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...

Behold the Misery Engine!

Centuries upon centuries ago, as humans reckon time, fire fell from the sky. And everything changed.

The immense, flaming ball of interplanetary debris punched though this flimsy atmosphere, the sound of its own descent trailing somewhere far behind it, and smashed a hole in what is now the Yucatan peninsula.

The Earth burned. Towering walls of soil and dust splashed upon impact into the highest tiers of the stratosphere, turning away the sun, as if shamed by the planet’s disfigurement. And in the night and the cold that followed, the reptile kings of the planet’s food chain shivered and wasted into fascinating clusters of bone. (There were, of course, a few fortunate exceptions.)

In the center of the crater, untouched amid the shimmers of searing air and toxic vapor, a spiky cluster of golden crystal glowed. Probed. Shifted its dazzling snowflake structure, with a sound like the scattering of broken glass. It sank new spars of itself deep into the traumatized, blackened ground, and pulled itself beneath the soil.

In the millennia that followed, it quietly spread.

Had enough of Kroatoan civilization survived to pass on its creation myth, it would have gone something like this: In the beginning, there was darkness, and humans were as animals. We groped across the surface of this world, bounded by the narrow perimeters of our own fears, concerned only with food and survival.

One of these sad, blunted creatures, scavenging in the jungles of what is now Mexico, was swallowed by the great mouth of the Earth. He fell a far distance, terrified, lost in darkness. And as he screamed and cowered there, so far from the world he knew, a song curled its way up through the winding maze of channels and slipped gently into his mind.

The man-creature felt a new world of sensation slowly begin to unfurl itself inside the head he scarcely acknowledged has his own — colors, scents, visions, ideas no human being had ever dreamed before, all opening like a flower in spring. But only so far. And once he’d tasted even the tiniest melody of this, the man-creature wanted more.

He followed the song, blind eyes and stumbling feet guided by the bright music unfurling itself in his head. And after a time, heading down, down, ever down, his eyes began to perceive the faint borders of things, outlined in radiant gold. The light intensifed, the song growing louder in his head. The man-creature was now consumed, overwhelmed, nearly drowned in a flood of thoughts that had nothing to do with meat or predators or procreation, thoughts that might no longer have even been his own.

At last, he reached the Cathedral Cavern, and collapsed, a whole chorus bursting in his brain.

The cave was filled with vast and slanting spires of coruscating golden crystals, big as ten men, or bigger. And all of them sang to him, ten million voices but the same song.

It is possible that the creature that got to its feet, after a time, was no longer entirely the same one who had first stumbled into the cave. He picked up a loose clump of the singing golden crystals that seemed to be waiting for him on the jagged, prickly floor of the cavern. And then he turned with sure, ceaseless steps, and carried it all the way back to the surface. To spread the crystals’ light, its seductive song of expanding intellect, to others. To colonize.

The Empire of Kroatoan was born.

In time, it grew to mirror the entire subterranean reach of the crystal network, stretching from outposts in the near-polar southern tip of South America to the vast northern capital city on the site of present-day Chicago. Led by crystal compasses, a fleet of Kroatoan even sailed in boats that skimmed just above the waves to a tiny island off the Western coast of South America. It was a chunk of land long broken away in some ancient tectonic shift, nestled at its secret heart with golden light and song. Wherever the crystals called, the Kroatoan spread.

Rebuilt, accelerated by the shimmering voice of the crystals, the people who would become the Kroatoan elite took up their crude tools and carved out advancements centuries beyond their time. They began with weapons — beams of searing, crystal-focused heat, to ensure all the food they could possibly need. Then the beams were turned to conquest, and neighboring tribes became armies of cowering slaves. Those slaves, in turn, hauled and chiseled and mortared the rock that built great spreading cities. And in those cities, newer and more wonderful discoveries blossomed. The crystals could be harnessed for light, for heat, for some strange, invisible motive force that made craft move under their own power. They could be shaped to bring distant stars leaping forth to the human eye. The crystals made all things possible, it seemed.

Civilization came early to Kroatoan. But it came with a price. The crystals hungered.

Certain lesser civilizations, the ragged, diminished remnants that lingered on after the terrible end of Kroatoan, believed the heart to be the center of a person’s life force. And with sadder, cruder versions of the black stone knives first devised by the Kroatoan, atop stone pyramids built in a child’s imitation of half-remembered Kroatoan majesty, they would cut out these hearts and dedicate them, still beating, to their god the Sun.

The Kroatoan would have found no end of amusement in this. Oh, the heart was useful, and certainly quite pyrotechnic when removed. But any sensible society would have already figured out that the brain was the seat of all man’s thoughts and impulses.

And far more delicious, besides.

The tender, savory meat of the brain, the Kroatoan knew, radiated waves with each electrical pulse of thought. Faint, all but undetectible by crude human means. But the crystals read these waves with ease, and were nourished by certain spectra of them. They glowed brighter, grew faster, sang louder and with greater exultation, when in the presence of human despair.

The Kroatoan were happy to oblige them.

Even at its utmost height, there were scarcely more than a quarter of a million full citizens in the whole of the Empire. The rest of its population, outnumbering their captors five to one, were slaves, swallowed by the spreading arms of the Empire to sacrifice their muscle and sweat and blood and bone to its greater glory. And when they could no longer haul stone, or prepare food, or bear shipments of goods and messages — or, sometimes, when their cruel masters simply felt like it — they were put to savage, horrific ends. And in their screams and blood and suffering, the crystals rejoiced.

The sacrifice-scientists of Kroatoan began to note curious side effects to the crystals’ grisly joy. Their light intensified. The flow of energy they produced increased, dramatically. Some varieties of crystal, the learned citizens found, could even absorb this excess energy, store it, harness it.

By this time, some of the more radical elements of the Kroatoan hierarchy had begun to speculate that other worlds beyond their own might yet exist; not only beyond the thin envelope of gases that shrouded their planet, but in realms invisible even the mightiest telescopes. The whole of their available landmass was rapidly falling under their dominion, and only their most daring thinkers had the vaguest idea that the endless seas stretching away to either side of their empire might contain other lands. The elders of Kroatoan, driven by the echo of crystalsong in the far depths of their brains, craved more territory to conquer.

Stone was quarried, cut, hauled, stacked, carved. The bones of the thousands who died in the effort were boiled, ground, made into mortar to seal together and consecrate the effort. The construction of the Great Arena a century before, though far grander in scale, paled in complexity to the new circular structure that rose behind it in the depths of the Winter City. The Misery Engine.

On the day of its consecration, the echoes of the doomed and dying so filled the cavernous reaches of the Winter City that the proctors carrying out the executions had to stuff their ears with cotton, or go deaf.

The bodies jammed the sluice canals that carried waste away to the Winter City’s great undergound swamp. The specially bred leechvines, usually lethargic to the point of immobility, swarmed over this torrent of nourishment with a speed and avidity never before recorded by Kroatoan naturalists. At least one proctor who fell into this writhing mass of hungry green and dead flesh was pulled out pale and drained and lifeless, and promptly thrown back in.

And when the prison pens of the Winter City were emptied, and the canals filled — sometimes to the height of a low house, or greater — the cream of Kroatoan society descended in their rattling, skeletal finery to encircle the Misery Engine. As the high sacrifice-scientists made ready the altar-controls, a phalanx of the empire’s finest Crystal Guards massed at the base of the rising stone rings, ready to march beyond the borders of their existence to campaigns unknown.

With an exultant cry, the sacrifice-scientists entered the seven key symbols on the altar-controls. The crystal spires ringing the engine erupted with blinding radiance, as the accumulated misery of thousands of lost lives flooded into them all at once. In a slow, millstone grind of rock upon rock, the concentric rings of the Misery Engine began to turn. Energy flowed up from the depths of it, to writhe and shimmer like a pool at its center.

The Empire of Kroatoan’s finest minds watched, behind inch-thick black quartz goggles, as reality itself crackled and yielded and yawned wide before them.

They were unafraid.

They were unprepared.

“They were delicious,” Operator Grin added, and sucked a dangling strand of drool back into the corner of one mouth.

Operator Vore turned slowly, the round lenses of his spectacles focusing his glare of annoyance to laser intensity. His strangely dressed comrade just stared into space, strange tongue swishing inside an unfamiliar mouth, trying to get the last bits of Maximillian out of his teeth.

“Can I finish?” Vore asked, in a way that wasn’t even remotely a question. “I’sdd like to finish now.” He swiveled his head in a too-neat motion back to Trip and Rafe, looking up from the bottom of the stone staircase, and rolled his eyes theatrically. As if to say, I can’t take this mismatched cannibal horror from another dimension anywhere.


“We sucked their civilization dry, down to the very marrow of its bones,” Vore continued briskly, as one might lecture on geology. “Oh, you should have heard the colony-mind squeal as we pulled it from its crystal husks and sucked it down like — like —” He snapped his fingers, or tried to, in imitation of something he might have once seen a real person do, in a way that showed only a rudimentary understanding of the act and its significance. “Oh, what are their names, the animals, they have shells, you like to crack them open and eat them—”

“Turtles?” volunteered Grin hopefully, gesturing with Maximillian’s needle, its tip still gummy with his saliva.

With an effort, Vore ignored him, and moved on. “We were younger then, you must understand. Time works differently where we’re from. We needed sustenance to grow. The Empire wasn’t much, but it sufficed.”

“You’re the Eaters of Kroatoan,” Trip said quietly, trying to keep the quaver out of his voice. Even in the staid, scientific language of his grandfather’s journals, the words had always carried an aura of holocaust, and a dark tinge of fear.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” Rafe hissed sidelong, through clenched teeth. “What with their talk of eating, and Kroatoan, and, you know, eating Kroatoan.” Sarcasm was a favorite resort of his in nearly every stressful situation. And in this case, as all his senses screamed at him about the sheer wrongness of the two figures on the raised altar, their strange commingled sent of burnt plastic and rotting flesh, the unnatural precision of their movements, it was all he had left save paralyzing, instinctual terror.

To Trip and Rafe’s mutual and considerable surprise, both Vore and Grin snorted with unconcealed amusement.

“Whoo,” Vore breathed, dabbing at his mouth with a deeply stained handkerchief plucked from one pocket of his overcoat. “I’m sorry, there’s — I’m dealing with an unfamiliar sensation here, like something within me wants to shake itself. Laughter. Yes. That’s it.”

“Good,” Grin added, looking relieved. He glanced down at his sagging stomach, sprawling out from beneath the valiant, insufficient hem of his T-shirt. “For a moment I thought he was trying to get back out.”

“It’s just,” Vore began, and then snickered again, and clamped the handkerchief to his mouth as if trying to hold it in. “Oh. My. There it was again. You referred to us as ‘Eaters.’ Plural.”

“There are two of you,” Trip noted, reluctantly. The destroyers of civilization were apparently having grammar trouble. “You kind of have to be plural.”

“In your meatsacks—” Grin began, and Vore stepped forward to cut him off.

“Bodies,” Vore corrected. Grin sulked.

“In your bodies,” Vore continued, “There are… how do I put this in sufficiently simple terms… a great many tiny rooms, yes? Each its own organism, of sorts, all cooperating?”

“Cells?” Rafe offered, testing the limits of everything he remembered from any biology class he’d ever taken.

“Yes! Ha. Little prisons,” Vore nodded, smiling perhaps a bit wider than the human mouth was ever designed to smile. “There is but one Eater of Kroatoan, as you so unimaginatively refer to us. And we Operators… we are its individual cells.”

“Can’t fit the whole thing through at once,” Grin chimed in. He spread his arms wide, as if pantomiming to very stupid children. “Greeeeeeat big us.” He compressed the space between his hands to mere millimeters. “Liiiiiiittle tiny holes.”

“Which is why we need you,” Vore added. “To make the holes bigger.”

Trip and Rafe looked at each other, profound bafflement quickly overtaking fear.

“I’m sorry,” Rafe ventured, shaking his head confusedly. “Did you just — did you just ask us to destroy the entire world?”

“Not the entire world,” Vore hastily added, in soothing lawyer’s tones. “We’d leave you both. I mean, I assume you’re a breeding pair, right? And one — no, no, I’ll be generous — two other living species. Go ahead, pick them.”

“Why do you even need us?” Trip asked. “You’ve got human bodies — at least, I’m assuming they’re human. The controls are right there. What’s stopping you?”

Vore and Grin grew very quiet, and something surprisingly like unease flashed across both of their faces.

“There are… certain rules to the arrangement,” Vore said at last, crushing the sodden folds of his hankerchief in a nervous, compulsive movement of his hand. “Governing bodies whose dictates must, must, must be followed.”

“It screams and it screams and we can still hear it,” Grin said quietly, eyes on his shoes. “Even after we’ve forgotten what it did.”

“It is quite forbidden,” Vore said, more forcefully than he probably intended to, “to take by force. Yes. That is the Fifty-Sixth Law. To breach the branes from our side. But! The Laws say nothing of concealment, cajolement. And if some careless strain of particularly fortunate monkey, poking at things it can’t possibly understand, should open a hole for us to get through, well, we can hardly be faulted for doing what comes naturally.”

“Num num num num,” Grin added, as if this were an eminently logical summation.

There followed a long silence, during which Trip and Rafe glanced first at each other, then at the Operators on the altar — their eyes wide and expectant, their smiles the phony, frozen variety one uses to persuade children — then back at each other.

“No thanks,” Trip told the Operators, then turned with Rafe to head back down the staircase.

Vore screeched, a keening, jagged sound that sliced through the two men’s brains and froze them in their tracks.

“Listen, listen, listen you paramecium!” the Operator snarled, face turning slightly more purple than the bounds of human anatomy would seem to permit. There was another sound, another voice, underlying his last three words, a bone-rattling growl that seemed to surround him like a looming shadow. “The holes through which we passed are growing. Your sad little thread of time is fraying itself to nothingness. We will break through, and our hunger will not spare you. The time of our multiplication is near, and we need your sustenance.”

“We’re going to be a mommy-daddy,” Grin gurgled, mildly.

“That’s great,” Trip shrugged. “Still. No.”

“Do not shun our mercy,” Vore spat, flecks of gelatinous saliva dancing forth from his lips to sizzle and smoke against the stone at his feet. “There are six billion of you swarming across the surface of this rock. You were just the most convenient.”

Trip stopped, shoulders square, and when he glanced back over his shoulder at the Operators, his eyes were hard and determined.

“I really don’t think so,” Trip said. “Go ahead. Name someone else who could have gotten past the booby traps. Survived the dinosaurs. Even known about this city in the first place. You need us. You always have.”

“It must be so terribly galling,” Rafe added. “All your great big plans dependent on a few miserable specks like us. Well, this paramecium has one word for you: Starve.”

The color slowly drained from Operator Vore’s face. His mouth compressed into a thin, bloodless line. Then, abruptly, he began to smile.

“Perhaps,” he said, a larger, more terrible shape once again rising behind his words. “But not today.” And his smile grew wider, and wider still.

Trip raised the Multipurpose Rifle, focused the sonic beam to maximum concentration, and fired at the altar.

A punch of pure rippling force shuddered through the air, splashing against the round, undulating figure of Operator Grin, as he flung himself in the path of the shot. The strange little shape of a man smashed against the stone and flopped, seemingly boneless, to the floor of the platform.

Vore paused, purple light already seething and spilling out from his grotesquely distended mouth, as Grin’s body lolled and flailed before the stone altar. Slowly, with a hideous scraping of gristle and shattered bone, the Operator got to something resembling his feet.

“Look at this,” Grin whined, his head dangling unnaturally from his neck, watching his elbow bend in ways the body was not designed for. “I think you broke it.”

Trip raised his rifle for another shot, and with a screech, sizzling tendrils of purple light burst forth from Vore’s mouth. Rafe tackled Trip to the stone floor of the central pit as Vore’s appendages raked and sizzled across the stone mouth of the stairway just behind them, collapsing the rock overhead in a growling, gravelly tumult.

A cloud of dust rolled forth from the ruined, chaotic pile of ancient stone. They were trapped in the Misery Engine with the Operators.

“On the whole,” Rafe shouted to Trip, gritting his teeth against the deafening shriek of Vore’s unnatural rage, “I rather think we shouldn’t have taunted them!”

Grin joined in now, horror in harmony, the whole of the Operators’ fleshy disguises lit from within by brain-searing purple light. The human shapes they wore began to bulge and distend as things unimaginable writhed furiously just underneath.

The sound, the light, knifed straight through Trip’s head as he struggled to rise. He faltered, muscles seizing, hands trembling, trying to raise the Rifle for one more shot. He could feel strange, horrible tentacles of thought winding their way into his mind, seizing around the amygdala, the lizard-brain center of pure animal fear.

Cower, ape, came the Operators’ words inside his skull. Fear makes you more delicious.

The Operators’ song of madness intensified, blotting out Trip’s vision, consuming his hearing, swarming over his thoughts. He was alone, helpless, cowering in the dark. He was prey.
Trip, halfway to standing, sank back to his knees. The Rifle clattered from his helpless hands. He pitched forward to the cold, loveless stone, eyes screwed tight, hands over his ears, in agony.

The steaming bright tentacles slithering forth from Vore’s mouth traced acid trails down the zigzag of the stone steps, across the empty floor, toward Trip. One began to curl keening around his outstretched arm…

Stone struck on stone, sparks flashing, and Vore howled and jerked the tentacle back. Most of it obeyed. The rest withered and died where it lay, a black stone knife marking the point of its severance.

Blood vessels bursting in the delicate whites of his eyes, his whole body shaking with the effort, Rafe Windham had stretched an arm out from the floor where he lay and cut Trip free. He turned now, hair falling in his face, and fixed burning, savage eyes on the tentacled horrors at the top of the stairs.

Bracing both hands against the stone-tiled ground, Rafe began to rise.

The Operators turned the full force of their mind-melting scream on him, the sound enough to make every veneer of civilization peel off from a human consciousness and blow away like tin siding in a hurricane. It might turn any man to a mindless animal.

Unless that man could accept, even embrace, his own savage nature.

Rafe shuddered, reeled, as the Operators’ assault hit him full force. Then he pushed back against it with the whole of his body and will. From low in his throat, a growl of combat rose, and he planted one foot upon the earth. Then the other. He held both knives tightly at his sides. And he stood straight.

In his mind there was no terrible color to burn the eyes, no shrieking that seemed to come from within one’s bones. There was only the cool velvet night of the jungle, and the stinking, primal breath of something large and hungry behind the dark, spurring him forward, refusing to let him fall.

Rafe put one foot on the stone staircase.

The Operators’ tendrils lunged for him, to snap and break and squeeze him down their gaping gullets. His blades flashed, moving as if of their own volition, and jellied hunks of dead alien meat flopped wriggling against the stone and began to corrode. Vore and Grin squealed anew in pain and strange, sudden fear.

In the dark underbrush of Rafe’s mind, the face of the painted warrior, the one who’d given him his knives, slid forth from the night into moonlight. “Civilized and savage,” he mouthed from the dark, silent lips forming the words. “A foot in both worlds.”

Rafe climbed the stairs, one excruciating step at a time.

The Operators’ mutilated tentacles reached down into the platform upon which they stood, wrenching forth slabs of stone and hurling them whistling down at Rafe’s head. He dodged, ducked, never wavered, and his bloodshot eyes never left the Operators.

Vore and Grin puppet-walked backward now, half-emptied bodies wobbling on jellied legs, tendrils uluating and undulating in distress, as Rafe reached the top of the stairs and faced them across the altar.

“Something about how they’ve been blessed,” the painted warrior said, and distantly Rafe felt the blades cool and certain in his hands.

Cornered, filled with unfamiliar surges of the terror they’d so often created in others, Vore and Grin charged forward, shrieking. Their rubbery deflated arms and stubby, half-healing tentacles plunged toward Rafe.

The vast beast over his shoulder hissed in breath and roared, a sound to shake the trees down to their roots. And Rafe roared too, plunging each of his knives deeply up and into the Operators’ chests. They doubled over, sagged against him, and for all their weight he did not tremble. He just stood there, breathing in short, sharp bursts, as their song died away and the purple arms by which they fed shriveled back into their sagging mouths.

Vore’s face contorted in pain and confusion, lips working, trying to sound out the explanation of his own end. At last, he simply said: “Ow.”

Grin looked at him thoughtfully, and nodded. “I wholeheartedly concur,” he said.

And they died, like salted slugs, retreating into vile, fast-decaying bags of skin and hair, and gouts of purplish fire. Maximillian’s Needle slipped from the sagging remains of Grin’s hand and pinged and rattled down the stone staircase.

Rafe shook both arms, sloughing off the Operators’ remains. They curled and bubbled into nothingness on the altar, leaving stained patches against the stone. In the jungle of his mind, the moon went out, and then the stars, one by one. The sounds moving in the trees padded away, until it was only him, and the hot breath of the beast behind him.

Rest, it rumbled, and extinguished like a match.

Rafe sagged for a moment against the altar, knees deserting him, and slowly slid down the face of it, and was mostly still.


Consciousness crawled back over Trip Morrow like a fleet of ants. He opened his eyes to a vast kingdom of gray, slanting away to some far, blurry distance. Then he felt rough rock against his cheek, and straightened his glasses, and found himself once more in the vast and echoing well of the Misery Engine.

Something cool and metallic brushed against his fingers, and he grasped it, and sat up slowly. It was not, as he expected, the Multipurpose Rifle — it lay a foot or two distant from where his outstretched arm had fallen — but a long, slender taper of pointed gray metal, stained somewhat at the tip. Maximillian’s Needle.

Trip slid it thoughtfully into his belt, shook the last, horrible echoes of the Operators’ screams from the inside of his skull, and got his bearings. The spires of crystal ringing the high carved rock walls around him still cast shafts of light into the subterranean gloom above, and the steps, now pockmarked with gaps of missing block, still led up to the strange stone altar that presided over the rising rings at the center of the pit. He saw no Vore, no Grin — just the edge of a human-like shape lying at the base of the altar, just beyond the rise of the stairs.

Standing up so quickly made him dizzy, especially with the weight of the pack on his back. Racing stumbling up the treacherous stairs didn’t help. Halfway up, something crunched and bent beneath the sole of his shoe; Vore’s gold-rimmed spectacles.

When Trip made it to the top of the altar, it took all his concentration not to stumble full out next to Rafe’s prone form. Instead, he kneeled down and checked for a pulse in Rafe’s neck.

He felt nothing.

Then his panic receded, and he remembered where the carotid artery actually was, and checked there. A jungle drum of circulation thumped in steady cadence, sounding an all-clear, and for the first time, Trip noticed the slow, steady rise and fall of Rafe’s respiration. When he rolled his companion over, he saw the flicker of swift, furtive motion beneath Rafe’s eyelids. Dreaming.

Trip sat down at the top of the steps and caught his breath, unshouldering the straps of his backpack. He shucked off his jacket and draped it over Rafe, shivering slightly as the damp chill of the cavern seeped in through his shirtsleeves. Then he looked down at the shattered, blocked mouth of the staircase that had brought him and Rafe into the Misery Engine, and the smooth, high walls of stone around the remainder of its periphery, and began to assess their options.

Trip dug into his pack, coming up with the nearly empty cigar box and his grandfather’s journal. The latter was all but covered now with strange, colorful stamps from exotic lands, and paging through it quickly, Trip saw nothing but sober, thoughtful recountings of battles with sky pirates and sea monsters and the animate statues of ancient tombs. He felt a pang of sadness to see the words of the man he’d known, the accounts of fishing trips and small, patient breakthroughs in the lab, completely overwritten by a tide of unfamiliar history. For the first time, he truly felt his grandfather’s absence, like the ache of a phantom limb.
As he thumbed through the yellowed pages of the journal, one entry toward the end caught his eye. It was a diagram, sketched in his grandfather’s sure, steady hand, of the altar against which he sat.

Malvolio Sinn discovered the Winter City in September 1930, while tunneling beneath Chicago in an attempt to breach the vaults of Barclays Bank. His criminal mind, hard and sharp as diamond, quickly appreciated the possibilities provided by the focused energies of the Misery Engine. Centuries of murder, heartbreak, catastrophic fire and corruption above had all seeped down to restore power to its matrix of now-mindless, still-hungry crystals. Sinn found a way to transfer that energy back into waves of pure human misery, and broadcast them to the surface.

It started when a pair of housewives, out for their afternoon shopping at the butcher’s, nearly beat one another to death over the last cut of pork loin. By nightfall, the police and fire departments were approaching their breaking point, and entire neighborhoods hefted bats and clubs and chains to make war with their bitter enemies living three streets away.

All this hatred, anger, and pure despair fed back into the humming crystals far beneath the earth, creating an endless loop of escalating disaster. And in the ceaseless night of the Winter City, Malvolio Sinn exulted to the distant roars of albino beasts, and dreamed of marching up to take dominion over a city that had levelled itself for conquest.

Tom Morrow and his team, fighting off their own private demons, plotted the epicenter of the escalating violence and, based on seismic readings Lasso had charted, launched an expedition into the hidden underworld. In single combat at the heart of the Misery Engine, a weary, half-murder-mad Tom had defeated Sinn and shut down the Engine, restoring Chicago to its usual semblance of peace.

Afterward, Tom and his friends had spent a week down in the darkness, racing to catalog all the wonders of the Winter City, before the mayor’s deadline to seal Sinn’s original tunnel with concrete and close off the wondrous, perilous subterreanean realm forever.

Now, standing at the edge of the altar, Trip saw its workings carefully outlined in the diagram in the journal before him. He examined the grid of symbol-labeled stone squares on the altar’s face, and the crystal levers beside them. Carefully, one eye on the instructions in his grandfather’s journal, Trip withdrew the heavy stone key whose turning activated the Engine; in a hollow channel within it, something rattled. He slid a series of smooth, cylindrical black rocks into his palm, and felt each exert its own invisible magnetic pull on the metal band of his wristwatch.

Trip read on, in the chill silence and the steady soft light of the crystals, paging past Tom Morrow’s entries on the Winter City, reading of adventures wilder still. He came to the very last entry in the volume, one of those specifically addressed to him, and carefully studied the pasted-in scraps of crumpled schematics from the lab of Arlos Satel.

His grandfather had written him a postscript, in large, hasty letters; three words at the bottom of the last page, underlined emphatically. Trip read them with puzzlement, and considerable interest.

Then he paged back to the altar diagram, making sure he’d really seen what he thought he had. He pushed his glasses further up his nose, and grinned.

Replacing the stone key in the console, he gripped the first and third of the three crystal levers, and slid them slowly upward.

Absolutely nothing happened. For all of five seconds, anyway.

Then the platform hummed beneath his feet, and the brightness of the crystals in the surrounding walls intensified. With a low, steady rumble, the entire complex began to rise into the air, rotating upward on a carved column of spiraling stone descending far into the earth below. Trip looked upward, and saw the rock ceiling of the Winter City approaching with troubling speed. The crystals flared, blinding bright, filling Trip’s vision with dancing blotches of ultraviolet color. Beams of energy lanced upward, converging into a single point; a drill of pure, focused light.

The rock above began to hiss and evaporate as the light splashed against it. A tunnel, woven by the spinning beams, dissolved itself into the bedrock. The platform spun steadily upward and upward.

Trip knelt beside the altar, trying to shield himself and the still-unconscious Rafe, as chunks of rock and earth rained down from the ceiling, and the rumbling of the platform intensified to nearly deafening levels. The beams of energy made quick work of the stony ceiling; utility pipes began to appear through the earth above, and sizzled away, severed, in a flash of light. Some small, wonder-impervious part of Trip’s mind hoped he wouldn’t eventually be billed for that.

Veins of sunlight began to break through the soil above, and the beams flickered and weakened at last. The light of day blazed in from above, full and dazzling, as the platform slowed and shuddered to a stop, the central pit and the engine itself continuing to rise until they cleared their surrounding walls.

Trip sat at the apex of the altar, shirtsleeves ruffled by a fresh, sweet breeze of open air, listening to the distant sounds of traffic. He looked up, and saw a familiar green-and-white scoreboard, flanked on either side by rows of bleachers, with rooftops just beyond. In a moment, he knew his precise address: 1060 West Addison.

The Misery Engine sat directly beneath Wrigley Field, a perfect fit within the borders its spreading grass-and-dirt diamond. A great many new hypotheses regarding win-loss records and the fortunes of sporting teams arose unbidden in Trip’s mind.

Beside him, Rafe stirred, mumbled something about a pair of argyles, and sank back into sleep.

Trip picked his way carefully down the steps, leaving his pack and journal next to Rafe on the altar platform, and gingerly hefted the Multipurpose Rifle from where it had fallen on the stone below. He stared up into the rows upon rows of bleachers, and wondered where the groundskeepers and security guards were, and how he would ever begin to explain this.

Applause reached his ears, a steady clap from a single pair of hands. He circled the rising stone perimeter of the engine to the home team dugout. A tall, reedy man in a white suit and a broad Panama hat strode out from its shadows onto the slim border of grass remaining on the field, clapping one last time before letting his hands fall casually to his sides. In her black coat and broad-brimmed hat, Valencia Stitch swept out just behind him, quiet, deferent. Trip couldn’t quite read the expression on her face.

The man in the Panama hat lifted his head, revealing a lean and handsome face of uncertain age. He wore thick, old-fashioned glasses, one lens entirely opaque, and a broad, unforced, oddly comforting smile. A silver needle gleamed from the lapel of his suit.

He reached into the pocket of his suit jacket, pulled forth a round whitish object, and hucked it easily underhand to Trip, who nearly fumbled it. It was a baseball, scuffed and yellowing, its stitches beginning to fray.

“I always liked the game,” the man in the Panama hat said, in a calm, easy Midwestern voice. He stuck out a slim, calloused hand for Trip to shake as he crossed from the grass to the stone platform of the Misery Engine.

“Pleased to meet you, son,” the man in the Panama hat said. “I’m Jefferson Edison Franklin. Most folks call me Jef.”

The Seven Signs of Salvation

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

His present problems had simply gotten bigger. And toothier.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Rafe?” Trip asked gingerly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stone shifted against stone, and Trip froze.

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

“Oh no,” Trip breathed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And?” Rafe asked, with expectant dread.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Next?” Rafe cried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trip watched the red glow rise in their eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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