The old bulb shone dully, but the light still played on Rasmus’ eyes and set his head dancing. He didn't know if Sebastian was real or a figment of his currently boggled brain, but he decided he would find out after a little nap. “Get him up,” the male voice said. “Against the wall, don't let him sleep.” Every word carried with it an echo, and every echo a new flash of pain. At times he struggled to hear anything at all.

  “Slap him!”

  “No, you slap him!”

  “All right, I will!” Rasmus woke abruptly, the right side of his face in agony. “I'm sorry, my friend. Rough day all round, really,” Sebastian said. Right now, he had his own problems to contend with, and struggled to get the last part of the way out of his vest without aggravating the wound. It ran uncomfortably close to a main artery and as deep as his collarbone where it mattered, but deeper as it ran along. It wasn't as bad as he initially believed it to be, but only because he initially believed it to be fatal. It had the contradictory feel that major wounds tended to – it both stung immensely and managed to feel unusually numb at the same time, but as painful as it was, he grimaced at the thought of what was to come next.

  He reached down to a pouch on his belt. The wound was on his left side and through a shear stroke of misfortune, so was the thing he wanted. He carefully lowered his hand into the pouch and produced a small pressurised cannister; he removed the plastic nozzle from along side it and screwed it into place, then pulled a plastic tab out from below the trigger inset into the can. One deep breath later and he shoved the nozzle as far down into the wound as it would go, then gradually squeezed the trigger. He squirmed as the cannister hissed and a yellowish foam gushed into the wound and filled every corner of it. It felt like he’d just poured battery acid into it; his eyes watered and his stomach heaved. The foam began to dry along the surface of his shoulder almost as soon as it was exposed to the air, and formed a firm but rubberised layer over the wound. It wasn't going to be a pretty scar, but for now at least he didn't have to worry about ripping the wound open further and bleeding to death like an idiot.

  He let the cannister clank to the ground and walked across to Rasmus, who was now surrounded by as many blankets and cushions as Bridget could retrieve from around the cellar, which was a disconcertingly large amount. Unlike the Huberts, the Tirrens, especially Bridget, took a great pride in labelling things, so she was able to locate everything she needed with minimal effort and maximum smugness. Sebastian knelt in front of Rasmus and clasped him by the hand.

  “You can go to sleep soon, my friend. First, tell me some things. Do you know who you are? Where you are?”

  Rasmus rolled his eyes, partly in contempt for the questions, partly because they quite wanted to roll back into his skull, and who was he to say no? Actually, who was he? The thoughts came slowly at first, trickling in and building a picture. Faces without names, names without faces, places he should have known, things he couldn't name or begin to describe. Then, like a torrent, so many thoughts came spilling into his head that it was blindingly painful – like a dam had broken and he was just stood before it. He made no attempt to focus his attention on Sebastian. His speech slurred as he tried to wrestle his mouth under some form of control.

  “Emmanuel Rasmus. Buffoon,” he said.

  “And where are you, Emmanuel?”

  “Hell.”

  “Close enough, let him sleep. We'll give him a prod every fifteen or so minutes and ask him again. If he's still belligerent in a few hours, he'll be fine. Probably.”

  “Probably?” Bridget asked.

  “I'm the wrong kind of doctor. We just have to keep his temperature down and hope for the best. He’s a tough old thing, he’ll pull through. Now back to my question.”

  “They're not here, Sebastian. They went to the woods to look for Bosco and Harry. They never came back, and then this-” She waved her arms around in a frantic motion. “-Happened.”

  “I think you've worked out that we're a little further from home than you realised.” Sebastian retrieved Edevane's cuffs off the ground and sauntered over to his prostrate form. He locked the cuffs on him and handed the key to Bridget. “In short, we fled our home and blocked the way behind us. When those silly automatons – where are they, by the way? – showed up, I knew they'd repaired the damage. It was a matter of time before, well, this. I did what I could to slow everything down and abandoned my daughters. Like a bastard. Do they hate me? Does Sarah even remember me? I hope not.”

  “You had your reasons, Sebastian, but why didn’t you tell us? After everything we did for you, we deserved to know.”

  “Info-hazard; just knowing where we came from and how we got here would have ruined your life. Every flash of lightning, every glimmer in the corner of your eye. Sooner or later, you’d start connecting things that didn’t make sense and you’d drive yourself mad. And selfishly, I feared if I sat down and explained, you’d send us away or think we were mad.”

  Bridget managed a small smile. “You’ve always been mad, Sebastian. I knew that from the moment you almost burned Emmanuel’s house down.”

  “I’m surprised he ever let me forget about it. No good deed and all that.”

  “Would knowing have helped? Maybe if we had time to prepare.”

  “No. You couldn’t prepare for any of this. There’s no fighting back, either; it’d be like standing at the foot of a volcano and shaking your fist. Only thing preventing a full-scale invasion right now is politics and caution. This is all my fault – I built the Gate, it was because of me that they're even here in the first place. I did this to us, all of it. Helena is dead because of me – I destroyed my family and yours along with it.” Sebastian knelt forward and tucked his head into his hands, then squeezed the side of his head until both it and his hands hurt.

  “She was sick, I don't understand how it was your fault.”

  “Don't expect you to. The technology, it wasn't stable, wasn't safe. I just didn't know how unsafe. There wasn't time to run proper tests, I swear. Parnell, the man in charge, was ready to send an army through the Gate and destroy an innocent world. And for what? So we could spread like vermin! I know Parnell, he wouldn't stop here. We'd find more places, more people, destroy more lives. And we'd never stop, never ever stop. The Gates need to be anchored on this side, otherwise the ambient radiation becomes too much, and that’s just the half of it. I thought I'd gotten everything right, every last calculation, but she was pregnant. I didn't know – it changed everything. She was too weak to make the journey, too sickly. I killed the woman I love through stupidity and hubris, and I almost killed Sarah along with her. My girls will never forgive me.”

  Sebastian pushed up from his knees, trepidatiously putting weight on his left side. The wound held, but it hurt like hell and he wasn't going be able to pull another stupid stunt like he did with Edevane. The device needed time and proximity to overload the internal electronics of his helmet; if it hadn't, he wouldn't be in this mess. It's not something he could rely on again, not in his state and especially not since the device fried itself in the process. He looked at a small scorch mark in the palm of his glove and was thankful the armour did at least something.

  “You didn’t know, you couldn’t have.”

  “Yet it doesn’t change anything, does it, Bridget? I need to go back, I need to find our families and put everything right. I’ll bring your boy back to you, I swear to you on Helena’s memory. I won’t abandon any more people.”

  “I know,” she said softly. “I know.”

  “You’ll be safe here now. For a few hours at least. There was someone else with us, probably awake now. He’s down in the workshop, all trussed up like this one. There’s someone watching the Gate but he’s not in any danger of thinking for himself and coming to bother you.”

  “Will he bother you?”

  “He’s big enough to eat me, so hope not. If I can reach the Pilot Fish, we might be able to sort that problem as well.”

  ***

  Isla walked into town. The midday sun beat down on her exposed feathers, and she had to admit, it was all pretty liberating. The thought of not only a scandal coming to Mayflight but her being the centre of it delighted her very much. The very idea of it! Of course, she was never going to do it, but the idea of it would entertain her for weeks. She wandered through the village, jumping at every shadow and recoiling at every noise, but the town was empty. There was no sign of her friends or the men she saw before her astoundingly unsuccessful landing.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Even in her scatterbrain, she could see someone had been there – all the doors and windows were left open, and multiple boot prints wended their way around the village. They visited each house in turn, then doubled back towards the fountain. If she was going to find her friends, she reasoned that she probably shouldn't find them in the all-together. That would make a presumably very awkward situation worse, and poor Mr. Rasmus would have a heart attack.

  She ambled towards her house with no real hurry, the thoughts in her head once more drifting off like balloons on the wind. Isla's house was the smallest in the village but also the tallest. She’d spent the happiest Summer in memory, though it wasn't always something to rely on, renovating a small grain silo. All of its better days were behind it, and it sat there rotting away in disuse and disrepair while the residents toiled away on a new one. Isla had saved it, like she saved the scraps of material that comprised everything in her wardrobe. If buildings could posses a degree of sentience, and in a world of infinite possibilities, perhaps some did – but if this one in particular did and it had a mouth, it would use it to scream.

  The facade was a patchwork of different materials – bits of wood and iron and canvas, all different colours and shapes, all patching holes in the original exterior. The interior faired little better. The building was too small for individual rooms, so the interior was as open-plan as the inside of her head tended to be. In between the chaotic mess of her belongings were intermittent specks of hope in the form of furniture that had been gifts from the Tirrens, some of which had been upcycled beyond all recognition but others remained in their untarnished beauty. And like the rest of her home, if in some freak cosmic occurrence her furniture gained a mense of its own, it would think it must have committed atrocities in a previous life.

  She climbed the ladder she used in place of stairs to the first floor. The building tapered slightly as it went up, so the first floor was even smaller than the ground, but it was just large enough for a small bed and a chest of drawers – lovingly upcycled, of course. She continued up a second ladder and onto the flat roof. She'd spent countless hours up here, just looking at the sky. When the wind caught her feathers, it almost felt like she was flying but without the possibility of a sudden, painful death.

  She took the dress she'd left drying down off the washing line she'd strung across the roof with no particular concern for angle or the throats of visitors and slid it over her head. Her shoulder ached a little less, but still, getting her wing up and through the armhole proved uncomfortable and knocked the thought of flying down out of her head. This dress was, in her eyes, distressingly mostly the same colour, pattern and material. She liked things to happen organically, so she'd have to wait until her next accident before she started to improve upon Bridget's design. She dared a glance over the side of the roof, being careful not to lean too hard on the railings – they, too, were her own design, and they carried the structural integrity of wet paper.

  Nothing exciting had occurred in the five minutes since she'd stopped paying full attention, so she headed back down and into the street. Before she set off on her cunning bit of subterfuge and inadvertently sunk the town's only boat, Mr. Rasmus had briefed her on their meeting place – the Tirren's musty old cellar. Isla wasn't fond of confined spaces or the dark, or a good many things associated with cellars. In equal measure, she wasn't keen on being shot at or taken prisoner. She'd been watching from her rooftop when the men came the first time, how they took old Bosco away, how scared Harry was. She'd wanted to help, she'd wanted to do something – she just didn't know what.

  She tiptoed through the Tirren's front door, nervously checking every corner and behind every piece of furniture big or small. Both the door to the cloakroom cupboard and the cellar hatch at the bottom of it were open. Isla paused and held her breath – she felt light-headed, which was an improvement over how she normally felt. She'd come this far, she decided, so she'd just have to give herself a stern talking to and be brave.

  “Here, birb.” Isla squinted towards the general direction of the sound, which drifted up from the floor like a whisper. “Here, birby!” it said again, this time louder than a pin dropping. Isla looked down directly at her feet. “About time, lanky,” said the cockroach.

  “Oh, hello,” she said with a startle. “What's a birb?”

  “You are, you silly birb. The hairy one is down in the thing, the room over there. It's with the other hairy one, the one with the tail that sometimes feeds me. And get this – there are hairless ones. Madness!”

  “Is it the girls? Are they safe?” Isla's heart danced in her chest cavity. Perhaps the girls had gotten the Tirrens back, perhaps everything would be over by teatime.

  “What's a girls?” The cockroach scratched the back of its head with three legs and had what would be known in cockroach circles as a puzzled look on its face.

  Isla's heart stopped, then realised it was a bad idea and kept beating normally. “Thank you. I guess.” She sidled around the cockroach and tried very much to avoid stepping on it, though it probably quite deserved it. Isla knelt awkwardly by the open hatch and called down as loudly as she dared. “Hello? Mr. Rasmus? Bridget?” Her mind hoped for a positive response, but her body had angled itself towards the door and taken starters orders just in case.

  “Isla! Oh, thank goodness. Get down here, quickly.”

  She’d never heard Bridget so glad to see her, or at least hear her. Her wings and feet weren't really meant for ladders like this one – the rungs were too thin and the ladder itself was partly recessed into the wall. She clambered down one foot at a time – slowly, cautiously, oblivious to the broken rung towards the bottom of it. The rung twisted out of position, and either it or Isla squeaked – it was a very confusing time on the way down. She landed with a feathery flumph, embarrassed but unhurt.

  “Hello, legs,” said the familiar voice from behind her. She knew who it was, but her brain refused to process the realisation until she’d turned around to make sure. He'd somehow managed to age twice as quickly since she'd last seen him, and his hair was flecked with grey, but he was otherwise the same as she remembered. She had so many questions, both about Sebastian and why the cellar looked like a murder scene, that she didn't really know where or how to start – so she didn't. She was content to just stand there, smiling with her eyes and saying nothing and doing nothing until someone saw fit to point her towards the most relevant thing in the room so she could turn her brain back on.

  “I missed you,” she finally managed.

  “Missed you, too, legs. Help me with this lump, will you?” Sebastian hooked an arm under Edevane's and waited for Isla to come take the opposite one. Between them they just about managed to drag him to the corner without aggravating either wound. “So, short story is, everything has gone a little frying pan and fire, and I'm trying to sort it all out.” He unclipped Edevane's helmet much to his confused protest, and turned it upside down to inspect the interior – the speakers had exploded completely and bucked the frame around the ears. He’d had very little to do with the military wing of R&D, but he knew what it looked like when corners were cut, and so many were cut here that what he was looking at was a circle.

  What he’d experienced of Edevane didn't endear him in the slightest, but he didn't want this. He’d banked on the helmet being somewhat structurally sound when he overloaded the speakers; temporary deafness, maybe burst ear drums, dizzy and enjoyably easy to subdue. Looking at not just it but every other piece of equipment he had, he'd have been better off in fancy dress, because Parnell had stitched this poor bastard up – and many others like him – something rotten. The torn and distorted lining of the helmet was soaked in blood and burnt skin, and frankly smelled horrible.

  Edevane's face was covered in a mist of blood that trickled down his neck the moment the helmet was removed. His ears were singed and bleeding, both from the inside and from the multiple shrapnel wounds caused by the shattering helmet; thankfully, they were still attached to the sides of his head and still resembled ears for the most part. He didn't think Edevane was in any danger of death outside of a rogue infection, but he was in immense pain and discomfort. If he hadn't been so unnecessarily cruel to Emmanuel, he'd have a properly trained and competent doctor looking at his wounds. What he did have was a man who one time managed to sow his shirt to his own arm while suturing a cut.

  Sebastian had read up on the expected injuries his device would cause, so he knew enough about ruptured eardrums and barotrauma to at least do something, but the shrapnel wounds were going to be something else. Edevane's eardrums had a good chance of healing on their own in time, as long as he cleaned them up and covered them over. He produced a small bottle of antihistamine tablets, popped one on Edevane's tongue and tilted his head back; it would reduce the pressure and help with some of the pain at least. He’d forgotten the actual pain killers in his rush, so there was little he could do about the rest of it. Thinking about it, he didn't really care – he just wanted to make sure Edevane was all right. It didn’t matter if he didn't particularly enjoy it, because he deserved it.

  “If it's not too much trouble, what is it exactly that's going on? What happened to Mr. Rasmus? I don't know, I has so many questions- Oh, and I accidentally sunk the boat. I'm very sorry about that, but it wasn't all my fault. Mostly my fault, but not all the way my fault. I just has questions is all.”

  “I'm all explained out, legs. Bridget will fill you in after I've gone.”

  ”Gone where? You just came back!”

  “Home, I guess. Doesn't feel like home, but I don't have the luxury. Bosco and his boy need me, and I can't let my girls down again. I'm running out of fingers to count on.” He turned to Bridget and gave a small a smile. It was tired and unconvincing, but it was the best he could manage given the last twenty or so minutes. He took a small first-aid kit from the last of his pouches and handed it to Bridget. “It isn't much, but there are some tweezers and disinfectant, some thread, a couple of needles. No lollipops, mind you – not like he’d deserve one. He won't look pretty, but he probably never did. I really have to go now.”

  “Will you be back?”

  “That sounds awfully like you want me to promise. Let me see if I can keep all the other ones first.” He smiled again and this time summoned a more convincing grin, then he turned and climbed the ladder out of the cellar without looking back.