Demons Below, Angels Above

They tumbled together, the air buffetting and battering them, the world looping dizzily from sun and sky to green-black lake, and back again. And all the while, Nora Swift pursed her lips around thumb and forefingers and whistled, long and loud.

Clinging one to the other, they fell. Nora Swift watched the flat expanse of lake below loom closer, and wondered when, exactly, she was supposed to black out. If she was.

Then the sky above them shimmered and roared, and a sleek silver craft painted itself out of invisibility and dove toward them like some shining bird of prey.

It passed close enough beneath them that Sully could see herself reflected in the fuselage, and start at the livid wound winding itself around her forearm. And then she shut her eyes as a hot blast of backwash from the jet’s turbines hit them both, and they spun and slowed — but not enough.

The plane matched the speed of their fall, unsealing its aft hatch. They fell into cool dimness and the reflections of flashing red lights, and the scream of alarms.

Slowly, the plane angled its nose upward, degree by degree, until the deck met them with the smoothness of a kiss.

“We’re in!” Nora shouted above the roar of the engines and the panicked clamor of the warning buzzers. “Pull up! Pull up!”

The hatch sealed shut above them, and gravity’s wide cruel hand smashed them both down against the corrugated steel of the deck. Nora felt her own skull begin to bend. A black fog eroded her vision, and distantly, she heard the plane’s steel skeleton creak and groan and pop.

The Cyclone bellied out no more than five feet above the cold, indifferent waters of the lake, turbines blasting an escalating V of frothing water in its wake. Then, slung on some invisible string, it shot back into the sky in a swirl of lakefoam and terrified gulls.

When Nora was no longer entirely certain that she would either die or vomit, or possibly both, she opened her eyes, and rolled over onto her back. The G-force had squeezed the breath from her lungs, and she sucked the air back in deliciously.

“That’s my baby,” she gasped, and patted the cold metal deck of the plane with a parent’s fondness.

“Yeah, yeah,” the plane’s digital voice grumbled back. “I love you too.”

Sully’s eyes opened wide, and she blinked, and looked around slowly.

“Huh,” she said to Sully, when she’d gotten back sufficient breath. “Your plane talks.”

“Regrettably,” Nora groaned, and unsteadily pried herself up off the deck into a sitting position. “How you doing, Cyclone?”

“Been better,” the plane sulked. “I don’t want to think what that crazy stunt did to my fuselage. You owe me so much of an overhaul.”

“Your plane talks back,” Sully clarified, more for her own benefit.

Nora gripped one of the jump seats and hauled herself upright, staggering toward the pilot’s seat. It felt strangely right, comfortable, to strap herself in and wrap her fingers around the stick. She realized how much she’d missed it.

“What did we miss?” she asked the plane. “Any word from Professor Science or the jungle boy?”

“I wouldn’t know,” the plane said. “When the Faithless grabbed you two up, I decided I’d shadow you.”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Sully interjected, hauling herself into a jump seat. “This plane was just floating around outside the Faithless the whole time? That would have made rescue so much easier.”

“Kinda slipped my mind,” Nora offered, only half apologetic. “What with crazy Lovecraft lady trying to kill us and all.”

“You got any kind of medical kit on this bird?” Sully sighed, wincing anew as she peered at the cut around her arm. “I could do with some bandages.”

Silently, seamlessly, a hatch zipped open in the wall opposite from Sully, revealing a sleek, squarish white box bearing a red cross. She popped open the lid, found disinfectant and bandages, and went to work on her arm. Only at second glance did she see what else the niche contained — a pair of shining pistols hanging on hooks, rows of spare clips trailing down below them.

“Score,” she said, and whistled softly.

“You say something?” Nora called back from the pilot’s seat.

“Your plane’s packing heat,” Sully smirked. She reached reflexively for her box of cigarettes, and then remembered they were gone. And then she thought of the last person to tell her not to use them, and she couldn’t decide whether to smile or worry.

“Trip and Rafe,” she said. “We’ve got to—”

“Find them?” Nora interrupted, suddenly quiet. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”

Sully craned her neck to see out of the cockpit glass, and felt her mouth go dry.

From the northern end of the city, a crackling line of eye-searing nothingness rose and twisted straight up into the heavens.

“Here we go again,” Nora sighed, and opened up the throttle.


It didn’t have a shape.

It had about twenty, all somehow layered atop one another, and none of them matched any of the others, a Cubist’s fever-dream. It had eyes and arms and teeth and tentacles, and too many of all of them.

And from everywhere and nowhere all at once, it had a song, a hungry uluation that bored into Trip’s skull and surged in torrents around the corrugations of his brain.

Around, but not into. Trip had heard this song before, he realized, but smaller — the hunting-shriek of the Operators. And, some corner of his brain realized, like an inoculation, his exposure to Vore and Grin somehow now protected his mind from being swept away on a rising tide of pure alien madness.

At the moment, of course, he had larger concerns.

“I’d started crying by this point,” Jef said off to his left, philosophically. He stared with one human eye, and one not, at the rippling, shifting planes of the beast crawling its way out of the energies at the heart of the Misery Engine. “Of course, we can make allowances for my youth, but still — you’re clearly made of sterner stuff than I give you credit for.”

“You can stop this,” Trip said, eyeing the controls on the stone altar. Jef stood firmly between him and any means of shutting down the Engine, and Rafe, somehow, still slept in the far corner of the dais. “There’s got to be something left of you in there, Jef.”

“Is there?” the old man asked, cocking his head strangely. “I sometimes wonder about that. About when, exactly, it happened. Or maybe I was always this way. It all gets hazy. Oh, would you listen to that?” He closed his eyelids and let the song of the Eater wash over him. It had extended… appendages, of uncertain but horrible shape, and begun to grip the lip of the Engine, pulling itself across the roaring gap between worlds.

Trip stuck the Multipurpose Rifle into Jef’s rib cage and squeezed the trigger.

The Rifle bulged and sparked, all that sonic force hitting pure resistance and turning back on itself. It blew apart in Trip’s hands, and a great soundless wave of force knocked him up and over the edge of the dais.

He hit one of the rotating stone rings of the Engine, skidded, tumbled, nearly fell off the edge to the next ring rumbling away below. Trip spat blood, shaking the spots from his eyes, and looked up to see Jef standing on the dais, unruffled, straightening his tie. He gave Trip a brief, jaunty wave before the rotation of the stone ring carried Trip out of the platform’s view.

Trip got to one knee, then stood unsteadily. The air in front of him jittered and stuttered and Jef was there.

“Like it?” Jef said, waggling the index and middle fingers of his right hand in the air. “I got the works of a Needle put in a few years back. Awful handy.” The fingers moved again, and Trip spun to find Jef standing just behind him on the stone ring. Above them, the thing clawing its way through the portal sent forth another symphony of ravenous triumph.

Trip closed his right fist and hit Jef square on the mouth.

It hurt, lots — pain bloomed in Trip’s knuckles and shot up his arm to the elbow. Jef took a half-step back and touched his lip, where something that didn’t quite look like blood trickled forth.

“Clearly,” Jef chuckled, “your grandpop never taught you how he threw a punch.”

He smashed a fist hard into Trip’s stomach. Trip doubled over, gasping, and dropped back to his knees. For a moment, all the sound of the world went away, and there was only the song of the Eater ringing in his mind.

Jef squatted down, fixing Trip with his half-horrible gaze, and dabbed gently with his hankerchief at his own cut lip. Jef’s necktie hung down loosely from his shirtfront; as the pain radiated and dimmed out through Trip’s whole body, he saw that it was covered with equations.

“I don’t have to kill you, you know,” Jef said, soft and friendly. “It likes brains — not just the soft meaty parts, but what’s inside them. If you just let it in, well… the singing is quite lovely.”

Trip watched the tip of Jef’s fluttering necktie, and the grinding gap where the top of the stone wheel on which he rotated met the base of the next one up.

He sucked in air, shakily, and stretched out a hand, desperate and feeble, toward Jef.

“I knew it,” the old man smiled. “I knew this world would breed more sense into you than your grandpop.”

And then Trip grabbed his necktie and jammed it into the gap between the wheels.

It caught, and stuck, and the inexorable motion of the wheels drew the necktie tight. Jef let out a strangled gasp as the tie sucked him closer and closer to the spinning intersection of the wheels. Trip heard bones snap, saw Jef’s neck cant oddly.

And all the while, the old man never stopped smiling.

Trip scrambled to his feet and ran, leaping down to the next ring below. He heard nothing behind him, and paused, to rest.

Behind him, something gristly crackled and popped. Trip turned to see Jef, his neck now trailing a ragged stub of fabric, using both hands to set his head back at the proper angle.

“No more of that ‘dying’ stuff, either, is another benefit,” Jef said genially, as his windpipe reknit itself. “You didn’t let me get to that part. But I’m guessing your answer’s no.”

He casually waved one hand, and Trip flew backwards, skidded off the edge of the wheel, bounced off the one below, and rolled hard onto the fringe of grass on the field inside the baseline, bruised and aching.

Trip looked up and saw Jef leap off the ring above, arc through the air, and land just before him. Behind him, the Engine spun and roared, and the Eater’s mouth — one of many, perhaps — broke through the gap, saliva sizzling and boiling in the oxygen of our atmosphere.

“I suppose I could kill you quick,” Jef mused, rubbing one thumb against the palm of his opposite hand. “As a favor to old Tom Morrow.” He smiled again at Trip, showing teeth this time. Behind his slightly yellowed human set, Trip caught a flash of many rows of sharper, stranger teeth, prickling and unfurling down the back of the old man’s throat.

“Then again,” Jef said, “I’m a man of science. Always been the curious sort. And it’s been just about ages since I had a chance to do a proper vivisection.”

He reached out a hand.

The rumbling whine of the Engine changed, deepened. The beast at its pinnacle keened and shrieked. Its probing assault on the borders of Trip’s mind drew back, replaced with fainter, helpless blasts of shock and fear. Jef staggered back in unison, eyes clamped shut, clutching at his own head.

And Trip smiled, slow and triumphant.

“Gotcha,” he said.

The old man opened one eye, the wrong one, and it quivered furiously in its socket as he spat the words out: “What did you do?”

Trip dug in his pockets with both hands, and came out with his fists clenched. When he uncurled the left, three black lodestones sat in the palm.

“That stone key on the altar?” Trip grinned. “It was probably supposed to have these in it.” Before Jef could move, he flung them away to vanish in the grass and dust of the outfield.

He opened his right palm, and a small glass vial rested there, empty save for a few stray flecks of clinging black dust.

“And this,” Trip said, “well, at first I wasn’t sure what it was, or why my grandpa left it for me. Then I remembered his Looking Glass — how the gyroscope that served as its key had another one just like it inside. I figured maybe that stone key worked the same way.”

“What did you do?” Jef roared again, his voice expanding once more beyond his own body, each word striking like a thunderclap.

Trip nodded to the Eater at the lip of the Engine far above, its terror-song growing louder and shriller by the moment. Its ever-shifting appendages were now clinging to the topmost stone wheel, digging sizzling grooves into the stone as the Engine inexorably drew it back into itself.

“I gave it a destination,” Trip smiled. “Oh, and my grandpa says, ‘Don’t trust Jef.’ In capital letters.”

Jef screamed, in all the keys of a pipe organ at once, and lunged away toward the stone altar. One mighty leap carried him halfway up the steps, and with another, he was at the top, hands scrabbling over the controls. He reached for the stone key to turn it, shut the Engine down—

And found the top of the key gone, a jagged, irretrievable stub left behind.

“I’m sorry,” Rafe Windham said, perched on the edge of the altar platform. “Were you looking for this?” The black stone knives clinking and janging from his belt. His eyes stared out at Jef scarlet with burst blood vessels, but they were clear and sane and just a bit smug. He hefted the severed upper half of the stone key in one rough hand.

“I couldn’t help overhearing that this might be just a touch important,” Rafe offered. “And then I seem to have gone and broken it. Shame, really. Here, I’ll make it up to you — have it back.”

And he hurled the chunk of jagged rock right into Jef’s human eye.

The old man staggered back and swore in some inhuman cadence, and Rafe leapt away, down to the Engine, as the stone on which he stood burst into vapor in a spherical sizzle of light. Rafe dashed and dodged his way down the spinning stone rings, leaping from one to the next as Jef, half-blind, lashed out with blast after blast.

Dodging one last dazzling bloom of deadly energy, Rafe hit the grass running, loping to Trip’s side. “What’d I miss?” he asked, grinning.

“Armageddon, nearly,” Trip replied, dusting himself off.

“Well, you know,” Rafe shrugged, “heavy sleeper. I did hear that lovely bit about the destination, though. Good on you.”

“I was practicing it in my head,” Trip confessed.

The grass between them boiled and caught fire, and the two men flung themselves in opposite directions as the turf exploded. Jef strode across the outfield toward them, smearing blood away from his freshly regrown eye, a trailing wave of fire rising from the earth behind him. There seemed to be a shape half-glimpsed growing in the air above and around him, some larger and more terrible form tethered to his human body.

“Schoolyard pranks!” Jef growled. “High spirits and hijinks. I am the single most intelligent being ever born on this planet, and if you two think you can so much as slow me down, I hrrrrruuugh!”

This last interruption to his threat came with a fresh tide of panic washing out from the Eater. Trip glanced up at the Engine and saw it clearly losing ground, being drawn further back into the Engine. And as it did, the otherworldly shape looming over Jef — something all angles and edges and orifices, some horrible Mobius strip of a creature — was yanked back like a kite on a string, dragging Jef’s human body with it.

In its primal panic, the Eater was summoning all its children home.

Jef managed to slur out a string of murder-filled vowels, fighting the pull of his alien master. The heels of his scuffed brown penny loafers dug and clawed at the burning sod. He stretched out a hand, and the air in front of it prickled and rippled—

A shadow fell over the field, and a sudden wind howled. Trip and Rafe looked up to see a great sleek silver assemblage of curves and wings wheeling about overhead, kicking up vortices of baseline dust in the downdraft from its twin turbines. The rear hatch shimmered open, and a dark figure plunged out, tethered to a slim cable, fire blazing from each hand.

The bullets slammed into Jef, staining the front of his neat white suit in ugly bursts of crimson-black. He staggered backward, losing precious inches as the Eater hauled the inhuman parts of him ever closer.

The cable trailing behind the new arrival tightened, drawing out the slack to slow her fall, and she landed gently, catlike, on the ravaged turf between Trip and Rafe. Trip started at the slender intruder, all billowing black fabric, until she looked up at him from above her mask. Black hair fell and fluttered against familiar eyes.

“Sully?” he marveled.

“Hey, boy genius,” she said, peeling back the sash around her nose and mouth, and favoring him with a bigger smile than he’d ever seen from her. “We got shot at by apes and blew up a spider lady. And dammit, you’re still having a worse afternoon.”

Trip opened his mouth to reply, and found himself hurled to the ground as Rafe tackled the both of them. Another bolt from Jef sizzled through the air where they’d been standing, neatly severing Sully’s dangling cable.

“Could we possibly reschedule this reunion,” Rafe suggested, “until after the end of the world is done?”

He turned and rose, drawing his obsidian blades, to face Jef, who still struggled forward as if fighting some gale force wind.

“I understand your kind don’t like these too much,” he said to Jef, hefting the knives. “Let’s see if that applies to you, too.”

He leapt forward toward the old man, blades raised high to cleave into Jef’s head.

And stopped, in midair, caught in a crushing, invisible grip. He tried to scream, twisting, but hadn’t the breath to manage even that.

“I ssssstill have powwwwer enough,” Jef slurred around uncooperating lips, “tttto deal with you.” The strain of fighting the Eater’s pull seemed manifest in his body — the skin of his face was beginning to droop and bubble, wax on a candle. “All of you. A mmmman keeps his promisssses. Iffff I have to ggggo I’ll wwwwwipe this cccccity off the map. Attttomic fission — allllways did like that one.”

He raised his hand again, and the air around it seemed to glow, brighter and brighter.

Then time thickened around him, slowed to molasses. His words became a low, murky drone. He swiveled his gaze, slothlike, to see why.

Valencia Stitch, blind and nearly dead, stretched forth her arm across the grass to bind Jef with her Needle. She aimed by hearing and spite alone.

“I quit,” she rasped.

Then she did.

And in the precious seconds she had purchased, Trip drew Maximillian’s Needle from his belt, lunged forward across the grass, and plunged it sharp and shining deep into Jef’s heart.

“I’m sorry,” he said, looking deep into the old man’s one human eye. With strength he didn’t even know he had, Trip snapped the buried Needle in half.

The world flared nova-bright, hurling Trip back into Sully, sending them both tumbling to the dirt and grass. Rafe dropped to the ground.

The uncontained energies of the Needle surged through Jef’s human body, up into the larger floating shape above him, and back along some unseen conduit to the Eater at the lip of the Misery Engine. This last jolt of sudden pain was too much; the creature released its grip, and sank with an ungodly slurp back into the steaming mass of energies now boiling out of the Engine. It dragged Jef back with it through the air, screaming all the way, until he vanished into the shrinking circle of un-light.

Rafe coughed and shuddered, feeling blood force itself back into his limbs. He looked over at Trip and Sully, disentangling themselves with no small reluctance. Over the grinding howl of the Engine, he shouted, “How do we shut it down?”

Trip looked at the Engine, then at Sully, then at Rafe.

“I… I hadn’t really thought that far ahead!” he confessed.

The ground shook. Fissures began to spread from the base of the Misery Engine as it slowly sank into the earth, drawing the entire field with it. All around them, the steel frame of the stadium groaned. Light poles bent. Bleachers peeled themselves up from their bolts and moorings. The green metal scoreboard began to pitch forward, and the digital signs ringing the upper decks exploded in sparks. Wrigley Field was imploding.

Drawn by the rioting Engine’s magnetic force, chunks of steel broke free and hurtled through the air, clanging off the shining hull of the Cyclone. In the cockpit, Ruby swore amid a clamor of alarms, fighting to keep the craft level. She swung the plane around, dipping it precariously lower, to shield her friends below from the storm of whirling debris.

“Get the hell onboard!” she boomed through the jet’s external speakers, extending the rear hatch’s ramp as close to the ground as she dared. Individual seats plucked themselves from the stands, crashing off the windshield, narrowly missing the hungry suction of the Cyclone’s powerful turbines. And as the plane shuddered and rolled around her, she fought to keep pace with the escalating pull of the Engine…

The fissures spread, and the ground began to slope. The whole stadium creaked and buckled, closing like the petals of the flower around them. Rafe dashed through the choking storm of dust and debris and leapt for the Cyclone’s ramp, sinking one blade deep into the metal, with a silent apology, to hold him fast. With the other, he reached back an arm to the trailing Sully and Trip.

Sully leapt first, grabbing Rafe’s outstretched hand, Trip just behind her. He jumped, arms out, reaching with every last inch.

The Engine screeched and blew apart in a fountain of raw, white-hot energy, sending car-sized chunks of its stone wheels spinning and pinwheeling in all directions. The shock wave knocked the Cyclone forward, just out of Trip’s reach, and Sully only just caught him with the hand of her injured arm.

“Hang on tight!” Ruby shouted. “I’ve gotta take her up!” Amid the whirling storm of metal, the Cyclone strained to rise, inching its way skyward as the steel fingers of the stadium closed into a fist all around it.

Trip dangled, felt himself slipping. He looked up at Nora, desperate.

“Get your arm around my waist!” she shouted to Rafe.

“You’ll fall!” he cried, shaking his head. She whirled at him, eyes blazing, and he would ever after swear that someone else’s voice, someone far more terrifying, came from her mouth next.

“Do it!” the Gaunt Heir snarled. Rafe promptly let go of her arm.

For one terrifying moment, she and Trip pitched backward into space. And then Rafe shifted his grip, just barely encircling Sully’s hips with his arm, as she flopped forward and caught Trip with both hands.

“Grab my arm!” she shouted down to him, gritting her teeth. “Climb up!”

He reached upward, hands seizing her mutilated forearm. Beneath the bandages, pain exploded, and fresh blood began to seep. She let the pain stream past her, bits of paper in a wind, and kept her eyes locked on Trip’s. Slowly, agonizingly, she hauled him up until he clung to the hatch.

The Cyclone cleared the closing gap in the stadium roof by a matter of millimeters, sparks scraping from the tips of the wings, and shot forth into the sky. In a last burst of unearthly light, Wrigley Field collapsed in on itself, sealing shut the Misery Engine and the long passage down to the Winter City in tons of twisted metal and thick, impassable earth. A plume of dust rose and drifted westward, riding the breeze from the lake, and 911 switchboards citywide began to jam with calls.

Exhausted, Trip, Rafe, and Sully collapsed onto the steel deck of the Cyclone as the hatch seamed shut behind them, Rafe’s one stone blade still jutting from the metal. In the pilot’s seat, Nora Swift slumped in her seat, released a long, slow breath, and let the adrenalin seep out through her trembling limbs.

A wild animal yell pierced the cockpit, and then stinking, muscular arms seized her before she could scream.

“You!” Rafe whooped, spinning her around and contorting himself to give her a hug in her seat. “You magnificent queen of the air, bless you!” He stopped, regarding her with surprise and curiosity. “By God, I could kiss you. How frightening is that?”

“Very!” she grimaced, shoving him away. “Ugh! Good Lord, you stink. What the hell did you roll in?”

“Oh, that?” Rafe said, inspecting his grime-slicked torso and gore-stained pants. “That’s, yes, that’s probably the dinosaur blood.”

“Smells like,” Nora began, wrinkling her nose, and stopped. “I don’t even wanna know what it smells like.”
“I got several suggestions,” the Cyclone offered, moodily.

“Which I’m quite sure no one wants to hear,” Rafe replied. The cockpit lights flared at him in some digital equivalent of a Bronx cheer.

“Says the man who stuck a big-ass knife in me,” the plane huffed.

“You two be nice,” Ruby sighed, and looked back through the cracked glass of the cockpit. She saw a robin’s egg wall of sky, flecked with cottony wisps of cloud. It was freedom itself, a kingdom without fear. It was just about the loveliest thing.

In the back of the plane, Trip sat up, peeling back the sleeve of Sully’s silken blouse to see the bloodied gauze winding around her forearm.

“Oh, geez,” he winced, “your arm—”

“I’ll live,” Sully grinned. “Shut up already.” She stretched out a hand and ran one thumb gingerly across the stubble darkening his cheek. “Still haven’t had a shave, huh?” she asked.

Trip smiled. “I’m working on it,” he said.

“Well, when you get around to it,” Sully replied, “you let me know.”

The Cyclone cruised onward through the clear autumn sky, sun glinting off its hull. In the black depths of the lake below, the wreckage of the greatest menace the skies had ever known slowly began to rust. Far beneath the earth, in a city untouched by day, eyeless, hungry things prowled a wrecked mass of stone and crystal shards, searching for scraps.

And the whole of the living world above, slung in the gap between heavens and hells, went on about its lives, a breath away from terror and wonder, and never entirely knowing it.

Not the end! Two chapters more to go. Stay tuned...

The Man in the White Summer Suit

“You ever play the guitar, son?” asked Jefferson Edison Franklin, easily, a bit of music jangling amid his own softly gravelly voice. In the speckled shadows under the brim of his hat, his face could have been an old forty or a young eighty. It was the one good eye, the one not covered by the opaque lens of Jef’s mismatched glasses that threw Trip Morrow’s guessing off. It peered out clear and curious and sky blue, and its gaze was ageless.

“No, sir,” Trip said, watching the black-coated shape of Mrs. Stitch, just over Jef’s shoulder, shift her weight and purse her lips at her apparent employer. Trip kept the Multipurpose rifle slung at his hip, his finger not quite on the trigger. Just in case.

“I played the banjo a bit, when I was young,” Jef said, the fingers of his left hand, down at his side, briefly moving through some half-remembered finger pattern. “It was the strings, you see, that got me thinking about time. You pluck a string, right? Send energy all into it. And what happens?”

“It vibrates,” Trip nodded. He could hear Rafe snoring softly, all the way up the stone steps near the altar controls for the misery engine. In the distance, just audible through the hollow steel space of the stadium, he heard an elevated train clack-clack-clack into the Addison station.

“Right,” Jef continued. “And when it does, it seems to get wider. Like there’s two strings, instead of one. ‘Course, the vibration dies down, and the string quiets, and it’s back to being one again. And I’m afraid that’s what’s been happening the past few days, with us.”

“You plucked the string,” Trip said, handing the gnarled old baseball he’d been tossed back to Jef. “Sometime a long way back. The ‘30s, at least.”

“Sharp,” Jef nodded. “Like your grandpa. I was… well, I was just a kid, you understand. I was scared. Those things, those Operators Mrs. Stitch said you met — they’d figured out where we were — figured out a way to get back…” Trip spotted a twitch at the left corner of the older man’s mouth, a nervous, distant tension in his one visible eye. “You know an octopus, it can fit its whole body through anyplace big enough for its mouth to go… the tiniest little holes, if it’s hungry enough…”

Jef went very quiet, and with hands that did not quite tremble, he removed a folded white handkerchief from the inside of his jacket pocket and dabbed at his forehead under the brim of the hat. Mrs. Stitch took a half-step forward, but stopped when Jef turned back to her and nodded once, quickly.

“Mrs. S,” Jef said, “It’s a bit on the warm side today, for November. I believe I brought some lemonade in the Thermos. Would you run fetch it for me, kindly?”

Trip didn’t need any special perception to see just how greatly Mrs. Stitch enjoyed that particular nickname. But she nodded crisply and, with a curious glance back at Trip, swept off toward the bleachers.

“Anyway,” Jef continued, louder now, “I got all worked up and figured I was doing us all a favor. Splitting up the timelines so they wouldn’t know where to look. So we’d all be safe.”

“But it wasn’t perfect, was it?” Trip asked, nodding at the needle in Jef’s lapel. “You needed people to maintain the separation — to sew up the holes.” Mrs. Stitch was gliding back across the field, the fringes of her coat stippled with orange baseline dust, a silver thermos in her hands.

“At the risk of mixing metaphors,” Jef smiled, “you’ve got it in one. The Needles, like that one you seem to have got from old Maximillian there, well, they’re tuned to the frequency at which this timeline vibrates. They can use it, tweak it, smooth out bits here and there.”

Trip looked down at the Needle dangling from his belt. But he did not remove it. “Maximillian didn’t make it,” Trip said slowly. “Not for lack of trying, though.”

“He always was my favorite,” Jef sighed, in the manner of someone who’s just had an afternoon’s work go up in smoke. “Bit of a horse’s ass, but that’s artificial intelligence for you.”

Trip pointed at Mrs. Stitch, hesitantly, as she resumed her place at Jef’s side, handing her employer a bright silver thermos. “I’ve just got to say,” Trip told him, “you’re awfully friendly for someone who’s been trying to kill us.”

Jef paused, halfway through unscrewing the cap on the thermos with his long, lanky fingers, and let out an unforced guffaw. Mrs. Stitch didn’t follow suit.

“Kill you?” Jef said, through the tail end of his laughter. “Son, I was trying to improve you.”

Trip pulled down the collar of his shirt, eyes narrowing, to show the twisting scar of the Black Lotus still livid against the skin of his neck. “I don’t consider this an improvement,” Trip spat. “Or was poisoning me supposed to build my character?”

“Simmer down, son,” Jef soothed, pouring lemonade from the thermos into the hollow cap. “I knew full well you were close enough to Dr. Xiang’s to get help in time. How do you think I knew exactly where to find you? Besides, every good hero needs a little danger, a little tragedy…” His eyes focused once more on something a long time distant, but only for a moment. “A little toughening up. I needed people strong enough, smart enough, to fight the Eaters if ever I couldn’t. That’s the only problem with this world I built — same amount of awfulness, but not enough heroes.”

“And here we are,” Trip said, which would have sounded much more impressive had Rafe, still fast asleep on the altar, not chosen that exact moment to let out a somnolent snort.

“And here you are,” Jef nodded, and took a sip of lemonade. “Funny thing, though. As it turns out, you went and dug me up the one thing that makes you unnecessary.”

Trip’s hand moved on the Rifle at his hip, and Mrs. Stitch in turn began to draw a Needle from her sleeve, and Jef had to step between the two of them, lemonade sloshing perilously in the thermos cap.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa!” he said. “Pardon my poor choice of words. I just mean the hard part’s done for you. I can use the Engine to seal up the gaps, pluck that old string again — make everything like it was before we so rudely went and turned your life upside-down.”

Trip stopped, the prickle of danger fading from the back of his neck, and exhaled slowly. “Sorry,” he said at last. “You can understand how I might have gotten the wrong impression.”

“Surely, surely,” Jef smiled, screwing the cap back on the thermos, and handing it back to Mrs. Stitch. It vanished into her coat. He turned and began to stride toward the stairs leading up to the Misery Engine’s altar.

“You shouldn’t,” Trip said. Jef stopped, turned.

“Shouldn’t what, son?” There was a challenge in the old man’s one good eye.

“All your resources, all your intellect, and you’re telling me the best way to confront these things, these Eaters, is to hide?” Trip said. “To suck all the wonder out of the world? Lost kingdoms, and dinosaurs, and—”

“Plague bombs, and death rays, and sky pirates,” Jef cut in sharply, his voice quiet. “Walking metal monsters that can raze a city. And hungry, ceaseless things living just a heartbeat away, trying to find their way into our world. You think it’s all shining and golden?”

“I think the good in it’s worth fighting for,” Trip shot back. “We seem to have plenty of horror right here in this safe little world you made — and not enough to stand against it. You said it yourself.”

“Suppose I listened to you, then?” Jef offered, one foot on the lowermost step leading up to the altar. “Let time keep twining itself back together. You think you’d still exist? I knew your grandfather — Windham, Gale, Gaunt, all of them. Not exactly the marrying types. You’re only here because in this reality, your grandfather wasn’t scrambling all over the world, leaving dime-novel plots in his wake.”

Trip thought about this in silence for several long seconds, Jef watching him, waiting.

“Doesn’t matter,” Trip said at last. “The good he did matters more than anything I could possibly do in my life.”

“Oh, you say that now,” Jef laughed gently. “But you’re young. Who’s to say what you’ll do by the time you’re old as me? And don’t confuse shiny ray guns and fancy planes and radiocoder boxes with things the world could actually use. No, I’m saving your life, son, like it or not. I let the world settle back to the way it was, and I guarantee you, this conversation we’re having’s gonna get a lot more one-sided.”

“You’re wrong,” Trip said, stepping forward to take hold of the old man’s arm. The linen of the suit was soft, freshly pressed, and beneath it Trip felt surprisingly solid muscle. He heard Mrs. Stitch moving behind him, the rustle of the grass, and saw Jef’s eye flit to her, signal her to stop.

“I’ve got twice as many patents as you’ve got years, kid,” Jef said, calmly, softly. “I think you can trust me to do the math on this.”

“You’re looking at this as a binary choice,” Trip said, desperate, the words spilling out of him. “This world or that one. But I have to believe the universe, that time, is bigger than that. Big enough for the world you came from, and the world I came from, and whatever mixed-up world we’re both in now. You don’t have to destroy one to save another.”

“Let me guess,” Jef replied. “You’re about to tell me impossible’s just an excuse, right? If I had a nickel for every time I heard that…” He smiled at Trip, sadly, and for just a moment he seemed far older. “I like to think that, too. But it’s just a theory. And the evidence, well, sometimes the evidence says different.”

Jef turned away, gently pulling his forearm out of Trip’s grasp, and began to climb the stairs in a steady, measured gait. “Your grandfather once told me that he’d found the signposts, the trail markers, for the World Yet to Be. But he said it was my job to build it. He didn’t say anything about approving of the design.”

Trip started to race up the stairs, but a firm hand gripped his upper arm, and something cool and metallic pressed gently against the base of his skull.

“All appearances to the contrary,” Mrs. Stitch said quietly, “I rather like you and your friends. Which is why you still have a head at the moment. We’ll walk up, if you like — but slowly, and together.”

Helpless at the point of Mrs. Stitch’s Needle, Trip followed Jef up the stairs, the dark-coated woman trailing behind him. They reached the top, and Stitch moved away toward Rafe, curled up and still snoring in the corner.

“Let him sleep, Mrs. S,” Jef chuckled. “He looks like he’s had a tough day.”

“Wait,” Trip blurted out, as Jef reached for the stone keyboard of Kroatoan pictographs. “Sully and Nora — some… some thing took them, from the sky, and we don’t know if they’re alive—”

“It won’t matter,” Jef soothed. “Once I use the Engine to reset the timeline, they’ll be back in the same lives they were always in, none the worse for wear. Doubt they or you or anyone outside my organization will remember a thing.”

He looked back at Trip, with what seemed to be genuine fondness. “Which, I suppose, is call for me to say it was nice knowing you.” With deft fingers, Jef punched in a sequence of symbols in the stone grid, the pictograms lighting up from within as each was pressed. Jef adjusted the three crystal levers, placed one liver-spotted hand on the the stone key, and twisted it in the console.

Once more, rock rumbled against rock. The ring of crystal spires surrounding the Engine began to glow and pulse, but instead of riding in arcs from their tips, energy began to pour down through them. It surged and sizzled into the face of the carvings on the concentric wheels of the Engine, illuminating them an eerie crimson even in the daylight. And slowly, from the base on up, the Misery Engine began to turn.

In the hollow pit at its center, Trip watched as time itself began to ripple like a mirage. A web of brilliant white light wove itself across the opening, and coalesced into a puddle, and then a pool, and then the whole of the center of the Engine shimmered with unearthly light.

Then the rising whine of the Engine’s workings accelerated further. The platform began to tremble. And a hole emerged in the white light, growing ever larger, radiating every color at once, and none at all.

In the distance, somewhere inside his skull, Trip heard faint singing, growing closer.

“Say, Mrs. S,” Jef asked conversationally. “You remember that cancer you had when we first met?”

“Yes…?” Mrs. Stitch ventured, growing fear in her voice, as she watched the hole of un-light widen even further.

And then Jef turned, and touched two fingers to Mrs. Stitch’s brow. “You can have it back now,” he said.

The gray-eyed woman screamed, an entire lifetime of pain mushrooming inside her head. The world flew away, and darkness swallowed her sight. She fell backward, whimpering, hit the stone stairs and rolled all the long way down.

“What… what did you do?” Trip asked, his heart pounding, as the singing in his skull grew louder.

“A man keeps his promises,” Jef said, looking down the steps at the tiny, convulsing black shape of Mrs. Stitch below. “My dad taught me that. I’m keeping mine.”

He reached up and slowly removed his hat. His head was completely bald, and covered with gummy pinkish scars in strange and swirling patterns. And as Trip watched in horror, the lines of those scars began to undulate and glow, a soft purple, as if lit from within.

“A long time ago,” Jef said, “something put a bad thought in my head. And it grew. And grew.”

He took off his glasses. From behind the opaque lens, something pulsing and lividly purple stared back at Trip from Jef’s other eye socket. It would not, under even the most fanciful circumstances, have been considered an eye.

“And one day,” Jef said, his voice seeming to take on a shape far larger than the slender man who stood before Trip, “I just wasn’t myself.”

Behind him, through the crackling, stinking circle of un-light in the center of the Misery Engine, with a howl like twenty Guernicas, something began to break through.

The Seven Signs of Salvation

Life, for Trip Morrow, was an endless string of small, discrete problems to be solved. Get to the opposite side of the street in the fewest steps. Chart the shortest possible course between the produce and meat aisles. Find the most accomodating person-sized space in the packed subway car.

His present problems had simply gotten bigger. And toothier.

Trip dashed across the open plaza beneath the endless night of the Winter City, trailing Maximillian, the Multipurpose Rifle in his arms seeming to grow heavier with every stride. He kept one eye on the uneven stones that paved the ground before him, and another on the exposed innards of the rifle. His long, multiply scarred fingers dipped and dived amid the wires in the main chamber, risking burns and shocks, making last-minute adjustments. In his head, diagrams danced, reshaping themselves from moment to moment.

The trail of destruction Rafe and his reptile pursuers had left was easy enough to follow. That was some small comfort. The thought that he might be too late — that Rafe might be, at the very moment, sliding down some improbable beast’s gullet — was most definitely not.

Trip could feel his own heart hammering against his sternum; every breath burned. He risked a glance over at Maximillian as they rounded one corner of the giant stone arena, the big man’s strides devouring ground with a glutton’s effortless appetite. Maximillian’s face wasn’t even red, and if he breathed with even slightly more effort than usual, the trailing swirl of his long black coat concealed it. Trip nodded to himself, filed those facts in an ever-fuller drawer at the back of his brain, and switched the positions of two final wires.

Two furious roars echoed through the gloom, from the far side of the stadium, and moments later, a pair of tremors rattled their way out through the paving stones and up Trip’s legs. They were close.

Trip slammed shut the casing of the Rifle, pinching the tips of two of his fingers in the process, and felt it charge and hum in his grip. Now or never.

He turned the far corner of the stadium a split-second behind Maximillian and saw two truck-sized reptile bodies surrounding a small prone figure, bending low, tails flicking, jaws wide.

Trip slid to his knees, friction burning through the fabric of his pants as he skidded across the stone. He braced the Rifle to his shoulder and aimed at the beasts. The trigger slid back beneath his finger.

The sound was so low, it nearly felt like silence. The Rifle slammed itself back against him, and even in the semidarkness, he could see the very air itself ripple in an expanding bolt of sonic force, leaping forth to slam against the Rexes.

They reared back as if stung, turning, lurching, the mass of their mass of muscle and bone turned to sudden disadvantage. They faltered, but did not fall. The one with the X-shaped scar across its face bared its jaws and rumbled drunkenly toward them.

Maximillian shot Trip a look of absolute disgust. Trip shrugged.

“Impatient, huh?” Trip said, and fired again.

A wall of sonic pain smashed into the Rexes’ blunt, eyeless skulls. Their legs wobbled at the joints, tiny arms flailing. With incredible slowness, they slid sideways in opposite directions, quavered at the very edge between standing and falling, and crashed over onto the stone of the plaza. The Rexes lay there like sudden snowdrifts, breathing like steam shovels, bellies rising and falling, and groaned piteously.

Maximillian made a small, grudgingly impressed noise at the back of his throat.

“Yeah, I figured,” Trip sighed, getting to his feet again.

The prone figure over which the Rexes bent stirred, and alarm curdled once more in the pit of Trip’s stomach. He ran forward across the stone plaza, dodging a few half-hearted snaps from the Rexes’ prone heads, to find Rafe sprawled full on his back on the ground. Rafe’s eyes were squeezed tightly shut, an obsidian knife clenched tight in each of his fists; aside from a few bruises and scrapes, and his pants stained and reeking with reptillian blood, he seemed miraculously intact.

“Rafe?” Trip asked gingerly.

“That answers my question,” Rafe said with a deep sigh, and opened his eyes. “I cannot possibly be in heaven.”

“Which has its definite upsides,” Trip offered, giving Rafe a hand up. The long run was finally catching up with Trip; he breathed in greedy gulps, the oxygen never seeming to get to his lungs, and waited for his pulse to quiet.

“Took you bloody long enough,” Rafe said, smirking, checking himself for missing limbs.

“Yeah, well, you run fast,” Trip said. “That was a great strategy, though — lying down for them to eat you.”

“Thought of it myself,” Rafe replied. “You missed all sorts of impressive bits before that. I got to ride one of them. The little ones, I mean.”

“And sadly,” Trip admitted, “that’s not even remotely the strangest thing I’ve heard or seen today.”

“Funny how quickly one adjusts to all this,” Rafe said. “I keep half expecting to just start screaming and screaming and not really, you know, stop.”

Or, Trip silently added, start thinking about Sully, and where she and Nora might be. Or if they were alive at all. In that sense, constant danger was a luxury; it left him time and energy to worry only about himself.

Behind them, one of the Rexes roared, this time in pain. Trip and Rafe turned to see Maximillian standing next to the beast’s prone head, delivering a series of probing, experimentally vicious kicks into the back of its skull.

“Stop it!” Rafe shouted, his voice seeming to unfurl like a sail into something larger and more majestic than the man who contained it. Maximillian looked over at him, bored, and delivered another swift blow to the soft, vulnerable tissue just behind the cranial bone of the one-armed beast’s head.

Rafe crossed the distance between them in a few quick strides and grabbed Maximillian by the arm. “I said—”

The big man whirled, and in the blink of an eye the point of his Needle rested dangerously against Rafe’s jugular. Unfortunately for him, the keen edge of one of Rafe’s blades had found its way up to the soft meat between Maximillian’s chin and neck.

Trip moved forward to separate them, but Rafe held out his free hand in warning. “They’re no threat to us now,” Rafe said to Maximillian, even and calm. “Get your sick amusement elsewhere.”

Long, tense moments passed. Then, with a huff, Maximillian moved the Needle away from Rafe’s neck and stepped back. He ran one cork-sized thumb against the line of his jaw, where Rafe had punched him earlier, and shot Rafe a meaningful, poisonous look. Then he turned crisply and strode off, pushing roughly past Trip as he headed toward the circular structure behind the stone stadium, from which the ring of lights rose into the subterranean gloom.

Rafe knelt down to rest a hand against the beast’s massive head. It huffed and rumbled mournfully, lone arm clawing the air, and its companion nearby answered in similarly pained tones.

“They’re just hungry,” Rafe said softly to Trip. “Just doing what they were made to. It’s nature, is all. I think I understand that now.”

“Come on,” Trip said nervously, watching the bellows of the beasts’ rib cages swell and shrink in time with their labored breathing. “I don’t know how long the sonics are going to keep them down. And I’m not wild about letting Maximillian get too far ahead of us.”

“Amen to that,” Rafe said, tucking his knives into his belt.

A single entrance, wide and cavernous, sloped downward into the heart of the vast stone-ringed structure. Trip played the light mounted on his Rifle against the walls as he and Rafe descended into the dimness. The searching beam illuminated suffering etched in stone: carvings of crude but identifiable figures wracked with starvation or disease; defeated soldiers put to the sword; children wrenched from mothers. Again and again, in each carved panel, zigzag lines rose from these figures toward the same sort of circle above.

“Charming, these people,” Rafe muttered. “I’d love to see their hospitals.”

“From what my grandfather wrote,” Trip answered, shaking his head, “you really wouldn’t.”

Light began to trickle in from the bottom of the sloping passageway, and they emerged into a broad hall lit by crystalglow from brilliant clusters on the low stone ceiling. Maximillian waited there, at the periphery of a forest of carved, rectangular stone pillars that seemed to sprout from the floor in a roughly checkerboard formation. There were a dozen of them — or should have been; the spot near the door where one seemingly would have stood was empty.

The tall man turned his head as they approached, impatience registering in his cold grey eyes, then quickly turned back.

“You waited,” Trip observed. “Why does that make me think you know something we don’t?”

Maximillian didn’t look at them, but Trip caught the ghost of a smirk on his face.

“Yeah, I thought so,” Trip sighed. “After you?”

Maximillian shook his head, and swept an arm forward toward the stone pillars, oozing mock courtesy.

Trip hefted the Rifle and stepped into the thick of the pillars. Rafe followed, knives out, and Maximillian swept along behind them.

They moved in silence, weaving through the spaces between the squat stone columns. Something about the strangely lovely, curling carvings that covered the surface of the upraised blocks chimed in the back of Trip’s weary brain. How long since he’d slept? His backpack hung like a millstone against his shoulders, and the scar of the Black Lotus still throbbed dully on the side of his neck. Stay awake long enough, he thought, and the whole world becomes a waking dream. Not that his present surroundings helped much on that account.

Stone shifted against stone, and Trip froze.

“What is that?” Rafe asked, escalating nervousness in his voice, as the sound seemed to multiply, increasing in volume all around them. Trip saw dust springing forth from gaps and joints in the stone columns, and his recollection caught up with him. Red lines coursed upward along the curving channels in the stone. Red eyes began to glow.

“Oh no,” Trip breathed.

And from all around them, ancient, igneous voices rasped out their question: “Irik ku ta Kroatoan?”

“Don’t move,” Trip said quietly, as the deadly, burning gaze of the stone sentinels slowly turned to fix on the three intruders. “Just. Stay. Still.”

“These are the things you found in the tube tunnel, right?” Rafe half-whispered, his knives held rigidly down by his sides. “With the heat vision?”

“I think so,” Trip said, shifting his eyes with painful slowness to the blank square on the floor near the entrance to the chamber. “There’s a blank spot over there where one of them should be, I think. He must have malfunctioned — wandered off and found his way up to the subway, and — hey!”

Maximillian was sauntering past them both, weaving through the deadly statues as if out on a Sunday stroll.

“Don’t move!” Trip hissed. “They track movement! They’re going to—”

The statues did absolutely nothing. Maximillian crossed unharmed to the far side of the chamber, where seven decidedly non-animate stone pillars supported the entrance to an ascending set of broad stairs.

“All right, fine,” Rafe hissed desperately. “This is part of some clever plan of his, right? He’s going to deactivate some switch, and—”

Maximillian grasped a stone dial set into the wall with a ham-sized fist and twisted it in a single quick motion. There was another brief rumbling; then glowing crystal spikes spat themselves up from the floor between the pillars, sealing Trip, Rafe, and the statues off from the rest of the structure.

Maximillian gave them both a jaunty little wave, smirked, and strode quickly up the stairs and out of sight.

“When Mrs. Stitch said ‘Four or more is cannon fodder,’” Trip said quietly, “I think she may have been fudging the numbers a little.”

“If we get through this,” Rafe swore under his breath, “I’m bloody well going to kill him.”

“No you’re not,” Trip said, the last pieces of one particular puzzle snapping together in his mind. “You can’t.”

“I beg—” Rafe began, then shifted down a few dozen decibels. “I beg your pardon?”

“Irik ku ta Kroatoan?” the stone statues chanted again, as one.

“Never mind,” Trip replied, his mind turning to new questions. The seven pillars at the far end of the chamber were not identical. There was a carving on each, outlined in shadow in the steady glow of the crystals overhead. He stared at each in turn, committing them to memory.

Turning his head slowly, centimeter by centimeter, Trip looked behind him, to the back of one of the stone sentries. A picture was etched there in a square block, and another, different, on the back of the one next to it. And another…

“Okay, good news,” Trip said quietly, feeling the glowing red gaze of the statues bore into him. “I think I know how to get us through this.”

“And?” Rafe asked, with expectant dread.

“We’re gonna have to start moving,” Trip said, and swallowed hard. “Those symbols on the pillars at the other end of the room — I think they’re a passcode. See the marks on the statues’ backs? The ones that look like there’s a gap around them? We find the symbols that match, we press them in order—”

“Right, right,” Rafe said. “And if you’re wrong?”

“Then it won’t matter much,” Trip said. “Ready?”

“Not at all,” Rafe replied. And then he dove forward, and the statues lunged after him.

Trip threw himself to one side as one of the statues swiped at him with a pylon-sized stone fist, then rolled to evade the stomping feet of another. Good — the quarters were too close for these things to use their heat beams without damaging one another. Which meant that, at worst, he and Rafe would only be crushed to death.

“First symbol?” he heard Rafe shout from the opposite side of the room. There was a flurry of motion, and Rafe appeared crouching atop one of the thing’s heads, leaping to another’s shoulders as a stone fist smashed into his original perch. “First bloody symbol, please?”

Trip scrambled out of the way as a statue’s stone fists plunged down, smashing a crevice in the rock floor.

“It’s… it’s like a bird, with a mohawk,” Trip shouted. “Three feathers sticking straight up!”

Rafe leapt again, landing in a clear spot on the floor. “Can’t see it! Can’t—” A statue rumbled toward him, and he ducked and rolled between its legs. “Can’t — oh, there it is!” He reached up and smacked the butt of one obsidian blade against the bird symbol in the statue’s back. It flared in a radial burst of red light; then the glow ebbed from the channels of the statue’s surface, and the thing froze in mid-lumber.

“Next?” Rafe cried.

Trip ducked a whizzing stone fist and shouted back. “Two knives, pointing sideways!”

Rafe caromed up off the outstretched leg of one statue, sprang off the chest of another, and vaulted the shoulders of a third to smack the butt of his blade against the twin-knife symbol; again, the eerie light faded from the statue, and it retreated into motionless.

Rafe leapt again, and landed in a crouch — and behind him, Trip saw a statue loom, fat blocky fists raised to accordion him into a puddle of meat and bone.

Trip ran forward, ducking the swipe of a stone guard’s massive arms, slid headfirst across the stone floor, and ratcheted back the lever that controlled the focus of the Rifle’s sonic pulse. Rafe turned, in the shadow of the thing, as it brought its hands down. In the split-second before Trip squeezed the trigger, he saw the third symbol, a pyramid formed with six circles, on the statue’s back.

The pulse sent a whirling furrow of dust rising straight across the chamber floor, smacked into the statue’s back in a fat puff of gravel pebbles, and sent it tumbling headfirst over Rafe. Its face cracked against the stone wall of the chamber, and its limbs had but a second to begin to flail before the red light died and it moved no more.

Rafe shot Trip a grateful grin across the room. Trip was about to return it when night fell, suddenly and quite painfully, in the immediate vicinity of his head.

He tasted ancient stone, registered the inhuman fingers as individual stripes of pain compressing against his skull. Dimly, he felt the thing wrench him up from the ground, his feet dangling, the Rifle clenched frantically in his hand. Wild amoebas of color exploded against the inner wall of his vision. He couldn’t breathe.

And then the dark world into which he’d been thrust popped like a bubble, and he had light and air, and the dusty floor smacked up against him as he sucked great lungfuls of breath. He lurched around, spots clearing from his vision, to see Rafe dangling from the neck of the stone statue that had grabbed him.

“You know,” Rafe grunted as the statue flailed and swiped at him, “for some reason I thought I could choke this thing.” He leapt away just as the statue backed itself against the side wall of the chamber, trying to crush him. “Silly me,” Rafe finished, skidding to a stop across the floor.

“New plan,” Trip gasped, shaking his head to clear it.

“We had a plan?” Rafe asked, nervously eyeing the defensive line’s worth of stone sentinels grinding their monolothic way toward him.

“You distract them, I’ll get the symbols!” Trip said, dragging himself to his feet.

“Oh, sure, you get the easy part,” Rafe groaned. “Just because I volunteered with the dinosaurs…”

He darted to one side as the statues came at him, and Trip searched the jostling crowd of rocky menaces for the next symbol. There! While Rafe led the pack on a chase around the room’s perimeter, hopscotching over the frozen bodies of their deactivated comrades, Trip darted forward and slammed a palm against the one bearing a jaguar’s head. As it stiffened and extinguished, two of the trailing statues turned; Trip darted between them, saw a radiant sun and a flowing river, and plunged his hands against each in turn.

“That’s six!” he shouted, retreating to cover behind one of the deactivated pillar-men. From across the room he heard Rafe yelp in fear, and heard stone sizzle and boil.

“I’m fairly sure they’re cheating now!” Rafe cried, lunging to one side as two of the remaining sentinels eyes’ flared red. The patch on floor on which he’d once stood flared orange, then white in an instant, and began to crackle and smolder with violent green and purple flames.

Trip’s eyes darted to the last pillar, carved with a symbol roughly resembling a human face.

“Just one more!” he shouted reassuringly, and risked a peek at the searching sentries broad stone backs.

A human heart … the head of a dinosaur … an octagon … a seven-pointed star … a checkerboard pattern of dots…

Trip’s stomach sank. He thought of the empty space he’d seen when they first walked in.

“Well?” Rafe shouted, as the sentries heat-beams scorched and blistered the far side of the statue behind which he crouched.

“It’s not here!” Trip shouted. “The last statue — it must be the one that wandered up to the subway!”

Rafe’s response was as heated, and nearly as colorful, as the pools of fire now flaring on the walls and floor around him.

“When the time’s right,” he shouted to Rafe, “go for their eyes!”

“How will I know when the time’s right?” Rafe hollered back. Trip felt his stomach lurch in fear, and took a last deep breath.

“Well, any time before I start screaming should be good,” he said, and stepped out of cover.

“Hey!” Trip shouted, waving his arms. The five remaining statues turned, as one, an ominous, millstone sound filling the chamber.

“That’s it,” Trip said, feeling the hammerblows of his own heart against his rib cage. “Over here.”

They turned with heavy, dead feet, and in the sudden silence of the chamber, the stone sentries began to shuffle toward him.

“Who made you?” Trip asked the statues; trying to understand things, to reason out their workings, pushed away fear. It made him an observer, above it all. “Is that some kind of fluid powering you? Energy?”

They stopped, in a rough semicircle around him. Behind him, the entrance to the chamber yawned, empty and inviting. He could turn and run; but maybe they would follow, if their heat beams didn’t boil him to ash in the first few heartbeats. And Maximillian, and the Misery Engine, still waited within.

Trip watched the red glow rise in their eyes.

“Now, Rafe!” he shouted. The brilliant light only intensified. “Now would be good!”

And then, with a savage yell, Rafe appeared in midair behind the lead statue, scrambling up its back to perch on its shoulders. He crouched, encircling its head, as the other four statues turned their deadly gaze toward him, and jabbed the blades of his stone knives swiftly into and out of the sentry’s radiant eyes.

Rafe leapt away, and Trip flung himself to one side, the weight of his backpack and rifle lurching and choking him as he slid behind the frozen bulk of one of the deactivated statues. The room erupted in streams of brilliant red light, and Trip heard stone ignite. The pillar-men screamed their rocky innards out as uncanny energy poured forth from the lead statue’s eyes, setting fire to the channels of energy coursing across their surfaces. Twin channels of dribbling molten rock scarred themselves against the bounds of the chamber, sizzling perilously close to Trip as he huddled in the shadow of the dead sentry.

At last, the gargling roars of the statues died away, and the eerie light faded. Trip rose from his shelter to see the room newly marked in still-glowing whorls and lines and zigzags where the statue’s uncontrolled heat beams had carved into the walls and floor. At the center of the room, a pile of rubble lay cooling and settling; perhaps, if closely inspected, it might prove to have once been something more wondrous.

“Still alive?” Trip called out, a tremor rising unbidden in his voice. There was a long pause, and then, from behind the dripping, half-molten remains of a dead sentry at the far end of the room, a hand rose, making an upturned V at him.

“That,” came Rafe’s sullen, indignant voice, “was a terrible, terrible plan.”

“A terrible, terrible plan that worked!” Trip offered, as Rafe emerged, dusting chunks of rubble from his bare shoulders and arms. “And look!”

The wild, unleashed beams of the statue’s heat had split and shattered the crystal bars blocking their path to the Misery Engine; as Trip and Rafe watched, awestruck, strange sparks rose and whirled from the ragged ends of the broken spikes, before the light in the crystals flickered and ebbed away.

“I have got to study those things,” Trip said quietly. Rafe shrugged.

“Funny,” he replied. “I was thinking the exact opposite.”

Composed and ready, they moved in stealthy silence through the gaps in the bars, and into the stairwell through which Maximillian had disappeared. The stairs were broad and deeply spaced, flat channels cut into them at vertical intervals — as if, Trip mused, something were meant to be easily slid down them. Or dragged up. Flat white light bled down from a wide opening at their apex. Trip and Rafe headed up, slowly, warily.

Something tumbled into the stairwell from above, bouncing like a soccer ball, emitting strange metallic thuds and clanks as it rolled awkwardly down from step to step. It stopped a few steps above them, at last, and Trip slowly illuminated the light on his Rifle and trained the beam on it.

Maximillian’s head stared back at them, eyes wide and expressionless, gray hair slicked with some viscous goo, and slightly smoking and hissing at the ends. His neck ended abruptly, raggedly, just above where his Adam’s apple would have been — and sprouting from it came not flesh and bone and blood, but a tangle of wires, coils, and metal struts, and a thick, red, oozing liquid.

“He was a bloody robot?” Rafe hissed, casting an uneasy glance toward the top of the stairs.

“I thought so,” Trip said quietly. “The breathing, the small muscles around the eyes — they almost got it right. Almost.” Something in him wanted to bend down and get a closer look, but a larger question kept nagging at him — what had happened to the rest of him?

“So, wait,” Rafe said, holding up a hand. “Were they all robots? Oh, dear God, are we meant to be robots as well? Wait, wait, stupid question. How about this: What in God’s name happened to him?”

“Only one way to find out,” Trip said darkly, and nodded toward the top of the stairs.

They left Maximillian’s head staring down the way they’d came, and continued upward.

The stairs opened suddenly into dazzling open space. Pillars of crystal, somehow carved and focused with the precision of diamonds, ringed the high stone walls surrounding the central pit in which Trip and Rafe found themselves now. Shafts of light stabbed upward from the crystals into the gloom above in a radiant ring.

Across the stone floor, steps led up to some sort of wide, flat stone altar, which stood before a vast stack of concentric rings of carved stone, rising taller than a house into the open air.

And at the top of the steps before them, standing in front of the altar, two distressingly familiar figures waited, and Trip felt cold, concentrated fear seep like Arctic water into every corner and channel of his body.

“There you are,” said Operator Vore, his spectacles glinting in the crystal-light. “You’ve kept us waiting.”

Behind him, Operator Grin slouched, Maximillian’s gray hat crumpled and cocked on the oddly shaped oblong of his head.

“Crunchy,” Grin said, and smiled, and proceeded to pick his yellowed, crooked teeth with the point of Maximillian’s Needle.