“Stop! Stop here!” Quez shouted.

  The demon-man and the demon-woman stopped short of the corner. Around that corner was the way out of this metal labyrinth. Now that they’d stopped running, Quez could hear the voices of his warriors waiting outside.

  “You must stay here and let us go first,” Quez said. “Otherwise, they will believe you’ve corrupted us with your magic. I am going to try to explain the situation.”

  “Are you shitting me?” the one called Cort said. “If you betray us, you’re all dead. Do you even have any authority, birdman?”

  Lall fiercely stepped forward. “He is Sworn Guardian, commander of the Malikauan warriors.”

  “Then why the fuck is there any question whether they’ll listen?”

  Quez swallowed. “I am a poor leader. My weakness has been revealed. I watched, helpless, as you slaughtered my brothers and sisters.”

  “What? You want an apology? You attacked us first!”

  “Enough, Cort,” the flower-witch said. “Just go. They’re coming.”

  Quez fell in step with Lall and Atla, and they rounded the corner. Cheers erupted. It seemed the entire army awaited their return. None of them had crossed the threshold, but they filled the area outside.

  Quez felt his stomach drop. All of them, packed into these narrow corridors, ripe for slaughter. If he’d been deceived, if those two humanoid demons turned…

  In his mind’s eye, blood spraying. Guts spilling out, splattering on the floor.

  Quez slowed as they neared the end. He felt like he was being dangled over a chasm. Those two demons seemed to genuinely fear the red-eyed monsters. Perhaps some uncontrollable cousins of theirs from the demon realm?

  “Atla, you’re dismissed,” Lall said. She sent Atla out ahead of them a shove.

  “Quez, what are you doing?” Lall hissed as they trudged toward the open arms of their cheering comrades. “I thought you were lying to them. You have been corrupted. This is blasphemy of the highest order. We must kill those two demons while we have the chance!”

  “Hold your tongue, Speaker Lall. I am Sworn Guardian. My oath is not only to Challe’Jade, but to all of Malikau. I have no choice. I am willing to damn my soul. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

  Quez moved past her and stepped out into the familiar stone corridor. “Warriors, prepare for battle! The demons are here, they are coming now!

  “They are made of metal, and they wield weapons of fire. We witnessed their birth. They are coming to destroy us! They will destroy us.”

  “Blasphemer!” a voice screamed. Atla, raising a torch above her head. The warriors around her were banging on their shields.

  Quez raised his voice and pushed his way through the crowd. The cheers had shifted into discordant murmuring. “I would give my life for any one of you. All I can do is hope that you’ll trust me. I am… I am trying to make a miracle happen.

  “I believe the giant bull-man and the flower woman that we fought earlier are not demons! I cannot claim to know what they are—”

  Furor swelled through the warriors. “Demon slave! Traitor!” they jeered.

  Quez was jostled as the tide of bodies shifted against him. He shoved them back. A thrown club smacked him in the face.

  He raised his voice. “They may even be humans, survivors of the Apocalypse from a distant corner of the World. But they are willing to ally with us against the true demons. No, I do know what they are! They are our only chance.”

  “Blasphemer!”

  “The Sworn Guardian has been corrupted!”

  Quez was knocked to the ground. Some of the warriors held against the mob, not to protect him, but to keep a semblance of order. A foot stomped on Quez’s finger. Another found his stomach, knocked his wind out.

  He spotted Lall through the horde. She looked down on him, rocking back and forth on her heels.

  “Traitor!” she screamed. Rabid, she pushed through the tangle of limbs, club raised. She cracked him on the back of the head.

  ***

  “Fucking hell,” Leira said, peeking around the corner.

  “Saw that coming,” Cort said. “No chance they were gonna listen to that dipshit.”

  “I didn’t expect the betrayal to come from the green-haired lady, though,” Leira said.

  She couldn’t even see Quez anymore. The mob had buried him. But she could see Lall, trying to fight off the swarm, even though she’d just clubbed Quez herself.

  Leira shook her head. “They might kill him.”

  “Time to go!” Cort said. He grabbed her by the wrist as he tore around the corner.

  At the far end of the hall, the Leviathan stormtroopers appeared.

  As Cort pulled her away, Leira’s gaze lingered for half a heartbeat. Illuminated red eyes, mindless and cruel. She knew that, inside those masks, their natural eyes had been fused to those optical devices, providing them with extrasensory capabilities.

  These stormtroopers were the Leviathan’s most common type of infantry, often used by Monarchs to supplement their own personal forces.

  They opened fire. A barrage of laser slugs splattered against the wall behind Leira. The air quivered with the warbling hum.

  “Run, you fucking idiots! Run!” Cort screamed as he leapt out into the corridor. He plowed through warriors with his hammer, though, to his credit, he was shoving them rather than smashing them.

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  Leira released a cloud of red spores and sent it drifting over the heads of the feather-clad warriors. She spared a glance back as the bowlheads rushed the exit.

  Faceless cyborgs, once-humans turned machinelike. Most stormtroopers were ordinary people conscripted from populations deemed in need of culling. They were then lobotomized, surgically enhanced, and grafted into their armor.

  A layer of aramid fibers was fused to their skin, serving as a sort of bodysuit. Matte black plating covered their bodies, segmented at the joints to allow full mobility. The tubes that ran from the ventilators on their masks to the tanks on their backs were multipurpose, providing, when necessary, nutrition, water, air, stimulant drugs, and painkillers.

  Cort had managed to extract Quez from the mob.

  “Retreat!” the eagle-man was screaming as Cort threw him over his shoulder. He’d been beaten half to death. “Retreat!”

  Leira kept behind Cort as they pushed through the fleeing warriors. She wove them a path through her enthralled and guided a few unlucky ones backward to form up into a rearguard. She felt bad about using them as meat shields, but she could only do so much. She wasn’t a goddamn saint. Ashkana must have made her share of tough calls, too, she told herself.

  Screaming white-red slugs ripped through the mob. Men and women were incinerated. Melted globs of flesh splattered the ground, blackened and boiling.

  Leira clung to Cort’s backpack, her head buzzing with the resonance of so many discharged laser weapons. The air stank of burnt flesh.

  She wished the storm would shut the fuck up. The constant sound of rumbling thunder was driving her up the wall.

  The stormtroopers spilled into the corridor, relentless, heedless. Their boots squished through puddles of atomic sludge and liquified corpses. They fired another barrage.

  Quez screamed in Leira’s ear and then twisted out of Cort’s hold, landing hard on the ground. He scrambled to his feet and then fell over again as he tried to go against the flow of fleeing warriors. He crawled forward.

  “Lall! Lall!” he shouted, blood dripping from his mouth. He was going to be trampled.

  “Fuck!” Leira gave Cort a tug to let him know what was happening and then raised her hands, fingers dancing and curling, red spores streaming out to enthrall more warriors. She pulled them away from Quez, and, in clearing that path, saw what he was trying to do.

  Lall lay against the wall, huddled in a ball. A nasty red gash gleamed on the side of her head. Her green hair was all matted around the wound. Her face was a swollen mess of blood and bruises.

  “You’re shitting me,” Cort said. “This is all her fault!” He had strapped a few of the warriors’ shields to his arms and chest, and he held their Kaia stove in his arms.

  “Aw, c’mon, it’s sweet,” Leira said. She took a step forward, but Cort pulled her back. He held up one finger. They waited a beat…

  “Now!” Cort barked. He hurled the Kaia stove through the air.

  The stormtroopers fired their next volley.

  One slug connected, and blue ooze spewed out, trailing through the air as the cannister fell, spinning. It hit the ground at the feet of the Leviathan’s front rank.

  The stove exploded. Leira’s breath was sucked out of her lungs. Fifteen bowlheads vanished without a trace.

  Cort and Leira plunged through the straggling warriors and, keeping low, rushed over to Quez and Lall. Black smoke enveloped the pack of stormtroopers, flashing blue with secondary detonations.

  Leira pulled Quez off of Lall. She’d expected him to fight her, but he just fell over, incapacitated by the force of his sobbing.

  This guy is their best warrior? They wouldn’t even stand a chance against ten stormtroopers.

  Cort scooped Lall up and cradled her in his arms. Leira winced upon realizing that the woman’s arm had been blown off at the elbow. At least the laser had cauterized it. She had a smoldering wound on her side, too—probably from the same slug.

  Leira couldn’t affect stormtroopers with her spores, because their masks filtered them out. The only thing she had that could do anything was…

  Leira rammed two fingers into the center of the Megrim flower, twisting them around, puncturing something ethereal. Her fingers burned.

  She screamed as she released a fountain of acidic brown spores. The raining mist mixed with the dissipating Kaia smoke.

  It’d do fuck all against their armor, but she knew from experience that it could damage their bodysuits and their boots. Every little thing could make a difference.

  Her throat torn raw, Leira vomited out a mixture of bile and blood and sushi.

  Cort pushed her and Quez ahead of him as they dashed back through the warriors. With a little coaxing, they were polite enough to get the fuck out of the way.

  Quez had his arm around Leira’s shoulder, using her for support. She wrenched him forward and threw him down. “Use your fucking legs! They’re all gonna die without you. You’re their leader—use your fucking voice!”

  Leira shook her head as Quez got up and walked on his own.

  Looking over the warriors, Leira could see the big metal doors that she and Cort had jetpacked through earlier. They were nearly there—more than half of the warriors had already made it inside the auditorium.

  At the sound of another laser barrage, Cort bull-rushed them through the bottleneck that had formed at the doors. He shoved the entire wall of people straight through.

  Leira laughed, wondering if the warriors had been hoping to lock her and Cort outside. That wasn’t gonna happen. The last of the warriors made it inside and the heavy doors slammed shut.

  The locking mechanism dangled from when Cort had broken it, but the warriors were quick to build up a barricade.

  They were back in the room with all the crucifixes, lit bright green by the jade eagle statue. For now, the warriors seemed content to ignore the two demons in their midst.

  “Now is not the time to stop running!” Cort shouted, heading further into the auditorium. Warriors were spreading throughout. “Back up! Get away from the doors! Back all the way the fuck up.”

  As if on cue, laser slugs slapped against the doors. They sizzled and smoked, sagging at the heat.

  “Give her to me, Cort,” Leira said, gesturing for him to set Lall down. She knelt over the half-conscious woman.

  “Please, demon-witch,” Lall groaned, writhing. “Don’t touch me. Don’t poison me.”

  Leira clicked her tongue. First things first, she puffed out the residual acidic spores—those wouldn’t help the lady’s wounds much. Then she released a dose of pink spores in Lall’s face. An analgesic anesthetic, with just a touch of euphoria—that never hurt.

  Lall stopped struggling and her breath steadied. Quez hovered over Leira’s shoulder, his anxiety so damn palpable that it rubbed off on her. She really wanted to smack him.

  Instead, she cut away as much as she could of Lall’s burnt clothing, which had fused to the edges of her wound. “This might sting,” Leira said as she changed to white spores. The flaky substance fell like snow. She sprinkled some onto Lall’s flank wound, her worst injury, then some more on her arm and head wound. The spores caked into something like gauzy spider silk.

  It didn’t do any healing—she wasn’t so lucky to have such a power, and that gift wasn’t something Megrim could give. But it had numbing and antiseptic properties, and it served as a decent bandage.

  Behind her, Cort grabbed Quez by the collar and lifted him off the ground, so they were face to face. “Is there another way out of this room?”

  “No. We’re trapped.”

  “You morons!”

  “Please, tell me,” Quez said. “Where is Challe’Jade?”

  “The crucifix lady?” Leira said. “Our friend has her. He should be here any—”

  Bang! One of the metal doors broke off and slammed down on the ground. A flurry of laser slugs flew through the auditorium.

  ***

  “Woah,” Gwil said to Challe as they looked down into the hole in the floor. Green and red lights were flashing like crazy. “Sounds like it’s getting exciting in there.”

  “My people are going to be slaughtered! Please, we have to help them!”

  “Yeah, I know,” Gwil said. “Uhh…” He looked around and then grinned as his eyes landed on the big statue that he’d climbed on earlier. “Don’t worry. This’ll work.” He stuck his head down into the hole and shouted, “Clear the way!”

  Then he went behind the statue and started pushing.

  ***

  The bowlheads broke through. Warriors scattered, clambering into the stands, taking cover behind pillars, crucifixes, and the wall surrounding the sandy pit. Leira and the others hid behind the big jade statue in the middle.

  Leira looked up at the hole in the ceiling. C’mon.

  A moment passed, filled with cries and laser fire.

  Lo and behold.

  Leira beamed as the ceiling exploded. A huge statue of a man came crashing through, landing headfirst, forming a ramp to the floor above. Then Gwil jumped down, accompanied by that storm woman and an octopus.