The outlandishly gigantic monster was now terrain beneath our feet. Crumbling, dust-dry, almost rocky terrain. Dead as a single curved, breaking bone, it undulated in cracks and boulders, and strewn across it were all the dandelion trees. Their bare tops and scattered leaves were like burst bubbles.

  When Reed, Chora and I stopped running, it was when the open dunes began. We stopped and turned, appalled. Where the dead plant began, the patch of wood had once been. That one flytrap had destroyed an entire unique ecosystem.

  Now it continued the long collapse in on itself. When it was finished falling, it’d leave a mind-bogglingly huge chasm in its wake. If nothing else, it’d make another interesting passage for Logy to poke around in.

  I shivered. The euphoria of minutes ago was gone. I didn’t like using silly words like “poke”—even in my head—in the face of so much pointless death.

  At least here at the edge of the bygone wood, the three of us rejoined Bayce and Heidschi. They’d been waiting for us. Apparently, DeGalle had just buzzed off. Ugh…and Logy, speaking of buzzing. High in the sky, a condor wheeled around. Should I have felt guilty for wishing he’d done more? Well, I didn’t.

  The dunes ahead looked spotless, shining, almost too perfect. There was no trace of the smoke we were leaving behind.

  When we all got together and were facing each other, instead of the incredible destruction, Bayce piped up saying, “I’ve got two hands, and Heidschi’s got a drum. How about I cheer us up by…”

  None of us smiled. Bayce let the idea drop.

  We all watched in a thoughtful silence as Reed investigated a very beat-up car. Bayce had stored it in her bracelet-and-bangle-based Inventory, thank goodness. But that Inventory wasn’t meant to hold something so big. That was why it looked so…crumpled. There was about twenty-five percent less seating space. I could sit in it. But could anyone drive it without an explosion? Apparently not, because in the end, Reed only sighed.

  “We have sandwiches,” she said. “Pool toys aren’t too crushed.”

  Bayce’s eyes widened. “That’s right, they’re practically foam.”

  “Actually,” Chora said, “they are foam.”

  Heidschi raised a cautious hand. “If we want a ride, then maybe…”

  It turned out that Heidschi had been keeping some sheep hale and hearty in emergency reserve, just in case the motor gave out (or was obliterated). Heidschi themself didn’t look all that well—none of us did—and I imagined they’d used a lot of SP buffing and healing people for the past two hours or more. Still, they had the strength to do at least this. Summoning a single sheer from their ball, the shepherd then had a brief, cordial debate. In between bleats, Heidschi explained pros, cons, and the glistening acres of water ahead. Then, thoughtfully, they added that the water would be like a big flowing salt lick.

  “Me-e-eh,” the sheep said with a fateful nod.

  I looked up at Reed. Part of me wanted to overflow with thanks—not just to her, but to everyone—but part of me was just too rattled—and so was everyone. This broke my silence. After giving her leg an affectionate brush, I spelled out, “THE SHEEP KNOW LANGUAGE?”

  “I doubt that,” she said. “The ones who do are soulbound, or, like in your case, they’re from elsewhere.”

  The sheep kneeled, and then Heidschi began a drumbeat, this one slower and softer than any I could remember hearing from the shepherd. The beat unspooled, and curled around us, seeming to cradle the sheep in aura. Then without warning, Heidschi bashed the drumhead. A second phase, sweeping and warlike, started changing the animal into something larger, even more monstrous. A great goat-horse with a gazelle’s horns and a yak’s shaggy fur was kneeling before us, pulsing with cream-colored light.

  Riding the animal as one big group was a tight fit, but it wasn’t so bad if Heidschi walked beside it, beating a gentle tattoo about once a minute. Chora almost volunteered to follow, but I gave her a curt “maow!” and hopped off the steed myself. Already it didn’t seem right to have the shepherd going on foot.

  But I barely had the mental bandwidth to be debating right and wrong. As we strode along calm, loping, glimmering dunes, letting our tension fall, I could only ponder why in the world I had not received a single Level Up from this, Sierra you frickin’ coward! Is putting my all into saving innocents not Quest-worthy enough for you? Then again, I thought, if we’re gonna be fair, we should also consider the fact that I befriended a living butterfly superweapon! No Level Up from that!

  Wow. WOW. “Minus respect for Sierra,” I would say, if that weren’t redundant at this point.

  A notification that I could Evolve flashed into my vision and I immediately raged at the machine.

  Get this outta my face.

  What was ordinarily a huge honking gray box right on my nose became instead a little bar in the bottom-right corner of my vision. This was still annoying—in some ways more so, because having it in my peripheral vision made my subconscious think it was a swattable fly—but at least I still had eyes.

  I guess asking for things, I thought, fully aware of my snark, is what separates the cats from the girls. What a holy and inspiring message. Hey, what’s wrong, huh? Is Sierra too scared to come out and say something? She want me to feel bad for her?

  You are being sarcastic.

  You are!

  YOU ARE!

  We went back and forth exactly like that for, uh, longer than I’d like to admit. Eventually I gave up out of sheer boredom. This time I was, perhaps, the bad guy, but I had to say I deserved a chance to be bad for once. After all of today’s…well, garbage.

  It was great news that I’d just gotten stronger and my body was no longer aching, but it was taking me quite a while to snap back to normal and enjoy things like that.

  But the beauty of the dunes was working on me. Trudging up the rim of the sand-bowl valley, I was awed by the sight of that goat-steed tenaciously marching beside me with barely a heavy breath. Even more surprising was how Heidschi managed to scale on hand and foot—slowly, but without any new scrapes, and always pausing to drum a new beat before the Spell on their sheep faded.

  According to my Map, the clouds of monstrous vines were well and truly gone. The big dot was no more. Ahead was smooth sailing. Especially after a battle that, frankly, would have sent most land animals packing, like the prey those hell marmots smoked out with their wildfire way back.

  Then we finally came up over the rim. We weren’t there yet—another fifteen minutes of walking into a shallower sand valley would do it—but now we could see everything. Cresting a dandelion log, I caught a full view of the lake’s splendor.

  It was big, alright. So big I would hazard to call it “great.”

  Its waters were silver-black, slowly undulating, and far off, I thought I could see dark, dolphin-shaped figures curling in and out. Everything glittered, like magic as nature. The sun was still high, playing on the center of the incredible pool. Foam lapped at the coast.

  And no other humans were around. My Earth knowledge and my time in Earth cities had led me to expect at least a few other people to be milling around here—yes, even with the battle. But no…if “desolate” means “has no humans,” then yeah. Gorgeous and nonthreatening, yet desolate.

  Don’t tell me Vencia doesn’t have tourist culture.

  Because that would be too good to be true.

  I stopped, Heidschi patted sand off their dress, and the goat-steed sniffed. All six of us took one deep breath. To my amazement, the air was salty. And while the smell was probably subtle for humans, when you took it in consciously like this, with smoke and blood at your back and the images of the gentle waves right in front…it must have hit them full on.

  After that breath came an unmistakable collective sigh.

  “I’m so done with today.”

  Amazingly, that voice was Chora’s.

  As Heidschi tapped the drum and the goat led us down for another fifteen woozy minutes, Chora unloaded without mercy. “That was a marathon I never expected to experience. Never!” She sounded amazed at herself. “But every time I thought I couldn’t use another technique, I just…broke one out.” Chora sighed again and stared up at the sky, her body almost flopping sideways off the goat. “I don’t think my body will forgive me for at least a week.”

  Everyone spent a few moments in silent acknowledgement. She’d said pretty much what we were all thinking—and it had to be worse for them than for me.

  “They say the salt in the water is naturally healing,” Reed told us. “I’m about ready to get in there and…” She sighed as if lost in the daydream of it.

  That just made it more confusing that there were no human beach chairs or residences in sight. Come on, not even some fresh footprints? What could possibly explain this except that…that Vencia was maybe just really big, and had way cooler lakes? Or that it had about five hundred humans? Or both?!

  Well, I could ask in about twelve minutes.

  Or I could just take a nap in the shallows, letting just a hint of saltwater cradle me. That seemed like a nicer idea.