The World Reborn

On any other day, news of a dead gorilla found floating in the middle of Lake Michigan would have at least made the lower tier of the national news. There would have been footage of the baffled Coast Guard officers hauling the grisly, dripping anomaly onto their deck with hooks and poles, and perhaps some terrible pun on the newscaster’s behalf.

But Wrigley Field and its sudden, cataclysmic collapse kept that unusual item from attracting much notice. At first, the people of Chicago were just grateful that the stadium had been empty, and no one hurt.

There would eventually be a single body found among the wreckage, but not by rescue workers, and never reported. In the dark of night, it would be wrapped in its own heavy coat, and carried reverently to a long black car of uncertain make and model, and driven away toward a quiet, anonymous grave in a plot outside London, purchased many years before.

For now, as the entire South Side felt secretly delighted, and just a little bit bad about that, and the entire North Side mourned the passing of an institution, everyone could agree to be glad that it wasn’t terrorism, wasn’t some attack. Just bizarre bad luck. The final stroke of the Billy Goat curse, perhaps. There was talk that, perhaps, in the new stadium already going up on the drawing board, the Cubbies would finally have a shot at the series.

A stern, well-dressed city commissioner gave a briefing to the press, explaining the details of the structural collapse. But it was very dry, and very technical, and on the few stations that bothered to carry it, fewer viewers bothered to watch.

Even if they had, very few indeed would be bothered to note the small silver object gleaming in the commissioner’s lapel, just beneath his American flag pin.

A single sewing needle.


Indeed, in the years to come, a great many people — fishmongers and stockbrokers, policemen and architects, librarians and shop owners, would pass each other on streets and buses and trains, in highway rest stops and shopping malls, and spot the needles tucked in each other’s lapels. They would nod knowingly to each other, and go on about their lives. It had become a symbol without a purpose — just a reminder. A force of habit.

Had they ever risked exchanging anything more than glances, they might have noted a single, odd commonality to their lives: They all had extraordinarily bad luck getting a cab.


Nora Swift fell out of sleep with shapes still assembling themselves in her head. She nearly stumbled over the cat in lunging her way toward the drawing table, and fully awoke only after she’d already begun putting lines to paper.

The cat watched, tail flicking in annoyance, and padded off to the kitchen to further attack the mound of food that had been dumped into his long-empty bowl, by way of apology.

Nora wasn’t sure what she was drawing, but she knew why. She’d been dreaming about flying. And she’d been dreaming a lot, having spent the past three days catching up on her sleep, with occasional breaks to order pizza or Chinese, or take another shower. Sometimes, she had been dimly aware, the phone rang for a while, and eventually stopped.

Now the urgent flashing of her answering machine nagged at the corner of her vision, throwing off her concentration. She sighed, and slapped out the hand she wasn’t drawing with, and eventually hit the button that made it talk.

The first five messages were all from her mother, and more or less identical save for their escalating level of hysterics. After the first two, Ruby started skipping the rest.

The sixth message was from Murray, her NTSB boss, leaving a message to ask how she was enjoying her vacation, and to ask, if she had a chance, to let him know where he’d put that file on the latest upgrades to the cockpit doors on 767s. Ruby thought of the way she’d last seen him, tiny silver needles poking from the back of his head, and couldn’t tell whether to shudder or feel relieved.

The seventh message was where things got interesting.

“Ms. Swift? Hi, this is Tom Meachum, of Brinkley Fellowes Davis. This… this might come as a bit of a shock to you, but we’ve been operating under confidentiality agreements that have just been lifted. You may or may not know that you were listed as primary beneficiary in your grandmother’s will for any and all business interests she may have possessed.”

Nora nodded, pencil scratching away. She paused, hastily erased one line, and redrew it different. Better. Somehow, the news coming over the machine sounded like something she already knew.

“I’m not sure if you knew, but your grandmother operated a midsized aviation design firm for several years. It was purchased by a larger company in the ‘60s, but there were… complications and disagreements in the purchase, and your grandmother took the buyers to court. I’m getting all this thirdhand, you understand — I just started here a few months back.”

Nora stopped, squinted at the design emerging on the paper. She thought back to her engineering classes, imagined wind flowing over the shapes of it. Damn. She was going to need a better computer.

“Well, it seems the decision finally came down, in favor of your grandmother’s estate. So the upshot is that you, uh, you kind of own a company. There’s some property and assets, and some cash, plus the settlement. We should really meet to sort all this out in person. My number’s—”

The machine beeped, and cut him off. Nora smiled, having only half-heard any of it, and not quite paying attention to the next message, in which Meachum quickly blurted out his number, and a few more pleasantries, and hung up.

The next five messages, at least, were all from Nora’s mother. So she simply unplugged the machine, and solved that problem altogether.

At some indeterminate point afterward, she set down her pencil, blew away the fringe of eraser shavings, and looked at her work. It was just a sketch — just the faintest beginning, really. But she could see it already, had been seeing it in her dreams, carrying her through the clouds to all the places she’d never known she’d wanted to go.

She picked up the pencil again and wrote in small, careful letters in the corner of the design: CYCLONE MARK V.

The cat sauntered back into the room, looked up at her, and chirped. Nora rubbed sleep from her eyes, stretched in her chair, and lifted the sheet of paper to show to him.

“What do you think, huh?” she laughed.

The cat seemed singularly unimpressed.



The year’s first snowfall draped the city, muffling sound. The night sky glowed a soft orange-gray, fat, whirling flakes dancing in the beams of the lampposts and sticking themselves against windowpanes. Rafe Windham, his coast still dusted with snow, sat in a darkened office with a telephone to his ear. He reclined in a plush leather chair, savoring the way the springs creaked, his feet casually resting on a large, ornate mahogany desk. A crisp stack of cash sat neatly on the desk in front of him.

“You’re absolutely right, Mum,” Rafe said, and was still quite surprised to realize that he meant it. “Yes, yes, entirely foolish. Well, no, I think it’s more that my senses have come to me, really.”

He heard voices approaching outside the office door, and smiled to himself.

“As it so happens, I’m a class or two away from earning about four — no, wait, five degrees, I forgot zoology. Anyway, I’ve checked with the various institutions, and they’re only too happy to let me complete the courses by correspondence. In fact, they somewhat insisted I do all my learning at the greatest possible distance.”

The voices grew louder. A key fumbled in the lock.

“Money? Um, actually, I thought I might get a job. Mum? Mum, will you quit — Mum, please stop laughing, I’m serious. Please. Just… there you go. Breathe. There’s a bookshop I like that needs someone to do the deliveries, and I’ve been getting to know the city quite well… Mum, you’ve gone giggly again.”

The office door opened, the light flipped on, and Leopold “Eight Fingers” Kruczyk stopped dead in the middle of a very animated conversation with his two large, violence-prone associates to stare in sheer disbelief. Rafe looked up, nodded at him briskly, and raised an index finger. Just a minute.

“Mum, I — I think I heard a thump. Was that Dad on the extension? Oh. Oh dear. Have you checked his — yes, just to the side of the windpipe, on the right. His right. Oh, good. Well, just get him a blanket, then. Maybe a glass of water for when he comes round.”

Kruczyk’s large associates reached into their terribly unfashionable jackets and pulled out equally large guns, which they leveled across the desk at Rafe. He held up his finger once more, with a look that suggested they were being highly inconsiderate.

“Mum, I’ve got some friends here. Must go. Yes, yes. No, it’s really not a joke. Yes. Yes. Will do. Love you, too. Cheers.” Rafe hung up the phone and favored the three men with a dazzling smile.

“Mister Englishman,” Kruczyk grinned slowly. “May I ask, perhaps, what you are doing in my favorite chair?”

“Settling accounts,” Rafe said brightly, swinging his feet down off the desk. He scooped up the stack of bills and began thumbing through them eagerly. “That’s… yes, five thousand, three hundred, and twenty dollars. Less a few for the cost of a trans-Atlantic phone call, because I’m a sporting fellow.” He tucked the bills into his coat.

“And what is the significance of this sum,” Kruczyk asked, “which is apparently equal to the value of your life?”

“It’s the amount I would have won here a few weeks back,” Rafe said, “had your men — is it one of these two still, or do they all just look like that? — decided to so thoroughly cheat me. Not a penny more, I assure you.”

Kruczyk nodded, as if this were entirely reasonable. “I am just saying to the boys,” he said, “it is so difficult to shoot a man these days. Always the struggle, the resistance. Here I was very sad, thinking I would not have again the chance to shoot you. It is true what they say about you English — you are very considerate.”

Kruczyk’s very large associates cocked the hammers of their very large guns and centered them on Rafe’s skull.

“Considerate, yes,” Rafe said. “To a point.”

The men fired. The window shattered, and the leather chair died in a glorious flurry of upholstery and stuffing. It was no longer occupied.

The large men, the Tweedles, looked at one another, confused, and then at their guns.

The massive desk took flight, spinning end-over-end through the air, to come crashing down on the Tweedles, pinning them to the floor. Their heads hit with identical coconut thumps, and they saw stars, and then quite a lot of nothing.

Rising from his crouch beneath the desk, Rafe drew his twin obsidian blades from beneath his coat. Flakes of snow and a chill, cutting Chicago wind drifted in from the gaping hole in the glass behind him. He smiled at Kruczyk with neat white teeth.

The gangster reached into his shabby Members Only jacket, drew forth a pistol. Something blurred just in front of him, and he found that the pistol no longer had a barrel. Or an entire front half, for that matter. And then something very large and sharp came to rest just under the soft, wattled flesh beneath his chin.

“Eight fingers,” Rafe said, looming over him. At the point of his stone knife, he drove Kruczyk slowly back against the wall of his office. “Seems a positive surplus to me. It could always be less.”

It took Kruczyk a moment to identify exactly what this strange feeling was that came over him, this sensation of battery acid injected into his limbs, and a mongoose scrambling frantically around with his stomach. It had been quite a while since he had personally experienced fear.

“I think you should retire, really,” Rafe said, his voice low and quiet, his eyes unwavering. He began to drive the point of the knife very slowly upward, until Krucyzk stood pinned against the wall on his very tiptoes. “I hear Florida’s nice. Get a boat. Do some fishing. Play some cards with the other seniors. Might do your health some good.” Rafe paused, meaningully. “At least, it’d be far better for your health than staying here. Do you understand?”

Krucyzk mouthed words, maybe Polish, maybe English. His world had contracted to the face of the man before him, and the point of the knife at his chin.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Rafe smiled, genially, and whisked the knife away, leaving the faintest of cuts in the spotted flesh of the old man’s neck. Kruczyk sank slowly along the wall to the ground, shaking.

“Law of the jungle,” Rafe told him, not without sympathy. “There’s always something bigger than you out there. And chances are, it has very large teeth. See you around.”

Rafe strode from the office, leaving the door swinging open behind him, whistling. He stopped. The corridor between him and the upstairs casino was filled with even larger, unhappier-looking men, all reaching with thick, skilletlike hands into their poorly fitting jackets for their various firearms.

“Gentlemen,” Rafe smiled, holding up one hand as he moved to shrug off his coat. It was dry clean only, and he’d hate to get anyone’s blood on it. “Does any of you perchance know a good florist? There’s a young lady in Surrey I’d rather like to send a bouquet.”

Kruczyk’s men charged, guns drawn. Rafe sighed.

“Suppose I’ll have to look it up, then,” he said to himself. The knives moved him forward.


The spring rain had just ended, mist still curling up off the asphalt into the night sky, as the long blue car turned off Michigan Avenue and pulled up beside the nightclub. A rear door opened, next to the curb, and Trip Morrow folded himself out, clutching an only slightly battered assemblage of flowers wrapped in crumpled paper.

“You think about my offer, son,” came a stern, official voice from inside the car. A gray, weathered-looking man in a crisp green uniform, golden stars glinting in neat rows on his shoulders, leaned forward to catch his eye. “Your country could use you.”

“I will, sir,” Trip nodded, not quite daring to smile. “Thanks for the ride.” He shut the door; the car drove off, and Trip turned to the club, fishing a half-crumpled ticket from the pocket of his sportcoat. A line had already begun to form beneath the club’s shining marquee. In bold letters, it read: TONIGHT ONLY — DANGEROUS MAGIC.

After she had filled herself full of knives, and shot holes clean through a pair of playing cards — the exact pair her volunteers from the audience had chosen; after sealing herself in a tank of water, and reappearing from the wings, toweling herself off, to open it; and after her big finale, the notorious Flaming Coffin, left the entire club on its feet, stunned and applauding (and fire codes be damned), Sully Wells went backstage to find Trip Morrow waiting by the dressing room door.

“Nice of you to make it,” she grinned. “Saw you in the back row.”

“Thanks for the tickets,” he replied. “But what, you couldn’t have gotten me closer?”

“Ingrate,” Sully laughed. She leaned over and kissed him, further mangling the flowers crushed between them.

“You shaved,” she said after, running a thumb along her own lower lip.

“You noticed,” Trip replied, and kissed her again.

The air was cool and fresh, the shops of Michigan Avenue glowing in the mist, as they threaded their way among the crowds of jostling people. Buses and cars rumbled pass, an endless stream of light. Far ahead, the top of the Hancock Building vanished into the clouds.

“I still can’t believe you just walked away from OMG,” Trip said, shaking his head.

“Oh, God, if you had to put up with endless brownie-related conversations on a daily basis,” Sully groaned, “you’d have walked away too. I just… it’s not good when you find yourself looking across a table at your bread and butter and wondering where, exactly, you could shoot him so he’d take the longest to bleed out.” She shivered a little. “Guess it runs in the family.”

They passed the Virgin Megastore; row after row of OMG: Feel the Illusion video games filled the window, next to a cardboard cutout of the mystery man himself.

“Anyway, I wrote his contract way back when,” Sully continued, “so I still get five percent of the gross. Enough to fund my own little tour. I’m never gonna have his natural talent, but I’ve been practicing, and the reviews are good.”

“And how’s the arm?,” Trip asked, concern creeping into his voice. Sully unbuttoned the sleeve of her black shirt and rolled it up; a scar shone dimly against the rest of her skin, winding its way around her forearm.

“Still only skin deep,” Sully shrugged. “The docs say the tendons and nerves healed up better than they thought. It makes my sleight of hand a bit trickier, but like I said, I practice.” She looked over at him, and mussed his hair, over his hasty protests. “And what about you, boy genius? What have you been up to?”

“I, uh, I just had a very interesting conversation on the way to your show,” Trip said, smoothing out the single streak of silver in his hair. “Hey, you want to see something really great?”

Sully smirked. “What, you want to show me your etchings?”

“I don’t have etchings,” Trip said, mock-insulted. “I have blueprints.”

He stepped over the curb, held up his left hand to let the silver-and-amber signet ring catch the light, and whistled for a cab.



“Go on,” Trip said, as he and Sully stood before the vast silver door on the top floor of 900 North Michigan. “Guess how it works.”

“Duh, genius,” Sully laughed. “I opened it the last time. Where are those tuning forks?”

“Nope,” Trip grinned. “Changed that mechanism out. Too easy to fake with the right synthesizer.”

“An all-new impossible key?” Sully asked. “OK, this I gotta see.”

So he showed her.

“Oh, that’s good,” Sully smiled, as the unbreakable door swung shut behind them. “That’s really good.”

“Thought of it myself,” Trip said, reaching over to flip on a switch. Lights sprung to life, illuminating the now-familiar outlines of the Lookout. It was crammed with all manner of strange devices, cluttering corners and balancing precariously on tables, or on piles of half-opened cardboard moving boxes.

“I see you’ve made yourself at home,” Sully smirked. “You moved in how many months ago?”

“Hey, I’ve been busy,” Trip groaned. “Not all of this stuff is mine. Some of it got moved down from my grandpa’s storage locker in Jersey. Even with the notes he left, I’m still trying to figure how how half this stuff works.” He headed for the kitchen. “I think I’ve puzzled out the coffeemaker, though.”

“Dear Trip, do not use,” Sully said, peering under a dust cloth at some weird triangular assemblage of metal and wire. “Will blow up the Earth. Love, Grandpa. So all this is yours, huh?”

“I’m not sure who was more suprised,” Trip called from the kitchen, clattering around in the cupboards. “Me or the building owners. I don’t think they even knew this space was up here. I’m, uh, I’m still not sure it always was.”

“Can’t argue with the view,” Sully shouted back, opening the glass doors to the balcony. She saw traces of blue tape lingering at the corners of the frames, where the glass had been fixed.

She leaned against the railing and watched the traffic thread itself down Michigan. The clouds were too thick to see the lake; instead, she gazed into the black surface of the Hancock tower, looming unnervingly close. If she craned her neck, she could just make out the rough outline of the bland, Modernist skyscraper that had gone up in the ‘50s, according to city records she’d found, on the former site of the Wormwater Building.

Trip elbowed his way through the door, a mug of coffee in each hand; Sully took the one with the picture of Einstein printed on it, the one where he was sticking out his tongue.

“So,” she said, taking a sip. “This interesting conversation you had…?”

“Let’s just say there’s a lot of strange things popping up these days,” Trip smiled, holding up a mug that explained the mathematical relation between matter and energy. “Some of it safely tucked away in warehouses, some of it not. Satellite images showing landmasses that the eyes in the sky never quite managed to spot before. My former employers — you remember them? — they, uh, they came and looked me up.”

“Uncle Sam’s getting jumpy, huh?” Sully asked.

“To say the least,” Trip nodded. “Because if there’s anything the military loves, it’s uncertainty. And, well, my family has certain experience in these matters. And word’s somehow gotten to some higher-ups in the Pentagon about what really happened in Wrigley Field. I suspect there may have been some, uh, needlework involved in that.”

“Can’t say I mind that change of heart,” Sully said, taking another sip. A trace of winter still lingered in the air, and she was glad for the warmth.

“So it turns out that the Defense Department’s thinking it might just need a Special Science Division again,” Trip told her. “Very quietly, tucked away in some corner of the budget.”

“You break their balls about it?” Sully grinned, already knowing the answer. Trip blushed, and looked away.

“Uh, we haven’t really begun formal negotiations about it. I was hoping, maybe you…”

“Negotiations?” Sully said brightly. “With professional hardasses? I think that might possibly hold some appeal.” She leaned against him, giving him a convivial bump with her shoulder. “So tell me, are you just using me for my arbitration skills?”

“I thought maybe you might want to, I don’t know, travel a bit,” Trip smiled. “See the world. Keep your life interesting.”

Sully’s smile flickered for a moment, and she felt her fingers curl and uncurl, almost of their own volition. Her hands wanted to hold guns, these days. They wanted to hold guns all the time.

“My life’s plenty interesting,” she said quietly. Then she looked back at Trip, and smiled again. “But I wouldn’t mind some company. Think it might do me good. You talked to Rafe and Nora about this?”

“I was going to,” Trip said, “but I wanted to ask you first.”

Sully smiled, and shook her head a bit, shifting her sharp dark hair from her eyes. “Any particular reason?” she asked.

“You were likely to hurt me if I didn’t,” Trip said, and grinned at her. “Among other reasons.” And their lips met again.

“I can live with that,” Sully said, when they came up for air.

Trip exhaled, leaning over the railing next to her to gaze out at the lights and the city. In a few more hours, it would be dawn again; if the clouds cleared, he could stand here and watch the sun rise over the lake.

Somewhere, in some reality, his grandfather had stood on this same spot years ago, looking out on a world without limits, determined to never stop searching for the new and the marvelous. There was always a World Yet to Be, Trip thought, waiting just out of sight. Just beyond the curve of the earth. You simply had to look for it.

He turned to Sully and raised his mug. “To us,” he said softly, “and to doing the impossible. Preferably at least once a week.”

Sully clinked mugs with him. “Impossible?” she teased. “I thought impossible was just an excuse.”

Trip shook his head slowly, and felt a smile spread across his face, and all through him.

“No,” Trip said, looking off to the east, waiting for the sun. “Impossible’s just the beginning.”

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 Aerial Inferno (Part 2)

At the last possible moment, they leapt into the side passageway, slamming hard against the deck, as the gorilla chieftain opened fire with the M-80 machine gun clutched expertly in his massive, calloused paws. A cloud of firefly sparks erupted in the corridor where Nora and Sully had once stood, high-caliber bullets spitting and chewing and denting the walls and floor.

“Please tell me your grandmother said something about this!” Sully demanded, as she and Nora huddled against the deck. A dogfight’s worth of ricochets spanged and pinged above them.

“She said something about gorillas as pilots,” Nora shouted back, “but I sure as hell didn’t hear anything about them knowin’ how to shoot!”

The gunfire died away, replaced by the scramble of triumphant, predatory hands and feet against the metal of the corridor. The apes were coming. Sully and Nora rose and ran, ducking trembling pipes hissing treacherous needles of steam from every joint.

The lead ape, his back a broad stripe of silver, had by far the largest weapon — some things, evolution just sorts out for itself — but not the only one. And as the mass of apes lumbered into the corridor in hot pursuit of Nora and Sully, the jostling rear echelon of females and young males pointed submachine guns and pistols from thick, hairy paws, and pulled a multitude of triggers.

Sparks and steam exploded behind the women, bullets rupturing pipes and sizzling wildly into the walls and floors. The thick, white, searing cloud held the apes back for a moment, and Sully slid into cover behind a thick bulkhead, Nora doing likewise opposite her, and drew a bead on the roaring, hairy shapes flailing about in the steam.

Her hand shook. She could see the apes right there, teeth bared, waving their instruments of death…

“God damn it!” Sully roared, furious with herself, and yanked her trembling hand away.

“What?” Nora asked her, baffled.

“I watch a lot of nature specials, OK?” Sully spat. “And… and those World Wildlife Fund mailers! I can’t do it!”

“Hate to break it to you,” Nora replied darkly, as the first of the apes stumbled blindly out of the steam, pawing at its eyes. “But up here? I’m pretty sure we’re the endangered species.”

She took careful aim, and the revolver barked in her hands; blood flew out the back of the ape’s meaty shoulder, and it spun around shrieking and fell back to the deck.

Hoots of rage reverberated in the narrow passageway. Nora shrank back in terror as the apes’ guns responded, spattering the bulkhead that sheltered her with a punishing barrage of hot lead.

“Them or us, Sully!” she shouted, desperate, as Sully willed her shaking hands to still themselves. “And I really, really want it to be them!”

Sully did not so much hear her great-grandfather’s voice in that instant as feel it — the merciless scrape of it, passing through her bones, stiffening her spine. She thought of those two empty shoes, and the pair of earrings, and the open window. And how no one, whatever their past deeds, deserved so lonely and desolate a fate.

Her eyes narrowed. Sully Wells stepped full into the corridor with both guns raised, her midnight garments billowing in the steam like some terrible banner, and spat fire from each fist.

The apes fell back anew as Sully’s rounds cut into them, heavy primate bodies falling lifeless to the deck. Sully stood there fearless, exposed, aiming and firing and aiming and firing until her pistols clicked empty.

“Easy, easy!” Nora shouted, wrestling Sully back into cover. “I didn’t say forget about the nature specials altogether!”

“What?” Sully asked at last, shaking her head. “I didn’t — I’m sorry…”

“Are you kidding?” Nora asked, suddenly a little afraid of the strange, confused look in Sully’s eyes. As if she’d just awakened from some glorious, terrible dream. “You kicked their hairy asses! But they’re gonna be back, and I really don’t want to wait.”

Reloading on the run, they emerged from the access passage to the port-side main corridor. Behind them, Nora could already hear grunting and scrabbling as the pursuing gorilla forces regrouped.

“Which way?” Sully asked, jamming home a fresh magazine in one of her pistols.

“Just ahead!” Nora said, heading off to her right. “Can’t be too much—”

A thousand screeching, scraping tongues of metal sang, discordant. The gondola shuddered in its steel skin, as the corridor ahead tore itself open in a storm of metal and noise. Bright and fearsome, the sky came spilling in.

In happier, bloodier days, Wicked West still had a crew to amuse, and doomed male prisoners with which to amuse them. Those relatively fortunate souls not allotted to sharpen the skills of the elite Five Knives Brigade of Truth Extraction, or dragged screaming away to Rena Grimm’s lab as raw materials, would be marched at gunpoint into the engine room, to the cheers of the crew.

The Faithless drew propulsion from two vast turbines in the aft engine room, their diameters easily measured in elephants. The prisoners — grizzled cargo haulers, unwary fighter or bomber pilots, the occasional deluded explorer —
were stationed at a yellow line specially painted on the engine room floor, pointed toward the turbines’ intake valves, and made to walk forward.

Bets regularly arose over how far any given captive would travel under his own power, before the turbines’ ravenous suction did its terrible work. However far they got, the ultimate result never changed: long, ominious tracks of fine reddish mist, trailing in the Faithless’s wake.

When the initial dynamite bombs rocked the engine room, Turbine Two had been impaled by a flying pylon, consuming itself in fire. Turbine One had soldiered on bravely among the escalating flames and catastrophe until, at last, the inferno melted through the reinforced deck plates and found the fuel tanks beneath.

The blast lifted the entire turbine into the air with incredible force, the casing around its spinning, eleven-foot titanium blades shearing off like dried newspaper. The blades bored upward through the steel skin of the craft, shredded one of the remaining aft compartments of the Zeppelin’s immense balloon in a rush of escaping helium, and for a single, graceful microsecond, hung at the apex of their parabola directly above the dark expanse of the Faithless’s gasbag.

Then, succumbing to gravity, they fell. Before tumbling headlong into the lake far below, the smoking cluster of still-whirling blades plunged through a forward section of the balloon, shredded a gash through three decks and one wall of the gondola, and nearly tumbled Nora and Sully out to their deaths.

When her mind cleared, Sully found herself clinging to a ladder protruding from the craft’s inner wall with one hand, and clutching the wrist of Nora, precariously balanced at the jagged edge where deck gave way to empty air, with the other. The clouds outside had burned away in the late morning sun, and after growing accustomed to the dim reddish glow of the Faithless, the light seemed cruel and blinding.

Nora was a hazy shape against that light, and between the sudden blast of wind and the ringing only just subsiding in her ears, it took Sully precious, long seconds to realize that her companion was shouting something at her. A warning.

Down the corridor behind them, at the intersection from which they’d emerged, the gorilla gang had materialized, hooting and shrieking, brandishing their guns. They, too, seemed blinded by the sudden light — but recovering quickly.

Nora couldn’t even hear her own words as she shouted to Sully, stumbling forward to regain her balance against the howl of rushing air at her back. She raised her own pistol and fired into the mass of apes, but the shot went wild, over their heads. And it made the gorillas only angrier.

“What do we do?” Sully shouted, audible at last to Nora’s recovering ears. Nora glanced at the apes, then up the ladder to which Sully clung — to the portal in the ceiling through which it passed. She remembered the blueprints she’d glimpsed.

“We climb!” she hollered back.

Up the ladder they raced, hot lead spitting into the walls and rungs just beneath them. The fissure torn by the errant turbine greeted them again on the level above, and once more on the third tier; and all around them, on every level, the air rang with the panicked hoots of terrified, furious apes.

At the top of the ladder, Sully found a hatch, sealed tight by a rusted metal wheel. To one side, the gap torn in the Faithless’s side yawned, too far to jump; on the other, far down the corridor but steadily approaching, a wall of flames surged and boiled like a thing alive.

“I can’t — dammit —” Sully hissed, guns tucked in her sash, straining to turn the wheel and open the hatch above.

“Here, switch!” Nora called from just below her. “Just keep those apes off our asses!” She looked back, vertiginously, down the ladder, where heavy simian forms clambered in swift, syncopated pursuit.

Sully hopped sideways off the ladder, landing in a crouch on the deck, as Nora ascended. Peering down through the hole in the floor to the level below, Sully drew one pistol, all thoughts of endangered species and maudlin appeals banished. She could make out the face of the first ape up the ladder, pocked with tooth marks from long-ago fights; it bared its teeth at her.

“Hello,” Sully said quietly, and put a bullet between its eyes. It tumbled back down the ladder, taking a second ape with it. But more followed, and more still behind them…

At the top of the ladder, Nora clung to the rungs and stared up at the wheel, thinking hard. She flipped her pistol in her hand, grasping it by the barrel, and dug the butt into one of the four wedge-shaped opening in the wheel.

“Give me a place to stand,” Nora murmured, distantly recalling high school physics. She tugged against the barrel, using it like a wrench. And with a powdery shower of rust and a protesting groan, the wheel began to turn.

“I got it!” Nora whooped, to more gunfire just below her.

“Well, get it a little faster!” Sully shouted back, firing down the hole with one pistol while thumbing bullets into the a clip for the other. “I’m not sure I’ve got as many rounds as these shaggy bastards have reinforcements!”

Straining against years of neglect, Nora turned the wheel. The butt of the pistol scraped against the flaking paint of the valve; she spat and blinked as rust danced down into her eyes and mouth. Then the valve clicked, the lock unsealed, and with a determined shove from Nora, the hatch flopped open into clear air above.

“Come on!” Nora shouted. Below, Sully slammed a boot into the looming face of one last gorilla, leapt upward, and scrambled up the ladder behind her.

They emerged to the whistling wind, a black sky of reinforced tarp stretching away above their heads, and the smell of smoke and flame. A crisscrossing forest of thick, twining steel anchor cables sprouted at angles from fat rings sunken into the top of the armored main gondola, connecting it to the primary gasbag that held the Faithless aloft.

Nora slammed the hatch shut, and looked for some way to seal it from without; but it vanished into the hull nearly without a seam. The apes would follow, and there was no way to stop them.

“The other balloons,” Sully asked, scanning her eyes from side to side. The hull of the ship yawned wide on either side of them, and in the low, close shadow of the balloon above, their view of anything beyond was limited to washed-out white slices of sky. Far at the aft of the gondola, wild sheets of yellow-orange flame roiled away from the shattered remains of the engine room, lapping at what portions of the balloon hadn’t already succumbed to flying shrapnel. “If we can get to those catwalks…”

“Catwalk,” Nora said, feeling her heart deflate and collapse upon itself as she said it. “Singular.” She pointed to the port side of the gondola. Through the narrow gap between balloon and hull, they could see one of the two auxilliary pods once connected to the Faithless receding into a speck against the sky, light glinting off the ragged, shattered catwalk that dragged like a broken arm from its side.

“Must’ve been severed when the hull tore open,” Nora spat, strangely furious. “Dammit! How do we get off this nightmare?”

“One down, one to go, right?” Sully offered, hastily reloading her pistols. “Let’s check starboard.”

“And if that’s not an option?” Nora asked.

“This thing’s coming down one way or another,” Sully shrugged. “How well can you swim?”

“Let’s not find out,” Nora muttered, and swung herself under a anchor cable, headed starboard.

They picked their way through the maze of arm-thick steel cords, Sully’s cloak fluttering like a living thing in the ceaseless wind. Nora kept a keen eye back on the hatch they’d arrived from, expecting primate pursuers at any moment.

“Oh, thank you, good luck,” Sully breathed, then grabbed Nora’s arm and pointed. There, over the rise of the far side of the gondola, they could see the swelling top of a smaller black balloon — the starboard pod, still attached.

“Now we just have to figure out how to get down,” Nora sighed.

“I’m sure we’ll think of—” Sully began, but the jagged clang of an opening hatch swallowed the rest of her words.

Not the port-side hatch through which they’d emerged, but a starboard-side portal just ahead, between them and the sloping edge of the gondola. Long, hairy arms emerged, powerful muscles working beneath, and in a cloud of pure simian stink, a pair of gorillas emerged. Long machetes gleamed, clutched in their thick, gnarled hands.

“I swear,” Nora groaned, as the apes shuffled forward, grunting. “There needs to be, like a qualifying test for having opposable thumbs.”

“That’d make Arkansas a hell of a lot more interesting,” Sully replied, drawing a bead with her pistols.

“Hey, I’ve got cousins in Arkansas,” Nora protested, and the gorillas charged. Their machetes swung in sloppy, gleaming arcs.

Sully squeezed off a shot from each of her pistols, and the gorillas spun and died. “Stupid apes,” she sighed. Something inside her exulted in ways she found quietly frightening. “Bringing knives to a gunfight.”

Machine guns rattled, and bullets sparked and chattered off the crisscrossed steel cords behind them. Sully and Nora hit the deck as the port hatch overflowed with pursuing apes, the silverback they’d seen earlier leading the charge. More and more poured forth, crowding the top of the balloon, howling and shaking their guns in the air.

“You’ve just gotta gloat, don’t you?” Nora scowled at Sully, whose eyes narrowed above her makeshift mask. From within the starboard hatch just a few feet ahead, beyond the bodies of the dead apes, more hoots and growls echoed, and a second pack of gorillas began to emerge, teeth bared, hefting rifles and pistols and lengths of pipe.

Nora heard hissing, and looked up. Helium gas rushed in invisible jets from a scattering of ragged, fluttering bulletholes in the gasbag above. Her keen eyes flashed upon the machetes lying on the deck, just a few feet away, as the apes advanced with guns ready.

“If I had time to explain what I’m about to do,” she told Nora, reaching out to slide a machete scraping across the hull to her companion, “I’d want you to talk me out of it.”

“Good to know,” Sully said, holstering one pistol and gripping the machete, as Nora grabbed the other blade.

“On three,” Nora said, “we run for the other side. Start slashing the gasbag when we get there.”

“I’m not getting this plan,” Sully replied, “But it’s better than ‘get shot by gorillas,’ so…”

“One,” Nora said. The port-side crowd of apes sent a fusilade singing through the air above them. “Two.” The starboard troop drew close enough for her to smell their rotted-meat breath, to see the flies rising from their pelts. “Three!”

The women rose. The air erupted in roars and gunfire, sparks exploding from the steel cables all around them, as they ducked and leapt their way aft and toward the port side, away from the pursuing primate hordes.

“Slash the gasbags!” Nora roared, and punched the tip of her machete through the reinforced fabric above her. Gas rushed out, and she ran on, pushing the blade through the surface of the balloon, widening the fissure.

Sully reached the seam where one sealed compartment met the next and swung, her blade traversing a high, powerful arc; it sank through the bag above, rending open two compartments at once. And they ran on.

A chorus of bullets singing at their heels, the copse of anchor cables around them alive with firefly glimmers of ricochet sparks, Sully and Nora made ever-expanding V’s in the black, rustling surface of the balloon. Ahead of them, the fires still feeding on the engine room flared like blazing banners; behind them, the twin squads of apes had merged into a single charging crowd, firing wildly, rifle barrels glowing and sizzling as they began to overheat. In the rush of escaping helium, their hoots and shrieks became shrill, cartoonish.

Slowly, so slowly, the world began to shift beneath the women’s feet. Like a dying whale, the Faithless listed over further to port, as Nora and Sully robbed it of any buoyance on that side.

“It’s going over!” Sully shouted, as the balance of momentum finally tipped, and the deck on which they stood shifted irrevocably from horizontal to vertical. “Now what?”

“Climb!” Nora replied, scrambling toward the rising swell of the starboard side.

Machetes discarded to slide and skitter down to the deck and plunge off, they used the cables for leverage, climbing hand over hand up the steepening grade of the hull. Nora’s chest burned; the wind had blown most of the helium away from them, but what little had seeped into her lungs did her no favors now. Her foot slipped on the hull, and she nearly tumbled, clawing at the nearest cable for balance; Sully shot out a hand and held her fast until she found her footing again.

Behind them, gorillas clung to cables for dear life, or tumbled in hairy cannonballs screaming down the sloping black hull. Those with bullets remaining fired their guns wildly as they plunged, caroming off cables, to a last swim in the blue-green water far below. Seen from above, their impacts with the water bloomed like tiny pale wildflowers on the surface of the lake; and then a small churning; and then nothing.

Gasping for breath, Sully and Nora swung themselves past one last set of cables and threw their bodies full against the leveled-out hull, once the sheer starboard wall of the Faithless. Below, they could see the water, distant, but rising too quickly to meet them. Ahead, across a football field or more of riveted black metal, the starboard auxiliary pod — warehouse-sized itself — hung serenely from its own midnight balloon. The rusted metal walkway connecting it to the main gondola, and the snarled web of cables, were oddly angled against the hull by the Faithless’s lopsided lean, but they held true.

Strange weapons sprouted like gnarled trees from hinged ports along the side of the gondola. Sully saw serrated, multi-barbed harpoon guns, and thought of summers fishing with her father, the horrible ease with which the hook slid from the unprotesting meat of a captured fish’s mouth. Nora watched a blue ball of electricity coruscate at the tip of another cannon, feeling the faint prickle of current against her skin, even at several feet’s distance.

The wind blew harder now, here on the exposed flat of the hull, snatching at their clothing, leaning with a large dog’s mindless insistence against their chests. The women wound their way carefully between the jagged protrusions of weaponry, eyes always on the walkway. Seagulls had begun to dip and whirl around them, and dimly from below, they could hear the churn and slap of waves on the lake. Behind them, flames still consumed the flaccid, ruined compartments of the great black balloon. The Faithless was falling, and quickly.

Nora set one foot on the walkway and paused. She sucked fresh lake air deep into her lungs and exhaled.

“What?” Sully barked from behind her, over the wind. “What are you waiting for?”

“Apes!” Nora shouted back, prompting Sully to whirl around and check behind them. Nothing. “Apes, or more of those damn cables, or that lousy old scarface. I can’t believe we’re actually gonna get off this thing.”

Beneath her boots, Sully felt the hull begin to hum. Gears ground, motors whirred. With rising dread, she slowly turned again, to see the harpoons and electrical cannons and all of the Faithless’s terrible weaponry steadily grinding around to center on them.

“That,” Nora sighed, from some exhausted place far beyond terror. “I was waiting for that.”

Sully threw herself forward, smashing Nora to the clattering plates of the walkway, as a harpoon big as a dolphin whistled its way through the air where they had once been standing.

“Go!” Sully shouted, as she and Nora scrabbled for traction on the walkway. They lunged forward, racing across the fragile metal platform, as Hell itself filled the perilous air around them.

A ball of lightning burst forth from one of the Tesla cannons, scorching the trailing hem of Sully’s cloak as it tumbleweeded through the air. Chain-fed rivet guns chattered, chewing termite holes in the structure of the walkway. And all around them, harpoons sang deadly falsettos, plunging past to splash in the fast-approaching lake, or slamming point-first through the steel hull of the auxiliary pod ahead.

Sully should have been afraid. She wanted to be afraid. Next to this, being locked in a box would seem a blessing. And yet, pyrotechnics erupting all around her, she felt like she was on stage at last. Not watching from the cool shadow of the wings, but right there under the proscenium, at the center of all the energy, surrounded by miraculous danger. She was staring death right in its bleached, grinning visage, and beneath the sash across her face, the smile she turned back against it was its own.

The door was so close now, Nora could see the latch. She had raced and stumbled and shouted her way to a territory long beyond fear, and now everything around her took on the flat, cool, rational dimensions of the reports she had read every day. Terror and disaster stripped of their looming power, squeezed down genielike to alphanumeric codes. She watched a harpoon sail toward and just above her, the wind of it parting her hair, and marveled at how straight and keen it flew.

Then she turned back toward the door, and the world exploded bright blue in her face.

Eyes full of supernovas, she felt the ground fall away from her feet. Her blinded world pivoted, sharply, sickeningly, felt the meat of her side crash and swivel against the cold metal tube of the railing. She plunged, and something chill and elastic wrapped itself around her, twanged her to a stop.

Her vision returned, fighting away the moth-holes eaten in it, and she found herself staring up at the bottom of the walkway, Sully a shadow crouching down stretching out a hand. Her face stung, sunburnt. She tried to move her arms, and look, and saw them tangled in loops of coiled black tendrils.

And in a single instant, all her fear hit her full at the base of her brain.

She roared in terror, thrashing, and the cables grip seemed to give — and drop her inch by terrifying inch toward the water looming below!

A slim hand thrust itself full in her face. Sully, stretched out full on the walkway above, straining down to reach her.

“They’re dead, Nora!” she said, snatching the sash away so Nora could see her face. “They don’t move! Just relax. They only broke your fall.”

Heart hammering, Nora forced herself to be still, to spread her weight across the fragile web of cables that held her up.

“Good,” Sully called down to her. “Now, slow, easy. Just reach up to me.”

A harpoon slammed into the catwalk not ten feet behind her, severing nearly half its width. The whole thing shook, and Sully clung tight, bones rattling. Metal groaned as the auxiliary pod tried to pull itself up and away from the dying hulk of the Faithless. Bolts began to bend where the harpoon had struck, peeling up from its moorings the single slim plating that held the walkway together.

“Reach, dammit!” Sully cried. Their hands connected, slipped, grasped tight at last. Sully hauled, coronas of white-hot sparks bursting forth around her as vollies from rivet guns shredded the railings of the walkway. Nora gripped the walkway and dragged herself up. Beneath her, it twisted like a hangnail as the pull between the Faithless and the auxilliary pod inexorably tore it apart.

They crawled the remaining few feet to the door of the pod in a last, bitter storm of red-hot rivets from the Faithless’s cannons. Sully risked reaching up, sparks and shrapnel stinging through her gloves, as opened the door to chill, dim mustiness. They tumbled through and slammed the hatch tight; the point of a harpoon screeched through the door just above their heads and stopped, vibrating in some private key of mayhem.

Nora looked up, to the side of the hatch, and saw the lever, large and boldly marked: CATWALK RELEASE. She lunged up and pulled, with all her strength.

Outside, explosive bolts blew the walkway loose from the auxiliary pods; it twisted and tumbled away, dangled for a moment from the limping side of the Faithless, and then broke off, belly-flopping toward the lake below. The cables, now all that remained to link the ship and its offspring, stretched and writhed, and a dark shape seemed to ripple among them, pouring itself out from the belly of the Faithless. Then the tendrils snapped like piano strings, one by one, and the auxilliary pod lurched up into the sky, climbing back to the altitude for which it longed.

Farther below by the second, the Faithless bulged, then broke apart in clouds of fire. The few chambers of its gasbag still filled with helium burst. It fell, slapping against the green, murky depths of Lake Michigan in a mad froth of white foam and steam. And whatever dark secrets it still held sank with it to the silt and mud on the wide, lightless plain of the lakefloor, for the fish to ponder.

Sully and Nora sat for a while, backs to the cool metal of the door, thin light and bracing air dancing in their hair around the edges of the harpoon point above. They grinned like survivors.

The room was echoing and dim, lit by a few shabby pools of light — one above the door against which the women sat, another barely visible on the opposite side of the pod — and by needles of sunlight cast in from the fissures in hull where other harpoons had burst through. On the opposite side of the door from the catwalk release, Sully found a junction box, and ground the protesting switch upward into life.

Generators hummed, old flourescent lights buzzed and tank-tank-tanked themselves grudgingly on, and Nora let out a low whistle. It was a hangar. A smallish one, but still, there like silent stormtroopers in formation were row upon row of knife-sharp black-hulled fighter jets, the skull and crossbones painted across their tailfins. To their left, stretching across the front of the pod, a broad, segmented door waited; Nora could see tracks encasing it, running up to the ceiling.

“I think we found our way out,” Nora smiled, getting to her feet. Then she threw up her arms and whooped with delight. A week ago, the thought of getting into the cockpit of anything would have jellied her knees. Now it felt like a challenge.

“Not to be little miss killjoy,” Sully interrupted, tracing a streak in the dust across the nose of one fighter, “but, uh… you sure these things are still even working? Much less fueled?”

“What do you say we find out?” Nora asked, as they wandered into the center of the hangar. The pointed noses of the jets bristled out at them, expectant. Nora followed the shape of them with her eyes, imagining air currents flowing over their surfaces. They wanted the sky.

A dull scraping reverberated through the empty chamber, the sound clattering itself down off the ceiling above.

“See?” Sully grumbled, drawing her guns, looking around for the source of the noise. “Who's the gloater now, huh?”

“Easy, now,” Nora shot back, as her hand strayed inside her own jacket to rest on the grip of the pistol. “This thing’s old. Could’ve just been working the kinks out.” But she wondered: Had she had time to reload? How many shots remained? She patted one pocket and felt her spare bullets gone — fallen out, perhaps, when she nearly tumbled off the walkway.

“I really don’t think that’s it,” Sully cautioned, nodding back toward the door through which they’d entered.

Slowly, the harpoon head embedded in it had begun to turn. It rattled, lightly at first, then with sudden violence. Then it stopped, slid down limply against the door.

“Tell me that’s not who I think it is,” Sully growled, and Nora’s mouth went dry.

With a sudden shriek, the door tore off its hinges to flutter away. For a moment, empty sky blasted into the hangar — and then a creeping, many-fingered current of darkness rose and bubbled and seeped in around the edges.

As Sully and Nora backed away, the writhing mass of tendrils poured itself into the hangar, tiny metal teeth sinking themselves into the metal flooring, itsy-bitsy-spidering its way forward. And from the bulging, slithering mass of it, a face emerged, and the frail husk of a body.

Framed by the topography of scars upon her countenance, Wicked West’s eyes did not blaze with hatred, nor madness, nor fury. They were calm, and cold, and certain. They were absolutely terrifying.

“Now it ends, little ones,” she said to Nora and Sully, and the tendrils sprang forth to consume them both.

The Aerial Inferno (Part 1)

It had survived bitter, freezing wind, and the relentless assault of equatorial sun. It had turned away bullets, rockets, harpoons, and bombs, and even, once, the envious talons of something far older than man.

But now, far above the churning waters of Lake Michigan, the Faithless, night-sweat terror of the skies, burned and slowly died.

Had the great and terrible craft retained any crew members, they might have forestalled its end — quelled the fires that boiled in ravenous billowing gouts from the jagged fissures blown in the aft hull, patched the ship up, limped it home to pillage another day. But it no longer had a crew. It no longer had a home. And the majority of its inhabitants knew only of the terrible noise, and the frightening heat, and were moved to blind, savage destruction.

In the black heart of the main armored gondola, Wicked West screamed bitter hate through ancient lungs, the countless black cables that knitted her body and being to the ship itself writhing and lashing in the Faithless’s dying agonies.

Sully Wells’ vicious grin of triumph died on her lips as the tendrils encircling her rib cage began to squeeze. Fighting for breath, she flicked a wrist, disgorging a curving knife from up one sleeve, and began to desperately hack at the cables that held her. But their casings were hardened, resilient, and already black spots began to dance at the borders of Sully’s vision…

So, too, did the cables tighten around Nora Swift’s throat as she hung in the air, danging almost face-to-face with the withered, revenge-mad pirate empress. Nora’s fingers scrabbed for purchase against the cables, pulling them away from her neck with all her strength, desperate for a few centimeters’ room. The heavy iron shackles clamped around her ankles dragged her down, down, to certain strangulation.

Wicked West shuddered and screamed anew as a fresh round of explosions rocked the ship, turbines just on the opposite side of the bulkhead exploding in flaming hails of shrapnel. And as the pirate queen’s scar-scratched visage contorted in fury and pain, Nora saw her chance.

Grabbing hold of the cables that entwined her neck with both hands, summoning the memory of every hateful sit-up she’d ever done in her life, Nora lifted her iron-bound feet and smashed them hard into Wicked West’s face.

The cables dissolved into slack as the pain and shock jolted through the old woman’s body, dropping Nora and Sully to land hard on the metal plating of the deck. Still shrieking, Wicked West spooled herself and all her flailing cables back up through the portal in the apex of the chamber’s ceiling, and vanished.

Ribs burning, Sully dragged herself into a sitting position, only to see Nora sprawled across the deck.

“Nora!” she shouted; the death throes of the engine room thundered in the air, blotting out whole spectrums of sound. Sully crawled across the deck, already feeling the heat from the fire in the next chamber beginning to spread through the flooring, and found Nora gasping and coughing, rubbing her bruised throat.

“Ow,” Nora rasped, strength returning to her voice. “Sully? The hell you wearing there?”

“Long story,” Sully sighed, flooded with sudden gratitude at the simple fact that she was no longer alone in all this madness. “You all right?”

“I’ll be a lot better if you can get these damn things off me,” Nora coughed, rattling the chains around her ankles.

Sully dug in her sash and producing a lockpick kit. “I went shoplifting,” she explained. “They had all kinds of really great, dangerous stuff lying around.” She tried not to think about all the things she hadn’t found in the ship’s armory — the racks of heavy arms sitting empty and dust-choked, the boxes of high-caliber ammunition hastily smashed open by inhuman hands, stinking of the same reek that pervaded the rest of the ship.

“Just a sec,” Sully said, digging in the shackles’ latch with a precisely twisted point of wire. “I think I recognize this design…” With a last twist of Sully’s wrist and a heavy clack, the shackles fell open, and Nora sighed in relief.

“Thank you, Eisenheim’s Second Revised Guide to Shackles and Restraints,” Sully said, prompting a very strange look from Nora. “For work! I read it for work! Can you walk?” Sully asked, helping Nora to her feet. “We’ve got to get off this thing. I may have done some damage to the engine room.”

“You think?” Nora snorted, as a fresh round of explosions rattled the steam seams of the chamber. One wall was slowly beginning to glow red, the rivets pinning together its steel plates popping and pinging loose. “Door’s locked,” Nora said, nodding toward the lone hatch she’d tried earlier. “Unless you’ve got some more of that dynamite?”

“Yeah, because I really want to be carrying that stuff around,” Sully replied. “Wait, I’ve got some blueprints here — maybe there’s another way out.” She unfolded the diagram and began to trace lines with her fingers. Nora peered over her shoulder and frowned.

“Wait,” Nora said. “Wait, wait, wait. Give me that. You see these lines here, running under the chamber? I think…” Nora eyed the deck plates, bent down, tugged at the corner of one. It lifted slightly, and Nora broke into a smile. “Come on, help me with this.”

Sully, confused, shifted aching muscles to help Nora lift the deck plate away, revealing a thick tangle of pipes, hoses and conduits running beneath the deck of the ship. Nora wiped a growing layer of sweat from her brow and shook it against the deck. In a few seconds, it began to dance and sizzle; the air in the chamber had begun to shimmer.

“What are we looking for?” Sully asked, as the two peered into the knotty mass of utility lines, and Nora pointed.

“There!” The rubberized skin of the thick cable was beaded with drops of moisture. Condensation. And when Nora reached down to tug the line free and lift it out of the hole in the plating, it was blessedly cool to the touch.

“If there’s one thing I understand,” she told Sully, “it’s ways you can stress metal. It’s getting hot in here, right? Well, this is a coolant line. And if we hit that door—” pointing at the hatch a few feet away — “with what’s in this, the sudden change in temperature—”

“Say no more,” Sully nodded, producing her silver knife with a flourish. “You wanna do the honors?”

“Hold up,” Nora said. “That’s not gonna do it. You’d have to hack through the line slowly, and the stuff inside might make the blade too brittle.” Her eyes roved the display cases dotting the room, resting at last on the jeweled scimitar near the bed where she’d awakened. “Oh, much better.”

Picking up the iron shackles from where they’d fallen on the deck, Nora dragged them over to the case in which the scimitar gleamed, pristine and lovely. Up close, Nora saw fine traces of long-dried blood along the edge of it, and shivered a bit despite the rising heat.

She stepped back, whirled the shackles with her right hand, building up momentum, and them flung them at the glass case. It dissolved into bits and shards, and Nora reached forward and picked up the sword. Heavier than it looked.

Nora was halfway back to where Sully waited with the cable when she stopped. The leather jacket she’d seen earlier, and the old revolver, hung suspended in light in the case to her left. Nora drew close, peering through the glass. The faded letters painted in flaking golden script on the breast of the jacket just barely read Gale.

With the butt of the jeweled sword, she smashed the case open. The jacket, once she’d shaken the bits of glass off, felt surprisingly sturdy in her hands; age had made the leather soft to the touch, the sheepskin collar pillowy and pilled. She slipped it on — a little small for her, perhaps, but it still felt right.

And when she picked up the revolver, it felt curiously familiar in her hand. It was older, more battered — yet somehow, the same pistol her grandmother had given her, the one she’d lost as the tendrils dragged her away. She checked the cylinders — empty, but somehow, she didn’t mind. The gun slipped into the inside pocket of the jacket as if the two were made for one another.

For the first time in hours, for reasons she couldn’t even begin to explain, Nora felt safe again.

“You about done accessorizing?” Sully griped as Nora drew near with the scimitar. Nora cast a critical eye on Sully’s own outfit, then hefted the sword.

“You just watch yourself,” Nora said. “This is gonna be cold.” She brought the sword down through the cable, striking sparks on the deck.

The coolant hose writhed and jerked in Sully’s hands, blue-white fluid jetting forth to splash against the metal of the locked hatch. Nora tossed the sword aside and helped her steady the cable, training the torrent of supercold liquid against the door. Frost began to crack and crawl across its surface, fingers of sudden steam curling off and away from it, and Nora and Sully could hear the metal groan under the sudden shift in temperature.

Another roar from the engine room, and suddenly the entire ship lurched, sliding several degrees left of horizontal. Large spots on the back wall of the chamber now glowed yellow-orange, and fiery red rivets pinged and sizzled like burning acorns from the creaking walls. Nora felt the heat like a hand laid heavily across the back of her neck.

“That’s gonna have to do it!” Nora shouted, and Sully cast the coolant hose aside to fizz and sputter against the deck. They approached the door warily, its cool breath to their faces, the searing escalation of fiery heat at their backs.

“On three?” Sully asked, and Nora nodded. She held up one finger, two fingers, three, and they reared back and kicked in unison. The door shuddered, a large crack spidering out from their point of impact, but it did not give.

“Okay, okay,” Nora nodded, “we just try again. Ready? One—”

The whole room shook, and with a ear-scraping screech, bicycle-sized shards of turbine casing plunged themsleves through the back wall and into the room, tips glowing and molten and beginning to drop. The gondola began to list even further, the door before Nora and Sully growing increasingly uphill.

“Again!” Sully shouted, and without waiting for a count, they rammed their feet against the door. The cracks widened, deepened; red light began to show through in gaps.

“One more time!” Nora cried, and took a few steps back. She and Sully squared their shoulders, got a running start, and hit the door with a pair of graceless but effective flying kicks.

The door gave, exploding off its hinges in fat, jagged shards, and Sully and Nora tumbled backward and fell to the deck.

“Gah!” Nora recoiled, as the stench from the corridor invaded her nose. “What the hell is that?”

Sully grabbed her arm and helped drag her to her feet as the back wall of the chamber groaned ominously. “Don’t ask!” she shouted, amid the rising chords of rending metal. “Just go!”

They threw themselves out the hatch and into the hall as the back wall of Wicked West’s private refuge collapsed. A wall of flame rolled across the room, consuming the silk-laden beddings, devouring the accumulated spoils under glass. And whatever Wicked West preserved in that black laquered box, it would whisper to her no more.

Sully and Nora scrambled to safety up the canted corridor as a fat, whirling tumbleweed of fire belched itself out of the hatch. They watched it recede into genteel cat’s tongues of flames, then turned to one another.

“So,” Nora asked, as her lungs’ need for oxygen battled her sinuses’ urgent demand to breathe in as little of the funk as possible. “How do we not go down with the ship?”

Sully once more unfolded the blueprints. “Apparently, your crazy friend in there wasn’t a big believer in escape pods,” she shouted above the groans and shudders of the dying craft. “But there are walkways, here and here, port and starboard, leading to smaller blimps. If we can get to one of those, well, at least we won’t be on anything that’s currently exploding.”

“Think maybe you overdid it?” Nora grinned grimly, nodding her head in the direction of the engine room.

“Business instincts,” Sully sighed. “Last time I blew up a whole building. You’ve always gotta make the encore bigger.”

They wobbled, arms flailing, as the craft listed even further to the left. The walls were now perilously close to becoming floor and ceiling. Sully folded up the map, dug around in the sash at her hip, and handed Nora a small, dust-coated paper box emblazoned in colorful foreign script.

“Bullets,” Sully explained. “For that piece of yours. I took a few different kinds, just to be safe.”

“Wait, why do we need guns?” Nora asked, the revolver feeling suddenly heavy against her ribs.

Sully shook her wrists, and twin automatic pistols slid out of her sleeves. One fell neatly into her grip, but she nearly fumbled the other, catching it before it could clatter to the deck.

“I’m, uh, still getting the hang of this,” she said hastily. “Pretend that was a lot more badass, okay?”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Nora replied, thumbing shells into the open chambers of her grandmother’s gun. The spare rounds clinked and jangled in her jacket pocket.

“I’m not sure I know the answer,” Sully said darkly, cocking one silver pistol, then the other. “And I’m not sure I want to. Come on.”

The infernal heat grew with every step they took through the flickering red lights of the corridors, even as they put greater distance between themselves and the engine room. Several times, Sully thought she could hear other, pursuing sounds just below the groaning, roaring din. But the corridors betrayed no shadow, no flicker of motion save their own.

“It’s not far now!” Sully shouted to Nora as they reached a t-junction in the halls. To their left, a tangled, narrow passage festooned with pipes led to the opposite side of the ship. But ahead, the steepening grade of the corridor revealed the hatch she’d left ajar upon first entering the craft. Now all they had to do was find a ladder up to the next level...

A dark, broad, form loped out of the doorway ahead and stopped. Sully froze, flinging back an arm to restrain Nora. The shadow was joined by another, and then more and more, spilling out of the hatch in shambling, pendulous motion. As a mass, they shuffled forward, into the flat red glare of an emergency beacon.

The troop of gorillas, skinny and scarred from countless inter-tribal skirmishes, regarded them in hooting, nervous uncertainty for several long moments. Then the leader raised something cradled in his thick, powerful arms, a long, tapered tube of metal that gleamed dully in the crimson lights. Even with her ears ringing from the constant noise, Sully could make out the unmistakable sound of a bolt sliding into place.

She swore, inventively, and with great enthusiasm.

“What you said,” Nora seconded.

To be continued...

In the Crimson Jungle of the Clouds

She dreamed of drowning, tangled in the rigging of some sunken galleon. And when Sully Wells at last awoke, sodden and shaking and faintly blue, she looked up and saw the ground.

It took her a few seconds to realize that yes, that was the Sears Tower pointing back at her, so far below. Then it vanished behind a curl of cloud, and all was gray mist once more.

She had gone so far past cold that she nearly felt warm again, soaked to the bone by the previous night’s storm and the pervasive, clinging mist of the cloud that surrounded her. She tried to move, and something caught at her, snagged her. Sully craned her neck and looked back and up and saw the tendrils, and nearly screamed.

They were still now, inert, and she had somehow gotten twined within them. She didn’t remember how; just a long, rushing flight up toward darkness, Nora clinging to her hand. And then…

She tried to move again, and the cables started to loosen their hold — and she began to fall. Panic stabbed at her gut, fear shot a torrent of heat through her limbs, and she grabbed the black cables to steady herself. She lifted her neck to look ahead. The cables stretched over her, taut, to some sort of gondola a good distance ahead, hanging suspended in the air by a great black patchwork balloon.

It took her some terrifying minutes, working numb hands and stiff limbs, to push herself up carefully through the tangle of black cables, slip from where they’d looped and knotted around her limbs, and lie with her weight carefully distributed across the slithering net of tendrils as they bounced and swayed in the air. Her teeth chattered like a wind-up toy, until she thought her jaw would rattle itself off her face.

When she could finally tear her eyes away from the dizzying depths below her, she slowly turned her head to the left. There was a walkway, dull rusted iron, stretching across the cables, extending to the gondola. Only after she had crawled, inch by shaking inch, and sprawled full on its freezing, rain-spotted plates, did she bother to wonder where it originated.

She looked back over her shoulder and saw it — armored hull battleship-huge, bristling with pikes and harpoons and colonized in fractals of rust and wear. Bulging steel cables, thick as a clenched fist, stretched up from the top of the massive gondola to a mammoth, sun-blotting oblong of thick, black-painted fabric. The weathered outlines of a skull and crossbones leered out from the side of the balloon, big as a house.

There was a door in the side of the massive gondola, connected to the walkway, and Sully rose on muffled, unsteady limbs and lurched her way toward it — only to find no outward latch. She banged on it with icy white fists, kicked it and shouted, and heard nothing.

At last, her legs gave out. She dropped to her knees, muscles jumping like bugs beneath her skin, trying to shake out the cold.

There, on the plates of the catwalk, she looked down through the tangle of black cables sprouting through ports on the side of the gondola, and saw an open porthole below.

She nearly fell sliding herself off the catwalk, and again lowering herself through the cables to kick her feet at the circular open window. Slowly, numb hands gripping the slippery black tendrils for dear life, she managed to work one leg, and then the other, into the hole — and with one last, sickening lurch, and a number of bruises she barely felt, she slipped and bumped and fell into the gondola.

It was warmer here, even with the chill coming in through the open window. Warm air rose through gaps in the deck plates, and Sully spread herself flat on the floor and passed out for several minutes, exhausted and shivering.

Distant footfalls, vibrating all through the metal of the ship, woke her. Slowly, aching, she pushed herself up from the floor. The heat only served to make her realize how cold she really was, under layers of freezing, moisture-sodden clothes.

She was in some kind of crew quarters; rows of spacious, comfortable-looking bunks and heavy metal lockers lined the walls on either side. At the far end, she saw a door, pressure-sealed with a circular valve from the inside. Dents from outside bulged in the metal of the door, and a pile of chairs and a metal table had been haphazardly stacked against it.

Behind her, the porthole yawned open, cold air whistling in. She stood gingerly, stumbled forward, and shut it, hearing it latch tight. Then she looked down at the low ledge beneath the window, where the massive outer plates of the hull had been welded together, and something gleamed back at her.

Earrings. They were a pair of gold and pearl earrings, simple but lovely. They had been placed neatly and precisely, one beside the other, on the metal. On the floor beneath them, a pair of worn black silk slippers, set down with the same solemn care.

Sully thought about this, and about the open window. She looked back at the makeshift barricade barring the door, and when she shivered, it was not entirely from the cold.

The air grew steadily warmer in the narrow room, now that the window was shut. Sully rummaged the bunks and found blankets, dust-choked and moth-worn but still thick and warm. Clumsily, she stripped out of her soaking clothes, the leather jacket, the thick boots and fishnet stockings, and huddled in a mound of blankets at the center of the floor until her shaking subsided and she felt fully alive again.

The lockers had no locks, and inside them, Sully found more of the neat black slippers, and black silken pants, tunics, and cloaks — the Stevie Nicks ninja brigade, Sully wondered? Jean-Paul Gaultier designing for the Nazi Women’s Auxiliary? But at the moment, staying warm — and not running around a strange and possibly dangerous death ship in mismatched, several-days-old underwear — trumped the possibility of looking stupid.

After a few tries, she found a set of clothes that fit — a loose long-sleeved shirt, baggy harem-like pants with a sash for a belt, and a hooded cloak that draped across her shoulders. The dark fabric was lightweight, comfortably warm, and nearly soundless when she moved. She didn’t want to think about how much a getup like this would have run her back in L.A.

She rummaged through her thoroughly ruined jacket and found, at last, her silver Zippo and Mister Gaunt’s box of cigarettes — a bit damp around the edges, but miraculously undamaged. None of the slippers she could find fit, and something made her leery of touching the pair by the porthole. So she sighed, gritted her teeth, and squished her feet back into her boots.

Wherever she was, the tendrils had taken her. Which meant Nora was here. Sully didn’t really know her — they’d talked some at the Lookout — but in all likelihood, Trip and the British guy were somewhere far, far below. Which made Nora the closest thing Sully had to a friend, literally.

And wherever the tendrils had taken her was probably nowhere that anyone wanted to be.

She moved the furniture away from the door, slowly, carefully. From the dust piled in the corners of the room, and the mothholes in the blankets, whatever had happened here happened long ago. That didn’t make Sully feel any more comfortable.

A turn of the wheel, a few sturdy tugs on the hatch, and the door screeched open, terrifyingly loud. Sully froze, listening to the shriek of rusty metal echo through distant corridors. Then the smell hit her.

A butcher shop. Hell, an entire meat department. In the middle of a monkey house — scratch that, ten monkey houses — in the dead of summer. Sully stumbled back, the sheer stink of it hitting her like a shove to the chest. One hand pinching her nose shut, she rummaged through the lockers again until she found a spare sash, which she wrapped around her nose and mouth until the sheer stench was cut to tolerable limits. She caught a glimpse of herself in a cracked, spotted-over patch of mirror inside one of the locker doors; a strange-eyed bandit stared back at her, and for a moment, she felt her lips twist into a grin beneath the sash, and wasn’t sure why.

The smell didn’t get any better outside. The hallway was empty, lit an eerie, eye-burning red by emergency bulbs sprouting from the bulkheads. Dried black piles of something Sully didn’t even want to contemplate soiled the edges of the corridor, and as she crept along the corridor toward what she vaguely remembered as the front of the gondola, she saw entire lunar fields of tiny craters and dents pocking the thick steel walls. Bullet marks.

Something howled, indeterminately far away, the sound ramming itself madly off the corridor walls, sending a flock of centipedes clamoring down Sully’s spine. Okay, guns, she thought. Guns had just become a priority.

She passed many doors; most were locked, while some yawned open into kitchens or bunk rooms preserved in some hurricane state of disarray. Sully kept moving.

At last, she found a ladder, which she climbed to a closed hatch, white light leaking in around its edges. Sully waited, listening. No voices. No sound at all. She pushed, arms still aching from that manhole cover yesterday, and the hatch creaked open into light and cold air. Sully had found the bridge.

Cold, wet wind blew in through the smashed-open windows that ringed the fore of the room, bits of jagged glass clinging like barnacles at their edges. Steering, throttle, communications — the stations sat empty and unmanned. A captain’s chair, all smooth curving metal and rotting leather, bloomed roselike in the center of the room.

No one was piloting the ship.

Sully fought down an initial wave of panic and shut the hatch behind her. Something had to be controlling this ship; it had grabbed her and Nora, hadn’t it? And she saw lights glowing softly on the control panels — those not smashed, melted and blackened by fire, or chewed up by what looked like gunfire.

She had a sudden urge to sit down, legs tired and aching. She was still getting warm from her time tangled outside. She moved toward the captain’s chair and stopped. Even empty, it had some sinister presence about it — a sense of being occupied, even when it wasn’t. Sully thought better and retreated to one of the stations around the rear periphery of the oblong chamber.

She sat for a while, watching clouds and the occasional bird pass outside the gaping front windows, her brain trying to catch up with the rest of her. Something fluttered at the periphery of her vision, and she turned to look at the console before her, where a slim curl of tattered yellow paper peeked out from one of several slender, vertical drawers mounted into the wall. She pulled out the nearest drawer, and found a map — topography of some strange island, with runways and flight vectors marked by hand in red pencil. The other drawers held more maps, and blueprints — science-fiction aircraft like Sully had never seen, sprouting strange multitudes of wings and engines. Here, too, careful handwritten annotations had been made — circles and x’s noting what appeared to be weak spots and points of entry.

The last map was different. Sully recognized the shape of it — the very gondola she occupied. She found the bridge, traced the corridor back to the room from which she’d entered. The diagram was rougher than the others, sketched by a shaky but trained hand. In sharp, slashing letters at one corner, it had been labeled: FAITHLESS.

She pulled the diagram as far as it would go from the wall, and stood, fingers pressed to the yellow, gummy celluloid that sheathed it, searching. Looking for points of interest. The ARMORY, there, on the opposite end of the ship. ENGINE ROOM, not far away. And right at the heart of the ship, a vast empty space, pointedly unlabeled…

The gentle slithering sound crept slowly around the edges of Sully’s consciousness, and at first, when something brushed lightly against her shoulder, she nearly reached up and swatted it away. Then she saw movement in the corners of her eyes.

The black tendrils were spooling from ports in the ceiling, twisting and twining and searching their way across the bridge.
Sully froze, her heart jackrabbiting against her rib cage. She started to move, and five or six individual cables stopped with a jerk, and turned their pincer ends in her direction. The cables began to diverge, slowly, winding themselves into a cord thick as a man’s arm, oozing like oil across the open air of the room toward Sully’s face.

She shifted her weight to one side, ready to dive, and in a blink, the tendril had closed its distance, sharp metal pincers on the ends of the dozens of cables jawing in predatory leisure.

And then it split, and slid around her head, and neatly shut all the map drawers she’d left open.

Across the bridge, Sully saw the cables flipping switches. Strands wound around the rudder controls, making careful adjustments to the ship’s course. Even at the broken, burnt-out consoles, the tendrils continued to adjust switches that no longer worked, and grope for dials and levers smashed and blackened beyond recognition.

After a minute or two, the tendrils retreated, reeling back up into the ceiling. The bridge was empty. Sully was alone.

She looked down and saw her own knuckles white against the edge of the console.

Sully pulled the map drawer back open and yanked the blueprint of the Faithless out of its frame. She clenched it in her fist until she felt the shaking go from her hands.

A quick scouring of the bridge turned up nothing else — no weapons, just a frustratingly empty cabinet that looked like it might once have held rifles. Sully found a second hatch, on the opposite side of the gondola from where she’d entered. Fastest way to the armory, the map said. She opened it carefully, listening again for any sound or motion below. And when she heard nothing, she climbed down carefully.

She got one final glimpse of the strange, unsettling captain’s chair before the hatch swung shut above her.

The corridors on this side smelled no better, nor were they any less strewn with debris and the marks of battle. Sully followed the blueprints as best she could, but it wasn’t easy; the corridors all looked the same, save for their various desecrations, and the eerie red light made the diagrams hard to read.

She had paused at an intersection to check her progress when she heard it. Shuffling, scraping sounds. Grunting. She turned to check the corridor behind her. Strange shapes flitted and bulged on distant walls.

The inhuman howl rose again, reverberating off the surrounding metal. Closer. Too much closer.

Sully turned and ran, stuffing the map back into the sash around her waist. Every footfall of her boots on the deck plates seemed to ring out like a hammer blow. Behind her, the grunts grew louder, more aggressive. She didn’t dare look back.

She started testing doors, looking for any shelter she could find. Locked. Locked. Locked again. The latch on one seemed to give, only to snap off in her hand.

Shadows, cast from behind her, began to flicker and dance along the walls. She heard shuffling, the tread of heavy bare feet on the metal. Ragged, aggressive machete-blows of breath. And the stink in the air, choking, thickening.

Her hands fumbled. A latch gave, a door swung wide, and she tumbled inside and slammed it shut behind her.
It wouldn’t lock. She looked at the door and saw that something, long ago, had smashed and twisted the handle. Sully turned and saw a lab table, large, heavy, and pushed it shrieking across the metal floor to block the door. No sooner had she slammed it home across the hatchway than the door boomed with a sudden, heavy blow from outside. Another. The table rattled, and the door shook. Dents began to appear in the metal. It’d hold, but only so long.

Immediate danger faded, Sully drank in her surroundings. The stink was somehow even worse in here. Some kind of lab, it looked like. Rusted metal cages lined the walls, big ones, stacked atop each other four high to the ceiling. The doors of most had been torn off, bent, dangling limply from their hinges.

Beyond where the table had been, Sully found the floor painted in red-brown dried blood. Bits of thick white fabric, liberally stained, were scattered about. Surgical tools, scalpels and chisels and saws, lay scattered and rusting on the metal plating, where they’d fallen from an overturned cart.

On shelves on the walls, past the cages, row after row of elongated simian skulls stared out at her. The skulls had been cut open, and mechanical components, of differing design, placed inside. Sully shuddered.

A thunderous blow shook the door, and the heavy table screeched inward a half-inch. The hatch cracked open, and Sully heard angry hoots and shrieks from without. There was another door at the far end of the room, and Sully opened it hastily, finding herself in an office blanketed in cobwebs.

There were a desk and chair here, and more shelves, with jars; strange, blind things floated preserved in formaldehyde. Some had more than the usual number of limbs. Or heads. Sully didn’t care to look too closely.

Another boom from the chamber without; another screech of the table. Whatever was outside, it was quickly getting in. Sully looked up and saw a ventilation grate in the wall, up near the ceiling. Rusted and treacherous, but big enough for her to fit.
She pushed the desk over to the wall, shedding papers snowdrifted on top of it. A framed picture on the desk toppled and fell, and Sully, curious, picked it up and shook the glass free. It was a young woman, hair tightly pinned back, neat lab coat perfectly fitted, strange piercing eyes boring through the camera. She stood behind a table, on which a young chimpanzee sat, staring ahead at the photographer. It took Sully a moment to realize that the top of the chimp’s skull was missing, its brain showing beneath. She dropped the picture back on the desk as if it had suddenly squirmed in her hand.

There was another loud crash from the door outside, and the sound of the lab table clattering on its side. She had no time. Sully grabbed the grating and tugged, flinging it to one corner of the room. She planted her hands inside the duct and hauled, wriggling up and into the narrow tunnel.

The duct seemed to contract around her, squeezing the breath from her lungs in a single gasp. She was back in the attic, locked in the box, blind and helpless and terrified.

Sully squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated. Remember the diagram. The false panel. The hidden latch, just underneath the back of the lock…

A thick, powerful hand seized her by the ankle and yanked her backward.

The skin of her palms squealed and stung against the metal of the duct as she slid, clawing frantically for traction. She looked back — a shadow blocked the light at the entrance of the grate, one thick, impossibly long arm winding its way inside, clamped around her boot. Waves of stench rolled off the thing, and Sully heard grunting, and saw a flash of teeth.

She kicked out hard with her free foot. Her heel smashed against skin and bone, and she heard something cracked. A howl erupted into the duct, rattling her eardrums, and the hand let go of her ankles. She crawled forward into the dark, desperate, awkward, fast as she could. The light blotted out behind her, and she heard the dark shape swatting and pawing around, just out of reach of her feet. Sully looked back at saw the thing smashing itself again and again at the entrance to the vent, trying to get in. Too large to fit.

The thing roared at her, and Sully, triumphant, blew a raspberry back at it. Then she turned and wriggled onward into the dark. At a safe distance, she fished out the blueprints and flicked on her lighter, tracing ventilation ducts. This might work.
Some minutes later, she battered open one last grating, reached out to grip a particularly sturdy-looking pipe bolted to the ceiling, and dragged herself out to dangle and drop into the heart of the ship’s armory.

It was a long, narrow room, one wall all panels of glass, the others rows and rows of lockers, interrupted at one end by a thick, securely fastened door. A steady, constant thrumming, louder here than elsewhere in the ship, filled her ears. That was the first thing Sully noted.

The second: She wasn’t alone.

The body, dessicated by the passing of unknown decades, wore robes like the ones she sported. It slumped against the wall of windows, legs splayed out across the floor, undignified. In the bony claw of its right hand, it held a revolver loosely. It was largely missing one side of its head.

Sully’s gorge rose, and she fought it down. It wasn’t a person, she lied to herself. Never had been. Just some elaborate prop. She could deal with props.

She busied herself checking the lockers. OMG had done tricks with guns — impossible shots, death-defying exploits — and she’d had to learn them herself, to make sure the tricks were safe. She never liked the way the guns felt in her hands. Largely because she liked them too much. The concentrated power of God, a fingertip away. All you had to do was point, exhale, and squeeze. If she held a gun for long enough, and stayed quiet and listened, she could begin to hear her brain making quiet, awful suggestions, in honeyed tones.

But she knew enough to find the most reliable models among the racks of weaponry that awaited her behind the locker doors; to check that the automatics were clean, to know where to find the safeties, to find the right caliber of extra bullets. She found all sorts of useful things.

And only when she was fully stocked, and nearly adjusted to moving around with a bit of extra weight, did she bother looking through the wall of windows into the dim, red-lit gloom beyond. Vast turbines hummed and crackled, and person-sized pistons turned at dizzying speeds. The engine room.

Almost without her knowledge, Sully found her fingers digging out the box of cigarettes, her hands moving to flick open the lighter. She stopped, and turned, and looked at the heavy wooden crate she’d very carefully pulled out from one of the farthest lockers. Better safe than sorry, she thought, and gingerly closed the lighter.

Then her eyes fixed on the cigarettes in one hand, and the lighter in the other, and then back on the wooden crate, sitting there in ominous innocence on the steel floor.

She had an idea.

Sully pushed at one of the windows, scrabbled her fingers around its edges until she found a latch. It clicked, and the window swung open, and Sully stepped out to a platform behind, and a narrow, steep staircase leading down into the pit.
Beneath the sash, she smiled.


The noise in the engine room was nearly deafening; as she climbing the ladder up from the pit to the catwalks high above, quickly but deliberately, Sully could feel the inside of her skull reverberate. Reaching the top, she risked a quick look back down, but it was more instinct than anything else. It was too far, and too dark, to see anyway. She headed onward along the catwalk, feeling more than hearing the clang of her footsteps against the metal, tracing the pathways of the blueprints in her mind.

The vast, unmarked chamber she’d seen on those plans cradled itself like an egg at the heart of the ship, nestled against the engine room as if seeking some adjacent warmth. At the end of the catwalk, Sully found what she’d been looking for — the hatch to the maintenance tunnels surrounding the central chamber. Whatever it was, it still needed water and light and air. And whenever you had systems like those, you needed ways to go in and fix them when they broke.

It was pitch dark inside, save for a distant well of soft light ahead, and once she’d shut the hatch, the noise of the engine room dropped to a dull thrum again. After nearly banging her head on a low-hanging pipe, she dropped into a crouch and inched forward along an even narrower platform. Thin railings denominated its sides, and reaching her hands beyond them, Sully felt only empty space.

Something moved in the darkness beneath her, once, quietly. Then the stale, close air filled with a familiar slithering sound, and Sully flicked on her lighter to see, several feet below the catwalk on which she knelt, the entire floor of the chamber alive with writhing black tendrils. They seemed to be pouring forward into the central well at the heart of the chamber.

Sully heard a voice, low and musical, faintly over the sound of the rustling tendrils, and then a panicked shout. It sounded like Nora.

Sully scrambled forward to the edge of the well, where the catwalk swelled into a ring surrounding the opening. Peering down through the marionette tangle of undulating tendrils, she saw a figure, almost human, suspended in its midst.
“… could have killed you in your sleep, I suppose,” the low, horrible, weathered voice was saying, each word drifting up to Sully like a puff from a hookah. “But I made myself wait. I wanted to see the fear in your eyes. I wanted you to know.”

Sully clenched both fists around the railing, felt her stomach double-knot itself, and took a deep breath.

The voice at the bottom of the pit said something else, quick and low, but Sully didn’t hear it. She had swung herself beneath the railing, off the edge of the catwalk, into the vortex of cables below.

She hit one side of the mass of cables and slid, picking up speed, the fabric of her cloak and trousers zipping and humming against the wriggling tendrils. Down and down she funneled, feet braced to land hard on the figure that dangled at the very heart of the obscene nest—

The wall of tendrils against which she slid gave way, and with a yelp she tumbled out into empty space. Black lines arced and darted at the corners of her vision, and she stopped with a sudden jerk, her arms and legs wrenching painfully, to dangle several feet above the metal-plated floor.

With a rough, nauseating motion, the cables snaring her limbs wrenched her up and around and face to face with the figure at the center of the tendrils — a woman, Sully saw, uncountably old, her face criscrossed with a fierce topography of scars. Beyond her, pressed against the wall, Nora struggled to pry loose the cables squeezing around her throat.

“I was not to be disturbed!” the old woman roared in a sandstorm voice, eyes blazing with hate. “I made that specifically—” Then she stopped; her eyes narrowed, her mouth pursed. Sully risked a glance at Nora and saw, to some relief, that the cables seemed to have loosened around her neck.

“Oh,” she said, as a tiger might say to a lamb. “You’re not one of mine, are you? That’s right… I haven’t had…” Her eyes clouded for a moment, and then snapped back to knife-edge keenness. “Another False Sister, are you? Another deceiver?”

“And you must be the captain,” Sully said, trying to keep the shaking out of her voice. She remembered what her grandfather’s books had taught her, all those long summers ago: A magician must be smooth and practiced in his patter, must weave a comforting hammock of words in which the audience may rest…

“I’m nobody,” Sully told her. “Just one of the many, many enemies you must have bested in your life. And I accept that. There’s clearly no hope left for me.”

“Sensible,” the old woman sniffed, as if slightly pleased.

Funny thing about patter. It could sound a lot like contract negotiations, if you listened to it right.

“And seeing how we’re all women here, the three of us,” Sully continued, “I wondered if, if your triumph, you might grant me one small boon before you do me in. A last cigarette.”

“Tobacco,” the woman exhaled, slowly, longingly. “I can’t even remember how long it’s been.” Sully nodded to herself. A fellow addict always knows.

“It’s just in my belt here, with my lighter,” Sully said, jerking her hands against the restraining tendrils. “If I could…?” She managed to meet Nora’s baffled, somewhat indignant eyes, and tried to project as much reassurance back as she could.

The old woman’s eyes narrowed again for a moment. “Young lady, I’ll have no trickery from you. Unless you prefer to be picked apart very deliberately, over several hours’ time.” The pincers on the end of each tendril opened and shut, meaningfully, and Sully’s stomach churned again. She tried to count minutes and seconds in her head, thinking back.

The cables slackened enough for Sully to reach slowly to the sash at her waist, and to draw from it her lighter and the box of cigarettes. She flicked the lighter open and shut, stalling for as much time as she could, and then opened the box of cigarettes and peered inside.

“Huh,” she said, and turned to show it to the old woman. “Empty.” Sully took some small satisfaction in the shadow of disappointment that flitted across her scar-scorned face. “That’s right, that’s right,” Sully continued. “I used them all up. Earlier. Funny thing about being a magician. You can turn women into tigers, playing cards into doves…”

She paused, and flicked the lighter open for effect, and watched the flame dance reflected in the old woman’s black, confused eyes.

“Or old dynamite and cigarettes into time bombs,” Sully said.

The entire ship shook and boomed in terrible sequence, the blasts as much felt as heard. The old woman screamed, long and horrid, her face contorted in real pain.

“Abracadabra, bitch,” Sully grinned, and just beyond the steel walls, the engine room of the Faithless burned.