It was one of those unspoken universal customs, almost a taboo, that one didn’t look in the internet archive to see what a place had once been. Naturally, as with such social conventions since the dawn of human history, everyone did, but everyone was also very careful not to discus their findings in polite company. It spoke perhaps to a collective guilt, this urge to look away, to deny what had been lost, somehow externalized, as if the land was an aging actor who might not want to be reminded of their current decrepitude.

Many locations had been renamed, another way to put a blanket over the past in the hopes that it might sleep. The old names carried heavy burdens, after all.

That’s nobody’s business but the Turks, thought Magpie as Kuroudonain docked with the equally vast dome of what the Josho Clan called either East Island, or New Rishiri, depending on who was talking. What nobody called it was Santa Cruz, nor were there references to the even heavier name, Galapagos.

Not that there were Galapagos islands anymore, not as the ancients knew them anyway. It was all one island now, the original islands turned to volcanic hills and mountains, mottled green blotches standing over a carp-shaped blob of black and brown. Magpie could see the remains of broken domes far below, early efforts to preserve whatever it was the ancients had found special about this place, now as broken and abandoned as their hopes.

Those old domes did explain the Josho Clan’s presence though. Lord Josho had been the lead engineer on that failed effort to preserve the unique ecosystem of the area, and had even ridden out the worst years after Guardian’s rise on the islands his group was tasked with preserving. Magpie couldn’t imagine what he must feel, looking out over his failed works, made first obsolete and then ridiculous by the passing years, ruins lifted high by the receding waters.

For her, this arrival marked its own kind of transition. Kuroudonain would not be going farther to the east. Her time among the clouds was at an end, soon to be nothing more than memory.

She put aside her melancholic thoughts as Renzuru approached her at the viewing port. Over the long journey, Magpie and the Josho Clan’s head of security had sparred on multiple occasions, both with weapons and with words. These sessions had been instructive, the way falling down a mine shaft was instructive about gravity. Renzuru didn’t mince words then and she didn’t now.

“Don’t give me a reason to have you hunted down.”

Magpie looked out at the volcanic cones in the distance. “Do you really need a reason?”

“We have better things to do. That’s the main thing.” Renzuru stood next to her and took in the view. Magpie could never figure out if the threats from her were genuine or part of some kind of game that the woman played for her own amusement, or if there was even a difference.

A minute or two passed, a silence that had a language all its own, one that Magpie had learned from her various mentors over the years. Such silences shaped the meaning of what was said better than adding more words ever could.

“Give my regards to Uncle,” Renzuru said at last.

“I’d wondered,” Magpie replied. “How much you really knew about the Flock. But I told you the truth when I said I was done with all that.”

Renzuru allowed a dry chuckle to escape. “You don’t know where the boundaries of the Flock lie, so how could you tell if you were in or out of it? A flock doesn’t depend on the understanding of its members; it emerges when they follow their instincts, their program. You, girl, have been thoroughly programmed.”

“It’s just a name.” Even as she said it, Magpie felt her response inadequate, defensive.

“And names are just inadequate containers for a reality that overflows and spills between them like water through a net. If you consider it, all words are names. The only difference is how the meaning has been attached, when it was accumulated and how much has been forgotten.”

Renzuru sounded as if she was explaining to a toddler why shitting themselves was a bad idea. This was not unusual for their interactions, where Renzuru would bludgeon Magpie with ideas, in between actually bludgeoning her. Honestly, she preferred the physical combat, where she could follow the ebb and flow of the movements and at least understand why she was beaten. The rest of the time, she felt like Renzuru might just be making things up to mess with her, or as if there was a joke that kept passing over her head.

“You don’t happen to know Raven, do you?” she asked. “I think you two would really get along.”

“All those bird names run together,” Renzuru replied. “It’s a silly affectation.”

Hours later, Magpie looked out the window of a small airship bound for the Corp’s continental headquarters, together with Josho clan members on their way to fulfill whatever duties the clan had thrust upon them. There was nothing to see through the dark panel, other than reflections of small lights from within the cabin, but she pretended there might be nonetheless. Too many thoughts were running through her head to allow drowsiness.

She was now less than a thousand kilometers away, less than a day's travel at her current speed. Lilijoy had no idea she was coming, not even an inkling it was a possibility, and soon Magpie would need to contact her, to have what was sure to be the most awkward conversation imaginable. She had played it through in her head a thousand times, and it never turned out well.

In the end, it didn’t matter though. However ill-conceived this trip across the Pacific had been, it had been her idea, her plan and no one else’s. What came next could never take that away.

***

With four strides on the Inside for every one on the Outside, Lilijoy ran, her hopeful destination the same in both worlds. Anda.

The orcs were gone now, Jess and Skria too, off on a short instanced travel to rejoin the main force of their army. She had stayed behind, for Anda had never made an appearance, nor had he responded to her recent messages.

Without the presence of the Maasai revenants, the Rotted Lands were, not exactly normal, but certainly navigable. Smaller too, somehow, a thin slice of land from which she could sometimes see the tops of isolated, towering trees in the distance, their dim profiles something like giant baobabs against the night sky. She could only assume that their roots were in the lands of the Great Grass Sea.

She didn’t have much attention to spare for her search on the Inside, but hopefully not much would be needed to find Anda in the barren landscape, already scoured halfway to flat by the new winds. Anda’s inability or unwillingness to return to his senses on the Outside and move from burden to ally was the single biggest problem she needed to solve. A small amount of distraction was worth the chance that the solution would be found with his Inside presence.

Outside, she heard a shotgun blast from the building containing the others, and was simultaneously relieved and fearful. It was good that Attaboy had found the guns, but very bad that he was already forced to use them. There was no return fire, which was something. Her flies were doing their best to look into the area, but the gas was too much for their feeble vision and overwhelming to their other senses, something like an extended flash-bang at the chemical level.

She had captured a few exchanges between the enemy soldiers, though overall they seemed to possess a remarkable communications discipline which kept her from learning very much. In that way, it worked the way such things were supposed to, she imagined. It spoke to a high degree of professional paranoia, which told her as much as anything she had heard pass between them.

What was clear was that these were professionals, mercenaries who specialized in small scale operations like this one, where a clan would want a certain degree of remove, of deniability. Why that would be, she couldn’t say for sure, though she had plenty of ideas. Most likely it was Walden behind this, she surmised, working around Corp rules against open battle near the continental headquarters and avoiding overt conflict with Sinaloa. She had also learned that there was one other target for capture in addition to Nykka. Her money was on Attaboy, though she couldn’t rule out Anda. It just made more sense for it to be Attaboy, if it was Walden. They would want to make a statement with him, something that a quick death wouldn’t achieve.

Watching Nykka’s fight had given her a lot to think about. These men were competent, lethal, and only a little overconfident. Against Nykka, even that small amount of hubris had proved fatal. Still, that had only been two soldiers, who were hampered by the need to capture, rather than kill, and even then surprised by a weapon with capabilities they could not have expected. In the end, it had been a near thing, for Nykka was still out of commission for who knew how long.

Now Lilijoy was faced with taking on five more, plus the sniper, who she had lost track of; she was concerned he had withdrawn to find a new angle. Her insects couldn’t help her within the gas, so the combat would be direct. On her side she had... Attaboy.

she sent.

She went on to warn him of the strange weapon used against Nykka and give him a brief synopsis of events, all the while worried whether he was up to his role in this situation.

It wasn’t that she wasn’t glad that he was there. He might have already been the difference between disaster and a salvageable situation. He was protecting the others, contributing to the fight. There was a good chance this was all his fault, more or less, but she had let that go. The world they were trying to navigate was too big, with too many unknowns for either of them not to make mistakes. Attaboy was more rash, more impulsive, and arguably more stubborn than she was, so it was only natural his mistakes would be bigger too. Her mistakes were no less profound, but much less overt, mistakes of caution, of complacency.

But now was not the time to dwell on responsibility for the current situation. She dashed into the lingering gas, leaving her insects behind, along with contingency instructions for the system elements she had infiltrated into the snipers and other soldiers. She had made it all of ten feet when the first bullet hit her and she was falling, half dodging, half reacting to the shock of the impact on her rib cage. Her skin held, but the shock damaged her ribs and caused her heart to stop beating momentarily, and it was all she could do to roll behind a mound of broken brick that had once been a low wall as more bullets slammed into the earth around her.

Just then, Attaboy’s sensory feed came to her, compounding the chaos. He held one of Anda’s many guns, a stubby set of black metal tubes which corresponded roughly to the tactical shotguns from her internet memory, though overgrown with barrels. Anda had shown it to her at one point when he was walking her through his armory, calling it a five-shot. It was a common weapon on the Outside, and like many of the weapons provided by Inside manufacturing formulas, it had unique quirks and limitations. Foremost among those was the fact that there was no way to replace the ammunition. The five-shot literally had only five shots in the form of blasts of tightly spaced bearings, after which it became a half-decent club at best. It was a popular weapon because the formula and Inside materials were common and available, unlike the guns and ammunition that Anda preferred, which were exceptionally rare and closely held. Anyone with sufficiently capacious molecular manufacturing units could churn five-shots out with abandon, provided they had sufficient feedstock on the Outside.

Attaboy had two shots left, if her memory served, assuming his gun had started with the original five. He was standing against an interior wall of the back room, the gun pointing between the board-draped back exit and the opening connecting to the rest of the building. Threads of light filtered through the high set window openings, just enough for her to catch a bit of movement from his opponents from the adjoining space. Her processing speed was fast enough to see that the movement was a piece of cloth or something similar attached to a stick. He didn’t take the bait though, which made her happy.

More bullets fell around her, pinning her in place. Her heart was still feeling a little twitchy, though there was no real harm done. As far as she could tell, there were at least two shooters, armed with relatively low-powered semi-automatic weapons, and it certainly seemed like, unlike Attaboy, they had ammo to spare.

I’ve got to find Anda and get him Outside, she thought. I can’t get there in time. Although…

She was still in range of her insect network, which meant she had other, unwitting allies. It was the work of only a few seconds to pass the targeting information to her sniper on the south side, using her system’s best guess for the location of the gunmen who had her pinned down. They were firing from windows on the first floor of the building she needed to enter, which meant Attaboy was completely surrounded.

The sniper began to fire and the bullets flying around her stopped. Without hesitation, she scrambled to her feet and began to run the last stretch, feeling some regret that she hadn’t taken a sidearm from one of her earlier attackers. She didn’t bother dodging, and made it to the side of the former construction company’s headquarters without taking fire. Whether that meant the gunmen were taken out, or taking shelter she didn’t know, which worried her. If they were still able to fight, they would already know where she was, would already be receiving orders anticipating her movements.

She had tricked the other snipers into searching the sky for whatever craft was up there surveilling and coordinating the action below, but it was impossible for them to see through the low hanging clouds in the dark of night. The enemy’s advantage would be diluted considerably, if she could only get into the building, but the men would be waiting for her, and even if they had been taken out, the others would know she was coming.

On the Inside, she stopped. Running through the Rotted Lands hoping to find Anda wasn’t going to work in time, it seemed. A better solution was needed.

She pulled up her character sheet, hoping for inspiration.

Name: Emily Level: 27

Defender of the Young

Dark Lady of the Thorns

Blessed of Nandi

Awakener

Free Points: 12

HP: 110

Natural Traits

STR: 23 (44 effective)

END: 59

SPD: 57 (307 effective)

KA: 152

Magical Traits

POW: 21

INV: 52

VIT: 28

FLASH: 88

MW: 169

MG: 10%/100 Sec.

Elemental Affinities/Immunities

Fire: 38

Earth: 68

Water: 30

Air: 28

Charm:

People: 34

Plants: 78

Animals: 67

Abilities

Scan III (Universal)

Low Light Vision II (Common)

Echolocation IV (Uncommon)

Infrared Vision III (Uncommon)

Mana Manipulation (Rare)

Earthen Sense II (Very Rare)

Body Warp (Unique)

Two Minds One Self (Unique)

Skills (VP)

Body Manipulation: Illustrious Journeyman (40)

Nature: Animals: Enhanced Journeyman (25)

Nature: Plants: Enhanced Journeyman (25)

Unarmed Combat: Enhanced Journeyman (25)

Acrobatics: Enhanced Journeyman (25)

Medical/Healing: Enhanced Journeyman (25)

Meditation: Upgraded Journeyman (10)

Poisons: Upgraded Journeyman (10)

Manipulation: Augmented Apprentice (9)

Stealth: Augmented Apprentice (9)

Weapons: Blade: Short: Augmented Apprentice (9)

Weapons: Blunt: Club: Augmented Apprentice (9)

Climbing: Augmented Apprentice (9)

Deception: Augmented Apprentice (6)

Hand Weaving: Upgraded Apprentice (6)

Weapons: Projectile: Sling: Augmented Apprentice (6)

Gliding/Flight: Upgraded Apprentice (6)

Teaching: Natural Initiate (2)

Disguise: Natural Novice (1)

Dance: Natural Novice (1)

Leather Working: Natural Initiate (2)

Jewelry Crafting: Natural Initiate (2)

Swimming: Natural Initiate (2)

Pottery: Natural Novice (1)

Glass Working: Natural Novice (1)

Magic

Source:

Earth: Journeyman (5)

Clade:

Mass: Journeyman (5)

Matter: Apprentice (3)

Aspect: Initiate (2)

Class:

Fused: Apprentice (3)

Shaped: Initiate (2)

Spell:

Barrier: Initiate (2)

How to find Anda? Her Earthen Sense II ability was the best bet, and once again, she regretted passing by many opportunities to raise it. She still had twelve free points, which she had been hoarding to use with her elemental magic as it developed, so raising the ability was simple, and relatively cheap at three points. How useful it would be in a land with no real solidity remained to be seen, but it needed to be done, or she would end up regretting it yet again at some point in the future. She spent the points.

Then she buried her feet further in the ashy ground and plunged both hands in as well, wriggling her toes and fingers in the oddly soft material. The tense situation on the Outside made it difficult to concentrate, to the point that she built a barrier within her mind, nearly separating herself into two consciousnesses. As she feared, when the ability activated it worked poorly. She could feel tremors from the distant combat, the subsonic cries of the Regional Lord and huge explosions rippling the material she was connected to, but even that was diffuse, like seeing through thick fog. Any subtleties were lost, unable to propagate through the dampening properties of the ground.

I might be better off running around hoping to get lucky, she almost decided. If only there was a way to amplify the signals, some kind of antenna, or lens.

As soon as she had the thought, her mind began to fill with solutions. She had a tool now, her Barrier spell, that could form straight edged structures of any dimensions she desired, limited only by her mana well. The only question was, just how many walls could she make? She began to draw on her system resources in a way she never had before, searching through her internet memory, drawing on it to build mental models one on top of another in quantum superposition, searching the space of possible structures for the one she needed, the proper configuration and spacing of multiple straight lines to act as receiving antenna and amplifier. She felt her system dumping waste heat down her spine, felt her Outside self marveling at the massive undertaking, even as she fought to retain the resources she needed to survive there.

Seconds ticked by as she forced her system to work harder, forced herself to think faster, pulling half understood concepts and diagrams into the realm of comprehension, devouring equations without pause, urgency and flow combining to slow time to a trickle.

Then she had it. Had something anyway, and with no hesitation, she fed her model outward, into one barrier spell, and then another, etching wall after wall into a whole network of connected barrier spells until the structure she needed formed around her as a virtual presence, a many-layered enclosure of low, straight walls and gaps like an i-ching bagua run amok. Her awareness on the Outside narrowed dangerously, she fed her mana into the outline, unsure whether it was one spell or many.

It was fitting, she decided, to create a giant metamaterial structure with a meta-spell. The geometry of the structure surrounding her would, if she had calculated correctly, act like a lens to amplify the signals coming through the earth. She doubted such an attempt would work on the Outside, but she had a strong feeling that magic would have its own role to play here, that the almost ritual aspect of the structure, combined with her intent would do the rest. She could almost feel the Inside guiding her.

Her mana drained as the earth around her was sucked up, and down, into the walls. The spell took longer than usual, not because of its size, but because the earth in the Rotted Lands was light and almost endlessly compressible. Almost, but not completely, for the spell finally set, though her mana continued draining at an alarming rate to maintain the massive antenna she had built for herself. With no time to waste, she reached out and connected to it, apprehensive that she had made a mistake, or that her guesses about how her Earthen Sense worked were simply wrong.

One hand, and then the other reached out to connect to the two walls she had created as conduits for the signal and then her Earthen Sense came crashing into her, screaming into her mind like staring at the sun, an overwhelming jumble of noise that caused her to immediately drop her hands.

Good thing I walled my Inside senses away from the Outside, she thought. She brought her hands up again, not able to waste the time it would take to recover. This time, she made the connection light, just grazing the smooth dark surface with her fingertips, using pressure as a kind of volume control. The end result was confusing and imperfect, but worked as she had hoped, furnishing her with a mental map of a huge swathe of the Rotted Lands, shining bright with the disturbances from the distant battle.

There! she thought triumphantly. There he is.

It was a relatively small disturbance standing out against the monotony, the pressure on the land and the movement creating a small signal almost swamped in the ambient noise, but it was enough. She leapt onto the closest wall and hurtled off toward the source, jumping across the gaps before landing in a spray of the ashy soil. She shot off across the barren land, leaving her creation to collapse behind her, countless fragments spilling back to softness.

***

Mo was pretty sure he was dying.

In a sense, this was nothing new. He had spent much of his life poised between cowering fear and defiant acceptance of his future death, a razor’s edge that had sliced down the middle of his existence. At any given time, the coward or the belligerent might be on the outside, only to flip and display his other face. He despised this about himself, on those few times he was forced to think about it.

Become what you fear. Become the demon. He wasn’t sure what that said about him, those buried motivations from another lifetime given words. Had he failed in that too? Undoubtedly, but it was just as well. He figured most of the bad guys he knew were doing the same thing, other than the real psychos, an arms race of evil facades, slowly sinking through the skin. Cursed armor that corrupted while it protected.

Huh, he mused, dying brings out my philosophical side.

The pepper gas had really done a number on him. He’d long since given up on trying to draw breath, though somehow the sharp spasms of his burning lungs were keeping unconsciousness at bay. It could be, he supposed, that there were still some blood bugs kicking around in his body. The things were only good for a month or two, but that was some kind of half life thing, so there might still be enough from that batch Boggs had paid him with to make a difference.

He gagged against the burning swell of his constricted throat, and felt rivulets of snot and tears running down his face. He was pretty sure he was dripping on Maria. The suffering was extreme, but came in waves, as did the hallucinations, or augsight flashbacks, or whatever the fuck it was that his swiss-cheesed brain did pretty much all the time now. The visions of various Mayan deities were almost comforting, in some twisted way. Gods he didn’t have names for danced in the fires of his burning skin, but he sensed that they were honoring his suffering instead of mocking it.

Mo was dying, but the voices in his head beckoned him onward. Embrace the sacred powder, they called. Let it purify your house.

Like much of what his hallucinations said to him, it was nonsense, a stew of words and symbols pulled from forgotten books or texts he had skimmed over the years on the internet archive, chewed, swallowed and barfed back into his consciousness. That this symbolic spew often dovetailed with his own thoughts and current experiences, or even anticipated them only drove home how slow his awareness was. Even his screwed up unconscious was more on top of things than his creaking, crippled brain.

He gagged some more, and writhed a little for good measure, as the agony in his sinuses, eyes and throat momentarily overwhelmed him. He could hear Maria whimpering and the sound of gunfire in the distance. He could hear his heartbeat, erratic, beating out the meter of the voices in his head.

A shotgun blast nearby made his ears ring. His inner voices leapt into the hollow silence of his unhappy eardrums. He was a fool, they told him, a coward. Purify your house, they said. Fear not, whispered a woman’s voice that slithered through his mind like oiled rope, to seek death is to seek life. Death is the door, and blessed are they who open it of their own accord.

The voice was not comforting. It belonged to Ixtab, perhaps his least favorite of the deities that haunted him. Not that the parade of horribles marching across his mental landscape had a shortage of candidates, but many of them blurred and spilled into one another, perhaps victims of his own fuzzy conceptualization, whereas Ixtab had her own vivid identity, as unmistakable as her domain.

Mo had never been one to overthink; Mayan gods were bad-asses and so was he, aspirationally at least. Ixtab, though, was a different category. She took the souls of suicides directly to heaven, a concept which made Mo uncomfortable. How a culture could have persisted that venerated violence against the self was a puzzle, why they would have worshiped a rotted corpse hung by her own noose… well, that he could almost understand. That was how the Mayans rolled, no sugarcoating, no flinching from the terrors of existence.

It didn’t mean he was fond of said terrors dropping in on him on a regular basis though.

Little Tony, said Ixtlab, wishes to be the demon he is afraid of. Wonders why my worshipers did not hasten to my embrace. I offer comfort, little Tony, I offer purpose. I am for those who were left behind. I am the answer for the question that breaks the heart.

Mo’s heart stopped. An odd internal silence descended, the pulse of blood deafening in its absence. From it rose a feeling of clarity.

Are you… talking to me? he asked in his thoughts. His visions had spoken many times; they could, at times, be a noisy bunch, but never before had one addressed him so personally. Hearing his old name, the discarded remnant of a rejected childhood, drop from the lips of a corpse should have been disturbing. Instead, he felt peaceful.

I really am dying, he realized, and my brain is throwing one hell of a going away party.

The walls of your self are thin, said Ixtlab. The blood of this world reaches through. Purify your house and you will be my priest.

Yeah, about that, Mo replied. Setting aside the obvious fact that I’ve finally lost my mind completely, I’m pretty sure I’m just about to check out. Maybe you could help Maria get over it or something? Except don’t show yourself to her. I’m pretty sure that would--

He was interrupted by cackling laughter that creaked and swung. Exactly! You have lost your mind, and I have found it. A pretty bauble to be sure, cracked to catch the light just so. Madness is a necessity, little Tony, if you wish to approach the divine.

Can you stop it with the ‘little Tony’ bit? he complained.

But that’s who you are, trapped in here with me, she burbled. The little boy whose parents stayed behind, not the demon he tried to become. They died for you, little Tony. They died, died, died, died. For you. Purify your house, little boy.

His heart beat. Once. Did it ever actually stop, or did he stop, while his heart continued?

Purify my house?

He felt his skin burning, felt tears and snot streaming.

“I’m sorry, Moonbeam,” he whispered to Maria, forcing the air from his tortured lungs.

He pressed his palms against the gritty floor. Another shotgun blast rang out. He could hear other guns firing just a little farther away.

He forced his eyes open, just a crack against the swelling. In another lifetime, pain and fear had been distant forces, rubbing at the edges of his psyche like a scratchy shirt. Now they were a pyre, immolating his thoughts, burning away his senses. The universe was pain and fear.

He stood, entering a space that was more hallucination that perception, a background of dark wisps swirling across thin lines of light, of throbbing gunfire felt as much as heard, against which his vibrant deities danced and leapt, beckoned and led. Still hunched against his pain, he stumbled a step, forcing breath into occluded lungs with wheezing, whistling sounds. Where and why were not considerations, only burning movement. A voice echoed in his ears, but he couldn’t understand the words. He could barely hear the language of his own thoughts.

Another step, then falling over a mound of debris, fragments of wood, plastic and stone digging into his arms. The world constricted into a red-tinged tunnel, and he forced himself up again. Purify.

Someone was calling his name, but he ignored the hollow sound and followed the tunnel. It twisted and writhed around him like a great serpent, and he stumbled within its coils. Dimly, he perceived figures moving around him. Something grazed the top of his head as he ducked within his ever-shifting vision. The dancing gods laughed, and he felt his fear lifting as he joined them, his pain evaporating as he twisted and spun, half drunk with abandon.

Shadows trailed after the gods, dark figures both more concrete and less real, mimicking their movements, as shadows do. He danced through the coils of the vision serpent, its body a path of future and past, a tracing and an anticipation. The gods spun toward him, jumped around him with grace, and he stumbled through his part, uncoordinated, late to their subliminal pulse. Some part of him understood, though, that they would forgive his clumsiness, as long as he didn’t touch their shadows.

Thunder and lightening roared around him, Chaak wielding his mighty axe. The blast echoed in his ears, oddly louder in reverberation. The lightning struck a shadow and spun it to the ground, rolling it to the feet of the god it was following.

***

Attaboy spun back into cover after firing at the three men, the rough-edged concrete where a door had once been framed scratching at his shoulder. There were two shots left, at least that’s what he assumed from the five-barreled monstrosity he was wielding. It took most of his strength to raise the thing to fire, and he wondered how such a poor design had ever come to exist as a tangible item. It probably didn’t help that he was smaller and weaker than most. His fingers barely reached around the trigger.

He was sure he had scored a direct hit at least once, or as direct a hit as one was likely to achieve with such a wide blast anyway. It was next to impossible to see though, and when he had peeked out from his shelter, there was no body he could find. Perhaps these attackers had augmented skin, like he would in a few weeks. Regardless, they seemed eager to avoid a shotgun to the face, and so the standoff continued.

He knew it wouldn’t be long until they rushed him though.

Two shots left.

They wanted him alive, or so Lilijoy seemed to think, the lack of return gunfire supporting her assertion. She was out there, somewhere, pinned down by gunfire, so he couldn’t expect help from that quarter anytime soon. He couldn’t run, or wouldn’t anyway. Abandoning Mo, Maria and Anda wasn’t an option he was prepared to consider. Even with his system assisting, he was terrified. Nothing in either life had prepared him for this.

He spun out, and then back in without firing, just to get a glimpse of a figure diving for cover. Can’t waste a shot, he thought. His arms were shaking, the muscles burning, but he didn’t dare lower his weapon. Movement inside his room caught his attention.

Just stay down, you idiot.

It was Mo, somehow stirring, stumbling to his feet.

What the hell does he think he’s doing?

The man looked to be in bad shape, sounded that way too, going by the painful wheeze of his breath.

“Get down!” Attaboy hissed. “They’ll shoot you!”

Mo ignored him, and lurched into motion, weaving and stumbling across the floor, tripping and regaining his feet. His eyes were swollen shut, and Attaboy could only assume that the man had snapped somehow and was making a break for it. Unfortunately he headed, somewhat directly, in the opposite direction of any hypothetical safety. Attaboy was at a loss. If he tried to stop him, the larger man would likely bowl right into him, and that would be the end for all of them.

“Mo, stop!” he tried again, trying to insert the barrel of his gun between the man and the door into the other room. It was no good. Mo half tripped just before the barrel connected and caught himself in a spin that brought him past Attaboy’s attempted intervention and into the room beyond.

Oh shit. He’s dead.

Attaboy wouldn’t call Mo a friend, not really. The man was too rough, too damaged. While his Atticus side appreciated him as a character, an almost elemental force of rudeness and irreverence, many days in close quarters had not created close bonds between them. But the pointless tragedy unfolding before him was still painful. At least before, Mo had had a small chance to get through this, as much as Attaboy had at any rate. Now…

Attaboy watched in horror as an enemy soldier emerged from behind a pile of half crushed file metal file cabinets wielding a long knife of some kind. Keeping Mo between them, the man took a step forward and thrust the knife with one hand, already reaching with the other to keep his human shield on its feet. Time seemed to slow, as it does in the face of inevitability, the moment sprawling before the horrific conclusion, laying itself out proudly for future flashbacks.

And then… Mo dodged. Less a dodge really, than a coincidental move that just happened to maneuver his torso to a different space than the knife’s path. Another man jumped out with the horizontal swing of a club, and Mo nodded, as if accepting his demise, just enough for the club to pass over his bald dome. The man with the knife attacked and missed again, and Mo began to make a sound, a gasping hitch that Attaboy belatedly realized was laughter. Swaying and lurching through the space, at times crouching and spinning, Mo danced through the enemy attacks, laughing all the while. To Attaboy’s strained and watering eyes, Mo’s body seemed almost illuminated, his movements tracing a subtle track through the swirling vapors in the dark. He imagined it must be some artifact of his system’s infrared capabilities that made it look as if the man moved in a tunnel etched by his passage through time. He wasn’t sure how to explain that the passage extended to where Mo had not yet been.

The spectacle almost made him forget he had a role in this as well, and so bemused the attackers that one of them allowed just enough distance for Attaboy to remember what he was doing and take advantage of the opportunity. He fired directly into the man’s side and dropped him, spinning to the floor.

One shot left for two, make that four, opponents. That’s not good math, he thought. I wish I’d taken more guns. I wish I had a sword.

Since he had none of those things he stayed where he was, waiting for a shot during Mo’s surreal ballet with the remaining attacker, feeling guilty he couldn’t help more. The problem was, there was at least one more opponent hiding somewhere out of his sight, and at least two more with guns defending the front of the building. About twenty feet away, the body of the man he had shot lay in a pool of blood, at least he thought it was that and not a particularly dark patch of shadow, and the club he had been using lay a few feet away where it had fallen. He eyed it as a future possibility; it would certainly be better that the piece of bent and rusty rebar that was his backup plan.

Any initiative was taken from him when Mo dropped to the ground, just a split second before gunfire tore into the room.

Guess they’re getting impatient, he thought as he dodged back into cover, thankful that the construction company had overengineered their interior walls. Maybe capturing me has dropped a few notches in priority.

He heard the footfalls just a moment too late to bring up his gun.

.

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