous. That was clear; danger bled from him like a cold mist. The soldiers leaned away unconsciously, not quite daring to actually take a step. Black’s pale fingers twitched at his sides, no doubt prepared to draw and shoot those revolvers before anyone else could even blink.

  “But these are bullet wounds, witch,” said Abraham Black, his voice cold and hard with just a hint of amusement. “And I see that you are the one with the gun.”

  Heidi had a limited field of vision, which included the scene with Vyrix and Black as well as the wall behind them. She was looking right at it when it happened: something slid out of one of the hairline fractures in the angular wall of the lorn spike. Like a tall sheet of paper, it emerged from a space that could have admitted nothing thicker. It slid out quickly, and Heidi gasped when she realized what it was: Severard. It looked like a completely flat paper cutout of Severard, the tall thin mannequin wrapped in parchment.

  But when it was fully out of the wall, the cutout of Severard turned, twisted, and Heidi saw it fully in three dimensions as though suddenly comprehending an optical illusion. Severard had done it so quickly and smoothly that no one besides Heidi had noticed before it was completely there. Severard’s arms flattened into almost-nothing, and with a quick scything motion it slashed at the two nearest Darkworlders, who at once dropped to the ground with cries of alarm and sprays of dark blood.

  Thunder rang out, deafeningly loud; Black stood in a cloud of smoke, one revolver aimed at Severard, the other at Cazzie.

  Something landed heavily among the Darkworlders, crushing one to the cold metal. The three-armed shape rolled aside as light flashed from energy weapons into the space where it had fallen. Thunder boomed once more.

  A chittering, a skittering, and Cazzie warbled and snarled as something many-legged and horrible swarmed upon it.

  Vyrix dropped painfully onto the ground and began muttering words that Heidi heard as though from a great distance–until Fifteen dropped atop her, interrupting the disfigured witch.

  In an instant, the tense silence became a chaotic roar of sound against a backdrop of perpetual crashing thunder. The weight of Cazzie lifted from Heidi and she staggered to her feet. A dark shape swirled about her feet. Bahamut! He flicked his head away, and Heidi understood.

  She summoned a sphere just as the rue descended on all of them from above. With a terrible cry, it took the shape of a many-headed monster. It was big. It would have been the biggest Heidi had yet seen were it not for the colossal monstrosity that had destroyed the wrecked ship not long before.

  Abraham Black cackled with laughter and turned gracefully through the chaos, arms outstretched as though dancing, his weapons flashing and thundering. Heidi saw Severard shot full of holes, saw Fifteen come apart like mist in the clutches of Vyrix, heard Ruth and Cazzie battling, saw the gorilla streaming with blood as it employed one Darkworlder as a weapon, flinging it carelessly against all the others.

  She twisted gravity as hard as she could, shaping it to take herself, Ruth, and Bahamut. They, along with Vyrix and Cazzie, skidded sideways alongside the lorn, across its surface, leaving the battle far behind. They fell for many seconds, away from the booming thunder.

  “Thtop!” said a voice as though shouting right into her ear. “There’th a wall!”

  Heidi reversed the gravity to slow them down to a halt, then let go and dropped them all onto the cold metal. Vyrix coughed in a series of hacking gasps; she whimpered with pain. A ball of cold blue light illuminated them: Heidi, Vyrix, Ruth, Cazzie, Bahamut, sprawled out at the juncture where the lorn they lay on intersected another. Gravity was weak here, and it made them seem to be on a mild slope.

  Ruth was up in an instant, one of his cruel pincers around the neck of Vyrix. He appeared capable of snapping her head clean off. Vyrix choked and spluttered in his grip. Cazzie, nearby, stirred feebly, but Bahamut stood guard over her. Heidi could now see that Cazzie looked a bit like an enormous feathery gecko with wings and a long neck. And eyes, of course, about six of them rolling around on the ground and groggily lifting into the air. Each eye was different.

  The hideous face of Vyrix hacked with choked laughter. “I thee,” she gasped. She turned her single eye up to the chewing mandibles of Ruth. She spat black blood at him. “Do it.” Cazzie wailed her warbling cry in response to this.

  “Wait,” said Heidi without thinking. Her throat felt dry and prickly now that she could speak again.

  “Thut up,” said Vyrix. She kicked feebly and glared at Heidi.

  Ruth turned to look at Heidi. There was something awful about that sight: the grotesque insect monster clutching an equally repulsive girl by the neck. Not a girl, though. A cursed witch. One ready to sell Heidi to the villains, and from the looks of it probably regretting not killing her.

  “Shall I make an end of her?” asked Ruth.

  “N…no,” said Heidi.

  “Then…?” Ruth did not let Vyrix go, but he relaxed his grip enough for her to breathe.

  Heidi didn’t know. She had no idea. She struggled to clear her thoughts. Maybe it was everything that had happened, so confusingly and quickly, in such rapid succession, but she was getting a headache. She tried to focus. “We…there’s a prison, right? I’m the warden of a prison.”

  Ruth nodded.

  “We’ll take her prisoner, then.” Why? Why, when she was dangerous and this was almost certain to cause nothing but trouble? Maybe Heidi had seen enough killing already. Maybe she thought Vyrix could be helped. Or maybe she didn’t want to watch a girl get decapitated in front of her, no matter how villainous. Yes, that was probably the one.

  Vyrix laughed, a horrible gasping chuckle. “Tho,” she said, her voice still choked and weak. “You figured it out. I’m imprethed. I couldn’t tell.”

  Heidi took a deep breath and rubbed her temples. Sleep. She needed it.

  “I took you for a fool,” Vyrix continued. “Well, there’th no need to torture me. I bet I wouldn’t latht an hour anyway, not from thith one.” She kicked weakly at Ruth. “It’th right in my cloak.”

  Heidi shook her head. “What?”

  Vyrix narrowed her eye at Heidi. “The antidote.”

  Antidote. “For what?”

  Vyrix blinked at Heidi, the first time Heidi had seen her blink. “For the poithon of courthe. I poithoned you. Wait…did you not know that? Thit. Thit! Well. I gueth now I really am dead. Go on.” She closed her eye. “I can’t thtop you.”

  Cazzie came to life, struggling and thrashing although badly wounded. Bahamut hissed, ready to pounce.

  “Wait! Stop!” Heidi shouted. She was getting dizzy. Poison? Damn. She had to think. “Just…no. No more killing. We need…” What did they need? She pointed at Vyrix. “Prisoner.” She pointed at Cazzie. “Prisoner.” She pointed vaguely back in the direction they had come from. “Get the others. Retreat. Back to…” To where?

  Something hit her on the side. She instinctively fought back, but it was hard as metal. Hard and cold; immovable. She bruised her knuckles against it. She heard other voices. Ruth, showing concern not befitting so terrifying a creature. Bahamut, her friend. Mighty hunter.

  Then there was nothing.