In the windswept outskirts of a small town in southern Russia, three young boys crept through the dilapidated warehouse of an abandoned metallurgical plant. Loose girders creaked and swayed overhead. A floor panel rattled as one boy stepped across it, making them all jump. Something skittered in a dark corner.

“Was that the wind? That was the wind, right?”

“I’m telling you, this place is haunted! Why are we even here?”

“Don’t be daft, Andrei. There’s no such thing as—what was that?”

From the shadowy recesses of the adjacent wire mill came a whir and a thud, as if some long-disused machinery had suddenly been reactivated.

“That was not the wind.”

Nervous eyes flitted from side to side as they stalked toward the doorway. The one called Andrei raised a hockey stick, and looked prepared to use it. They peered around the corner and…

Something skittered loudly across the wall behind them. All three boys spun about. Andrei swung his makeshift weapon wildly. It clanged into a steel rack, leapt out of his hand, and clattered onto the floor.

“Rastyapa,” muttered his friend. Butterfingers.

The third boy stumbled backward into the wire mill—and almost tripped over. His foot had caught against something, but when he looked down, there was only a faint ripple in the air where the object should be. He reached down—and drew back his hand with a sharp hiss. His eyes drifted up the wavering thing that reached almost to the high ceiling.

“What is that?”

“Kikimora?” said Andrei, his voice filled with uncertainty.

“Don’t be daft. That looks nothing like a—whuargh!”

A metal face had emerged from the side of a rusty water tank, opening its mouth in a silent scream.

The boys’ shrieks were far from silent. They stumbled and skidded back out into the warehouse.

White spiders poured down the wall behind them.

Their screams didn’t let up until they were back outside. Leaping on their bikes, they rode off as fast as their wheels could carry them.

“That was really mean, Ruhildi,” said Saskia, watching the departing boys through a broken window. “Those poor kids won’t sleep for a month.”

Ruhildi smirked down from her perch atop a high girder. “I didn’t see you hurrying to stop me.”

Saskia frowned. “It was like watching a trainwreck. I couldn’t look away.”

“Lads need a good scaring from time to time,” said Ruhildi. “Mayhap they’ll think thrice afore coming back.”

“Yeah, but what about their parents? Or anyone else they talk to? We’d better skedaddle.”

“I haven’t finished getting what we came here for,” said Ruhildi.

“Hurry it up, then,” said Saskia. “We leave in half an hour.”

They’d come to this disused factory to salvage metals and other materials to use or to sell on the black market. Most readily-accessible scrap metal had already been looted, but Ruhildi’s stoneshaper magic allowed her to identify and extract materials that wouldn’t be worth the average looter’s time.

They piled the metal into the hexapod’s storage bay, then steered it out the large garage doors. The huge machine could squeeze through surprisingly small spaces if it squatted down and contorted its legs the right way.

From there, they made their way back to Olav’s house on the other side of Novoretsk, the little town they’d called home for the past few weeks. Despite its immense weight, the giant robot left no footprints in the dirt. This was, once again, thanks to Ruhildi’s magic. Without her covering their tracks, the hexapod’s stealth field alone wouldn’t have been enough to conceal them for long.

Her mum greeted them as they stepped in the door. “That was quick. How’d it go?”

“Uh…it was a good haul, but we might have a problem.” Saskia told her about their encounter with the boys.

Alice laughed. “I don’t think they’ll be telling their parents.”

“What makes you think that?”

“No sane parent would let their kid go to a place like that. Think about it. When you were their age, would you have told me you went sightseeing in an abandoned factory?”

Saskia coughed. “No comment.”

“Precisely. That’s not to say their parents won’t still find out, though. We notice more than you think we do.”

“Oh I know.” Her mum had demonstrated that fact to her time and time again throughout her teen years. She’d thought she was so clever sometimes, only to learn that her mum was always one step ahead of her. Meanwhile, her friends had always seemed to get away with the stupidest things. It had seemed so unfair at the time.

“Anyhow, we should be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice if things heat up around here.” Saskia sniffed. “Speaking of heating up, do you smell burning?”

“Olav’s performing surgery on the thingamabob,” said her mum.

“Ah yes, the all-important thingamabob,” said Saskia. “Without it, we wouldn’t be able to connect the doohickey to the whatchamacallit.”

A loud string of Russian curses emerged from the shed at the back of the house.

“Overcurrent protection is more than adequate,” Olav was muttering as she stepped inside. “Cyka blyat! Why it go boom?” Noticing Saskia, he flinched, and his expression turned a little sheepish. “Oh. Sorry, dama. Did not see you there.”

Olav Grankin was a trusted associate of Sergei Krasnov, the benefactor who had funded Threadless Studios. This house they were staying in was his. An electronic engineer by trade, Olav had been helping the guys build an interface between their laptops and the hexapod’s systems. This was a far more difficult task than cheesy ’90s sci-fi movies made it out to be. The hexapod’s robobrain was, as far as they’d been able to determine, analogue, not digital. In spite of the difficulties, Olav had already whipped together a prototype thingamabob, while Raji and Dave worked on a software whatchamacallit. Quite what her friends intended to do once they had unrestricted access to the hexapod’s brain, she wasn’t entirely sure, but they’d probably find a way to run Doom on it.

“Another capacitor bites the dust,” said Fergus, who was sitting around a laptop with Raji and Dave. He raised his eyebrows at Saskia. “Back so soon?”

“Yup,” said Saskia, not wanting to explain the situation for the third time. “I’m sensing a distinct lack of Ivan around these parts. Know where he’s gone?”

Grinning, Fergus shook his head. “He ate a wee bit too much Stroganoff for lunch. Best not to go oracle-peeping on him right now…”

“He’s got the runs,” added Raji helpfully.

“Yeah, I already deduced that on my own, thank you,” said Saskia. “But there’s no-one in the bathroom. You should be able to see that for yourself, on your map. No blue dot, see?”

Fergus’s expression took on that slightly vacant look that he got when he looked at their shared oracle interface. “That’s odd. Doesn’t look like he’s anywhere around the house. Did he just…” He smirked. “…do a runner?”

Dave groaned. Saskia stifled a snort.

The bathroom door was still locked—from the inside. As they forced the door open, a shiver of dread ran down Saskia’s spine.

On the floor in front of the toilet was a pile of torn clothing. Saskia recognised it as Ivan’s, but there was no sign of Ivan himself.

“Jesus,” said Dave, lifting a shredded shirt. “What could do that?”

“No blood…” said Fergus.

“I once found remains of man eaten by bear,” said Olav. “Blood everywhere.” He spread his arms to illustrate the point.

Saskia shuddered. “Thank you for that morbid piece of information, Olav. Obviously he hasn’t been eaten by a bear. How the frock would a bear get in through a closed window and closed door? It’s obviously not gonna bother to close them on the way out. But the question remains—”

At that moment, there came a frantic hammering on the front door. Olav peered out the keyhole, then pulled it open—and hastily stepped out of the way, as Ivan Storozhenko charged inside, naked and streaked in dirt. At least, she hoped it was dirt. He was sweating, despite the cold.

“Dude, what the fuck?” said Dave, still holding Ivan’s torn clothes.

Alice Wendle stalked into the room with her glare on. “We’ll have none of that language, young—” She looked at Ivan. “Oh my.”

Ivan turned to Saskia. “We need to talk.”

“Okay,” said Saskia. “But could you please put some clothes on first?”

A few minutes later, he confirmed her suspicions. “One moment I was sitting on the loo, feeling like…well, like shit. And then…” Sweat beaded on his forehead. “…I found myself in the dirt, a couple hundred metres down the road.”

“And let me guess,” she said. “There were tentacles.”

“What? No!” Ivan groaned. “Well maybe a few. I don’t know. It was so…” He trailed off.

“Congratulations,” said Saskia. “You just manifested your eldritch side. You’re just like me, Tentacle Boy.”

An annoyed expression crept onto his face for a moment, but then he broke into a wry chuckle. “I suppose I deserved that, Tentacle Girl.”

“I’d be lying if I said I was hugely surprised,” said Saskia. “The keystone called you a ‘latent.’ Well now you’ve been upgraded to ‘mouthlet.’ What I want to know is: where’d you get your eldritch genes? Is Viktor Storozhenko also one of us?”

“I doubt that,” said Ivan.

“Why? He could be a ‘latent,’ like my—”

“I was adopted.”

Saskia’s eyes went wide. “Oh.”

“Yeah, I probably should have said something earlier,” said Ivan. “It just didn’t seem important, until now.”

“Any idea who your biological parents are?”

He shook his head.

“Viktor has close ties to my father,” said Saskia. “Could Calbert be your father too?”

Ivan blanched. “Oh god. You mean we could be…?”

“Siblings, yeah. Or half-siblings. I mean it’s possible.”

He looked as horrified as she felt. When they’d first met, she’d fantasised about doing all sorts of unmentionable things to him. Now she felt like throwing up.

But maybe she was getting ahead of herself. She didn’t know how many of her kind there were out there. The only ones she knew by name were Yona, Calbert and The Ram, but there could be many others—not to mention numerous latent descendants, such as her mum.

The silence stretched for a truly uncomfortable length of time, before finally he spoke. “So, what, am I gonna start having seizures like you did?”

“Unlikely,” said Saskia. “The same anti-dampener that gives you access to your magus abilities should protect you from that kind of reaction.”

“Alright, that’s not so bad. Although of all the times I could have teleported, why’d it have to be then?”

Saskia snorted. “It could be worse. You could’ve teleported high in the air, or in front of a huge audience. With their cameras out. And had your butt plastered all over the Internet.”

Ivan shuddered. “I’m sorry you had to go through that. And I will never again call you Tentacle Girl.”

“Okay, Tentacle Boy,” said Saskia. “Don’t worry. Soon, you’ll be able to choose when and where you teleport.”

Teleportation was just the beginning, Saskia knew. At some point, Ivan—or his doppelgänger, at least—would spawn on another world. Would it be Arbor Mundi, or somewhere else? She’d save that conversation for later, though. Now, it would only confuse or alarm him.

Ivan let out a long breath. “Can you hold off on telling the others about me? I need some time to process this.”

“Take as long as you need,” said Saskia. “Although be aware that anything I know, Ruhildi will know soon enough, if she doesn’t already. She can read my mind.”

Ivan raised his eyebrows. “Really? Can she read mine too?”

“Nope. It’s complicated. But no. So what do you want me to tell the others?”

A few minutes later, she stepped out into the hallway, leaving Ivan alone in the guest room.

“So?” said Fergus. “Are you going to tell us what he was doing butt-arse naked out there?”

“He told me he was pretty out of it,” said Saskia. “Delirious. Whatever he has, I think it was more than just the Stroganoff.”

Alice’s face crinkled in concern. “Oh the poor dear. It’s probably gastro. I’ll make him some ginger tea.”

“That doesn’t explain the torn clothes or the locked bathroom door,” said Dave.

“It kinda does,” said Saskia. “In his delirium, he must have ripped his clothes, and climbed out the window.”

Dave looked less than convinced, but that was okay. He was sceptical about everything.

“How’s the hexapod interface coming along?” asked Saskia, eager to change the subject.

“Aside from the exploding capacitors?” said Fergus.

Olav muttered under his breath, and stalked back to his shed.

“Yeah, aside from that,” said Saskia.

“We’ve written an API to access the waveform coming from the ADC,” said Raji. “Analysing and interpreting the data is the hard part. That could take decades if we do it by hand, so we’re probably gonna have to throw machine learning at the problem. I’m thinking maybe a PCA method to reduce the dimensionality of the—”

“Okay okay,” said Saskia, raising her hands in surrender. “Sorry I asked.”

“Translation: it going good, but too early to tell,” said Fergus. “Although I do wonder…is all of this even necessary?”

“What do you mean?” asked Saskia.

“Well, your oracle interface can already access the hexapod’s brain with minimal effort. Now that we’re your vassals, we can do it too.”

“Yeah? So? We’re not computers, so we can’t—”

“Are you sure about that?” said Fergus.

“Sure about what?”

“Are you sure we’re not computers? I mean, it seems as if your oracle magic acts exactly like a well-constructed piece of software. It analyses a massive amount of data, quantifies it, and presents a summary that our primitive meat brains can understand.”

“It’s not that well-constructed,” said Dave. “The UI is missing some of the most basic quality-of-life features.”

“You realise the magic only manifests this way because I’m a game developer, right?” said Saskia. “Most of the other oracles of Arbor Mundi just have visions or dreams, and that’s it. The oracle interface is just my brain making order out of chaos.”

“That’s also part of the point I’m trying to make,” said Fergus. “You designed the art and user interface of Threads of Nautilum, so that’s how the oracle interface appears to you—and to us. But if you were a programmer…”

“It might be a terminal window,” said Dave. “Or a code editor.”

Saskia frowned. “How would that be an improvement?”

“Because if we had access to the source code of your oracle interface, we could make it do anything,” said Fergus.

“Anything?” said Saskia. “Like what? Conjure a sandwich out of thin air?”

“Anything that a computer can do,” said Fergus. “So only virtual sandwiches. But we could, say, create a web browser.”

“A web browser,” said Saskia. “In our heads.”

“Yeah. I mean, your magic is basically knowledge magic, right?” said Fergus. “What is the Internet if not the greatest source of knowledge on the planet? We could plug our brains directly into that source.”

“An oracle browser would be read-only, I assume,” said Raji. “It wouldn’t be connecting to physical servers, just tapping into the data already out there in the wild. No handshaking. No digital footprint whatsoever. We wouldn’t be able to upload anything, but it would make us completely untraceable.”

“That does sound useful,” said Saskia. “Viktor Storozhenko’s guys have done a good job protecting our browsing from prying eyes, but there’s always a risk someone will track us down.”

Could it work? She couldn’t think of a reason why it wouldn’t. It simply hadn’t occurred to her to try.

Closing her eyes, with her head in her hands, she concentrated on what an oracle web browser would look like; the data it would tap into. Within a few minutes, a fuzzy window was beginning to form behind her closed eyelids.

“What are you doing?” asked Fergus.

“Summoning a web browser in my head,” said Saskia.

There was a long, awkward silence. Then Fergus began to laugh. “So you don’t need to be a programmer to do that?”

“Of course not,” she said. “I didn’t need to be a programmer to conjure up any other interface layers. So why would this one be any different?”

“Such a cheat,” muttered Fergus. “If you only knew how hard it is to make even the simplest of programs…”

“Oh I know,” she said. “I worked beside you every day, remember? The cursing told me everything I needed to know about programming. Namely, that I never wanted to do it myself.”

Within an hour, her oracle browser was looking solid enough to use. Experimentally, she brought up a wiki article on aardvarks. Then she brought up the same webpage on Fergus’s laptop. They were indeed identical. Satisfied, she sent each of her vassals a copy of the browser to play with—even Ruhildi, though she didn’t know what her ex-dwarven friend would make of it.

But she wasn’t done there. She had no use for the source code of her interface, nor terminals nor text editors. But the guys were a different story. They were programmers. With the right tools, they might be able to create things she had never dreamt of. So why not give them what they wanted, if it was possible?

A few hours later, after doing a bit of Internet research on programming tools, she created something that at least looked like it would do the trick. She followed some basic instructions, ‘compiled’ a few lines of code, and ‘executed’ them. A message scroll unfurled before her eyes, with the words:

Hello, World!

Huh, that wasn’t so hard. She was under no illusions that what she’d done was actual programming. She’d just mindlessly copied a couple of lines of code. But the important thing was: it worked! Her friends could use this.

“Try not to break anything,” she said as she handed over the tools to Raji, Fergus and Dave.

“We’ll try,” said Fergus. “And fail. Can’t make a virtual omelette without throttling a few virtual chickens.”

“Why do I get the feeling I’m gonna regret this?” said Saskia. “Do I even want to know what you plan to do with it?”

“Make it run Doom,” said Fergus. “And maybe work on some software upgrades for the hexapod.”

Early the following morning, she woke to the sound of someone hammering on the front door. One glance at her minimap, and she was fully alert. Those were not friendly colours. They weren’t kill-on-sight colours either, but the people on the other side of that door were not the kinds of people she wanted to find her.

Olav was already heading for the door.

“Stall them!” she hissed, as she herded her mum and her friends out the back, to where she’d parked the hexapod. They piled inside, and waited in tense silence while Olav spoke to a pair of police officers.

The officers gave the house a cursory search, then left, without even bothering to check the shed or the back yard where the hexpod was parked.

When she figured out what was going on, Saskia let out a strangled laugh.

“What’s so funny?” asked Raji.

“It’s not that funny. Just a ridiculous coincidence,” said Saskia. She looked at Ruhildi, who gave her a wry grin.

Back inside the house, Olav told them the police officers had been searching for a naked man last seen in the vicinity of his house. Not wanting to get Ivan in trouble, Olav had denied any knowledge of it. There was more to the story, as Saskia had discovered when she listened in on the officers’ conversations, and those of their colleagues back at headquarters.

What the officers had actually been investigating was a report that several local kids had spotted, in their own words, ‘some seriously freaky shit,’ that had appeared out of nowhere, then transformed into the shape of a man. The coincidence she’d mentioned was the fact that these were the same kids who had gotten a huge scare at the abandoned metallurgical plant that same day. It was the second incident that had finally prompted them to fess up to their parents about their unsanctioned factory field trip.

The police hadn’t been inclined to believe either story. Ever since the video of Saskia had gone viral, there had been a flood of tentacle monster sightings all over the world—most of them hoaxes, or the result of mental illness. Still, the police were obliged to investigate all such claims. And so they had.

“I doubt anything will come of this,” said Saskia. “But I still think it’s time to say goodbye to Novoretsk. If we get caught with our pants down again—especially if there are more reliable witnesses next time—the local cops will take it more seriously.”

“I agree,” said Raji. “We have the prototype signal converter hardware, although we may not even need it any more. Sorry, Olav.”

Olav threw his hands up in the air. “Next time, I tell Sergei, idi nahui.”

“So…keep heading for Norway then?” said Fergus.

“Might as well,” said Saskia.

They departed that afternoon. In the weeks that followed, they never stayed in one place for more than a couple of days. Sergei and Viktor had contacts all across Russia who would offer food, a warm bed and a roof over their heads, but Saskia preferred to keep their contact with civilised areas to a minimum. Most nights, they simply slept in the hexapod. The webbing that supported them in the cockpit actually made a pretty comfortable bed.

Thanks to her new oracle web browser, they could now browse the Internet safely—albeit without the ability to post cat pics online. Not that they had been doing much of that in any case, for obvious reasons. They didn’t have a cat.

Her oracle browser came with its own search engine—one that seemed uncannily adept at digging up interesting images and forum posts from the darkest recesses of the Internet, whether or not they actively searched for them. Some of these originated from a group that called itself the Unveilers. Viktor had briefly floated the notion that the Unveilers might be responsible for exposing her to the world. But that seemed very unlikely. By his own reckoning, they weren’t a violent group. They posted about Saskia a lot, and from what she read, they sounded more like her personal fanclub than a terrorist organisation.

Some of their posts hinted at something big and mysterious happening in Norway, but these posts were frustratingly light on facts. Maybe they were just conspiracy nuts. But it was also possible these guys really were onto something, and Calbert or The Ram were doing an imperfect job of erasing evidence of their presence.

The hexapod made steady progress across the Russian wilderness, until at last they approached the border into Finland. It was there that they received an unexpected phonecall.

“It’s one of Sergei’s numbers,” said Ivan as he picked up the satellite phone.

But it wasn’t Sergei Krasnov. It was Olav Grankin. Saskia could hear the man’s frantic, almost incoherent voice as clearly as if she were holding the handset.

“They are here! How did they—blyat!”

Leaping through the phone into Olav’s head, she watched helplessly as a squad of camo-clad soldiers kicked in Olav’s door and advanced on him, laser sights dancing across the walls. There were only four of them, but Olav was no soldier. He didn’t stand a chance.

Without even quite realising what she was doing, Saskia felt her body shifting around her, ready to teleport to his aid.

The barrels of three carbines levelled with Olav’s head. Her view from his eyes abruptly vanished. She hadn’t even heard the shots, but it was obvious what had just happened.

Frantically, she tried to abort her shift into the between, but it was too late.

Saskia emerged in a whirl of chaos and flailing tendrils, reaching for the soldiers who…

Wait, there were no soldiers here. This wasn’t Olav’s house.

She was standing before a television screen, on which a man was giving the weather forecast for parts of North America. The volume was turned up about ten decibels too loud. Ruhildi stood beside her, looking as confused as she felt.

Feeling eyes on her, she spun about. An elderly woman reclined on a sofa, watching her with a steely expression.

She pointed a shotgun at Saskia’s face.