“How did I get stuck carrying Gwil’s backpack?” Cort said.

  “I’m more interested in how you avoided carrying mine,” Leira said. “Wait. Give me the Erithist Spike. You can’t be trusted with it.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Cort said.

  “It means I’m more likely to run away from a fight than you, so there’s less chance I get it taken away.”

  Cort grunted and pulled the cloth-wrapped Spike out of his backpack. Leira took it and stuffed it into her own bag, then looked up at the annoying racket.

  It was fortunate that the doors of this wretched auditorium were made of solid iron. Cort had hammered the locking mechanism out of shape to jam it, and then piled an assortment of crates, stone blocks, and furniture in front of it.

  Standing in the tunnel that led to the doors, Leira and Cort could hear the clamoring horde of rabid warriors. They pounded on the doors, but that wasn’t where they intended to break through. The stone wall surrounding the doors was weaker and already crumbling under the warriors’ assault. It would collapse fully in a matter of heartbeats.

  “Can we fight this many?” Leira asked. A cloud of her spores—pink mixed with red—hung across the stretch of wall that was going to be breached.

  “Maybe,” Cort said. “If they don’t have any Hallows, there’s a chance. We have a strong position. We can hold this bottleneck for a long time. They’re gonna be squeezing themselves through, and your spores will stack a pile of bodies in their path. If Gwil was here, I wouldn’t think twice.”

  “Aye, but he’s not.”

  “Yeah, and there’s a lot of them. It’s not that I don’t think we can win, but I’d rather not take the risk.”

  “You have an idea?” Leira asked.

  Cort patted the metal casing of the jetpack. “This thing’s got a bit of fuel left.”

  “Fucking hell,” Leira groaned. “Enough with the smashing through the ceiling thing, man.”

  “No. Not up. Through.”

  Leira raised an eyebrow.

  “It’ll work. Look.”

  Cort grabbed two metal chairs from the heap in front of the doors and handed them to Leira. “You’re gonna hang on my back and hold these like spears. We’ll rip through all of them.”

  The wall along the left side of the doors blew apart. Stone blocks crashed to the floor as warriors stuffed themselves through the narrow gap. A cloud of dust obscured them.

  Dust and spores. Half of the warriors dropped unconscious, falling forward through the threshold. The others writhed as red patches speckled their faces. One warrior cracked open his comrade’s head with his club.

  Leira clenched her teeth, glaring as she drove the victims of her enthrallment into a frenzy. Any warrior that breathed of her spores either collapsed or turned rabid. Either one left the gap full of useless bodies.

  “Alright,” she said. “I’m down for your stupid plan.”

  Cort passed her the jetpack. Leira’s eyes went wide.

  “You have to wear it. How else will you hang on my back without getting your legs burned off?”

  “Shit, right,” Leira said, laughing. She strapped on the jetpack. Cort knelt and Leira wrapped her arms and legs around him, squeezing herself between the other backpacks that Cort still wore.

  “Angle the thrusters so they’re just a hair shy of perfectly horizontal,” Cort said as he held up the two chairs so that she could hook her arms through their supports. She positioned the chairbacks on Cort’s shoulders, forming an array of eight tiny spears.

  “Hey,” Leira said. “Wanna hook some onto my legs, too?”

  “Couldn’t hurt,” Cort said. He hiked her up on his back and she stuck her legs out, bracing her knees against his hips to keep them extended. Cort stuck two chairs onto her legs. “Eh, this might be a little much.”

  “Nonsense,” Leira said. “You can handle it.”

  “I do feel pretty unstoppable,” Cort said, inspecting himself. He clapped his hands. “Ready? I’m gonna break the lock and we’ll blast through the doors. That’s the last thing they’re expecting.”

  Leira had her eyes on the broken section of the wall. A few warriors had come stumbling through, and most of her spores had been consumed. She made to reach around her back to activate the jetpack…

  “Ahhh. Cort?”

  “Eh?” Cort grunted as he bashed the door’s lock into bits.

  “I don’t have any hands free to pull the cord.”

  “Shit.”

  The iron doors flew open with a tremendous bang. Screaming warriors plowed through the pile of shit that had served to barricade.

  The feather-clad horde swallowed them. Cort smashed a few warriors and then lost his footing. They fell backwards and got stuck like that. Like… like a turtle built out of broken toothpicks.

  Adjusting her hold on the chair, Leira clamped one hand over Cort’s nose and mouth and let plume after plume of spores belch from her eyeflower—the whole gamut, save the acidic ones. The cloud engulfed them where they lay.

  Cort was flailing—swinging his hammer with abandon—because he couldn’t breathe. That was for his own good, since they were gonna get stomped to death if she didn’t save them.

  Leira rammed one of the chair legs into the mouth of a warrior that got too close, breaking a few of his teeth. She noted how pretty the pattern of his body paint was, then shoved the whole chair away, sending the man tumbling backward.

  With that hand freed, Leira reached underneath herself, feeling along the bottom of the jetpack. “Ah-ha!” She felt the ripcord’s handle and yanked it. The Kaia engine revved, but failed to catch.

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  Cort squeaked out something unintelligible through her clamping hands.

  She pulled the cord again, and the thrusters screamed to life.

  Driven by a terrible speed that Leira had failed to anticipate, they went flying across the ground, a mangled mess of metal and flesh, whipping around as wild as a loose hose.

  The legs of the chairs bashed and skewered dozens of warriors. Leira relinquished her grip on Cort’s mouth.

  Gasping for breath, he screamed, “Idiotttt!”

  Their absurd tangle spun in maddening, stomach-churning circles, a whirling dervish of destructive furniture, erratic as a dog frantically dragging its ass around on the ground. They smashed into a wall. The chair legs got caught up in a bundle of bodies, and they bounced upward. The thrusters, no longer obstructed by the ground, fired them off like a champagne cork. They whirligigged through the air. Leira screamed as she saw one warrior get decapitated by a chair leg.

  Miraculously, Cort had managed to twist himself around and, when their erratic flight path sent them spinning downward, he landed on his feet.

  They blasted forward along the ground, driven by the full power of the jetpack. In that moment, the chair legs truly channeled the spirit of a squadron of vicious spearmen. They cleared the doorway in a flash, after which Leira threw away the other chair from her arm. Two warriors had been skewered to one leg like a shish kebab, and there was no need to drag that extra weight.

  The hallway beyond the auditorium was less densely packed, and those that remained were diving out of the way, surely seeing the cloud of red mist in the wake of the deadly décor.

  Cort held his hammer out like a jousting lance as his legs scurried desperately, a blur for their speed. He ran like a mouse that had overdosed on amphetamines. He was more jumping than running, every step propelling them some five meters.

  “Arghhhh!” Cort screamed through clenched teeth as they reached a bend in the hallway. He leaned low to one side but failed to turn sharply enough.

  To his credit, Cort avoided splattering them against the wall. Instead, they were going to crash through a floor-to-ceiling-stained glass window. It depicted a robe-wearing warlock-sort wearing a skull helm.

  Cort’s hammer head hit first, and the image shattered into a million pieces as they burst through the glass. Leira lost the third chair as its legs caught up on the frame of the window.

  Seeing no more warriors, she kicked away the last chair, too. Passing through the glass had seen them into another hall. It was lit not by torches, but a dim blue glow… It took her a moment to register that as strange. Kaia lamps—they hadn’t seen that anywhere else in this whole place.

  And the clanging sound of Cort’s footsteps pounding against metal flooring. Everything else in the temple had been built from stone. And this was clean-cut, industrial style metal. The bladed clubs wielded by the warriors had been hand forged.

  They zipped past many doors and branching hallways. This place was a maze.

  Leira hovered her thumb over the emergency kill switch on the jetpack’s control stick, wanting to put some more distance between them and the warriors. She grimaced upon realizing that she probably should’ve pressed that button earlier. It had worked out well enough, but they’d gotten lucky.

  Cort’s huffing and puffing and wheezing made it sound like he was on death’s door, so Leira relented and killed the thrusters.

  Cort stumbled for a few paces and then collapsed on his stomach, sliding a couple meters across the smooth metal floor.

  As Leira recovered herself, she raised her hand to smack Cort awake because it sounded like he was snoring. However, it was only that he was sucking down air in such a ravenous fashion that it sounded like snoring.

  Leira unstrapped herself from the jetpack and let it fall to the floor. She wiped herself off—both of them were covered in bloody bits and flecks.

  “Where the hell are we?” Leira said, looking around.

  “Uwuhakerp,” Cort sputtered.

  Leira cupped a hand to her ear to listen. There was a faint chatter echoing down the metal halls, but nothing that sounded like they were being pursued.

  Acting so dramatically you might’ve thought he’d been disemboweled, Cort crawled over to the wall and leaned back against it. His face was a bloody, swollen, purple mess, like a smashed grape. He spat out a mouthful of blood, then covered his mouth with his hand.

  “Tartarus’s… piss… in a… teacup. I lost my front tooth.”

  Leira knelt beside him and pulled his hand away. Her eyes widened at the gaping black hole in the center of his bloody mouth. “Teeth, actually. You lost both front teeth.”

  “Fuck. Are you serious?”

  She nodded solemnly, without even a hint of a smile.

  “Are we even…” Cort stopped to gasp for breath. “What’s with all the…” He trailed off and gestured at the sparse hallway.

  Leira shook her head. “I’ve got a better question. Why didn’t the warriors follow us down here?”

  Cort spat out some more blood and grinned. “Do I look stupid?”

  “Well,” Leira said. “Someone might think that beavers look stupid with their big front teeth. And you are like the antithesis of a beaver now, so…”

  Cort blinked at her.

  “Don’t mope. I’ve seen they sell fake teeth with heaters in them so ice cream will melt in your mouth. Good plan, by the way. You saved our asses.”

  Cort raised his arm to point down the hall and then slumped over to that side. “Why aren’t they following us, though? We didn’t go that far, did we?”

  Leira shrugged. “My guess is this is a dead end, and they know we’re trapped. Maybe they’re biding their time, tending to their wounded. I can’t imagine they’re in a big rush to confront us. We just butchered a whole lot of them.”

  Cort wobbled as he stared at her with dull eyes, and not a hint of comprehension. She snapped her fingers in his face. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Cort said. “I got bashed in the head a bigger number than I could count ever, even in school. Calculators.”

  Leira raised an eyebrow. “Hey, listen—that lady Gwil found. Did you hear him saying she’s creating all the storms?”

  “Eh? What the fuck for?” Cort said, stretching out his jaw. At every movement, more blood oozed out of his cut-up face.

  “Dunno. I didn’t understand what Gwil was saying. Something like… the crucifix lady, and all the people who live here, they think that they’re the only humans left in the World.”

  “Eh?”

  Leira took a few steps away to peer down the nearby turn in the hallway. “Beats me. But I’d bet this sketchy-ass lair has something to do with that nonsense. And I’d be willing to bet a whole lot of doubloons that it’s all the scheme of some deranged assholes.”

  Cort laughed, his tongue poking through the gap in his teeth. “I’m not stupid enough to take that bet.”

  “Can you walk?” Leira asked, turning back to offer Cort her hand. She staggered under his weight as he pulled himself up.

  They set out down the Kaia-lit hallway. Sparse, featureless, perfectly uniform. The size and color of the panels, the arrangements of the rivets… So familiar.

  “This place is Leviathan make,” Leira said. “Their military uses these prefabbed structures to set up temporary bases and the like. So… let’s watch out for that.”

  Some awareness returned to Cort’s eyes. “You think this is a Levi base?”

  Leira bit at her lip. “No,” she said slowly. “Not exactly. They’d have no tolerance for these warriors. Something else is going on.”

  Cort hoisted his hammer. He’d been dragging it on the floor behind him. “Maybe the Leviathan abandoned this place. And these storm people set up shop here?”

  “Something like that,” Leira said.

  The first door they came to was a bit more complex than the others they’d passed. Leira pressed the red button beside it. With a hiss, the door unsealed, splitting down the middle to slide open. A puff of cold, visible air escaped.

  They went inside the hazy room. Leira could see her breath. The walls were white and bulbous and covered with frost. Glowing Kaia filaments ran along the edges.

  A giant refrigerator. Metal crates were stacked all throughout. They had displays on their fronts that blinked with little indicator lights.

  Leira smeared her finger through the frost that coated one of the crates. As she traced a smiley face, she said, “So, the people here are isolationists, and they’ve got all this stuff?”

  “I’ve been wondering about that too,” Cort said. “Even ignoring this crazy shit down here, where are they getting all the wood and textiles that they’re using? They live in a rocky wasteland. All those plants and the nice waterways, sure, they get plenty of rain. But the rest of it doesn’t add up.”

  “Break open one of the crates,” Leira said, hugging herself and clenching against her chattering teeth.

  Cort brought his hammer down on the edge of the crate and its lid popped open.

  The inside was packed full of frozen red meat, vacuum-sealed in frosty plastic packages.

  “Mm,” Leira said, fiddling with her miniaturized ztuff tube necklace. “Been a long time since I had beef.”

  Cort chuckled. “Maybe we should come back later.”

  Leira took a couple steaks and slid them into her jacket’s inside pocket, then they left the room to continue looking around.