With the click of a mouse, Blake Myers designated another target for his sniper skitter and shifted his view elsewhere, tracking the actions of his units as they spread out through the Eterian capital. A small smile grew on his face as he witnessed his robots doing exactly what he’d designed them to do: slaughter. Fascinated, he watched as three of his creations waded into the large, desperate mess by the city’s west gate, where the Eterians were engaged in a valiant but laughably futile effort to hold back the oncoming tide of Ubran soldiers. Neither side was prepared as the four bots swept in from the north and began carving through the Ubran troops while another four converged from the south.

To call the result “gruesome” was putting it lightly. The robots announced their presence with a furious salvo, the tucrenyx slugs tearing through the Ubrans almost as if they were made of cloth. Medieval-quality leather, cloth, and metal armor just weren’t made to stand up against bullets moving at supersonic speed. Nor, it quickly became apparent as the skitters charged into the fray, did it hold up against weaponized five-foot-long chainsaws.

It didn’t take long for panic to set in on both sides. At about ten feet tall, the Battle Skitter Mk Ones were hard to miss even in the chaos. They towered over the humanoids battling between them, their large, bloodstained chainsaws flashing out to bisect anybody foolish enough to get within range. Even if somehow one were to be unable to see them, the sharp cracks of the bullets breaking the sound barrier would be enough to catch your attention. That and the screams.

Not that Blake could hear those screams himself. He wasn’t anywhere near the battle; he sat back in his chambers in Wroetin where it was safe instead, watching from above through a video feed like a sensible person. In his opinion, there was no real reason he needed to put himself within even a hundred miles of possible danger when he could just have robots do it instead. He had the technology, after all. Even at this distance, he could still give orders through the same chain of flitters stretching from Otharia to Crirada that supplied the view he was watching. The delay wasn’t even too bad, perhaps ten seconds at its worst—more than fast enough to coordinate his units and let their rudimentary AI handle the details. He only hoped that the Eterians wouldn’t be stupid enough to attack the skitters, as the skitters would no doubt return fire without mercy—a behavior that Blake had programmed into them from the start to deal with any Otharians who might decide to start attacking his units in some sort of guerrilla campaign against him.

Quickly Blake switched through an array of video feeds coming through the link, checking the state of the rest of the city. While most of the Ubrans had been entering the city from the west, some had taken advantage of the nearly-unoccupied wall around the rest of the city to enter that way, and they couldn’t be left to do as they pleased.

Two of his units scrambled through the large nondescript buildings in the northeast quarter, while another two worked their way through the large empty villas in the southeast quarter. The final three skitters were reserved to guard the gate of the wasteland that had once been the northwest quarter. Outside of pushing back the Ubrans in the west, keeping the north gate closed and the northwest quarter unoccupied was his top priority. After all, it was the reason he’d bothered to throw his hat in the ring.

Blake hadn’t cared for the fate of the Eterians until yesterday—if he were to be honest, he still didn’t care now—but the phenomenon he’d witnessed that day had turned his thoughts upside down. He’d never before heard of a “Severed” attack, as he’d later learned they were called, but eldritch tentacles emerging from portals meant other dimensions, and that made this highly relevant to his interests.

At first, Blake had thought to recreate the phenomenon in Otharia for better study, but one conversation with Leo had squashed that idea. Apparently, people at risk of becoming Severed didn’t just grow on trees, and any that did pop up were usually taken out before they could endanger everybody around them. How the Eterians had acquired such a number of Severed people was a mystery, but that didn’t matter in the end. What mattered was that there hadn’t been a Severed attack in Otharia in twelve years and finding somebody was just about impossible as well as highly unwise. The news had left Blake momentarily crushed.

There was one other thing he’d learned, however, that had restored some of his hope. It seemed that the area affected by such an incident would be afflicted with some sort of aura or radiation or something that left it “blighted”. Nothing would grow in that area and people who stayed inside it for more than a few moments would grow ill. The “blight” would slowly weaken until the land eventually became safe and usable again. This meant two things: there was still something for him to study in the hopes of finding a clue to a way home, and he needed to get to the site as soon as possible and get every bit of data he could while things were still as fresh as possible.

With that in mind, he’d quickly assembled several underlings, loaded them up into his zeppelin along with as many skitters as his newest creation could lift, and sent them off to Crirada as quickly as he could. It was good that he hadn’t wasted any time; if he’d delayed even another half hour, it was likely that there would be nobody left in the city to oppose the Ubrans but him. His skitters were a force to be reckoned with, but fifteen of them couldn’t take on the entire Ubran army. The numerical advantage would be just too great to overcome.

Glancing at the readout for his units, he noted that the ones covering the west side were already running low on ammo. He’d have loved to bring more ammunition, but when given the choice between more units and more bullets, he’d gone with the former. It would have been nice to have both, but such an option wasn’t possible as long as he relied on his airship to transport everything.

The simple fact of the matter was that sending troops by land wasn’t a realistic option. His skitters weren’t able to move as quickly as his zeppelin, nor would they be able to take as direct a route. On top of that, they’d have to fight through an army just to get into the city, assuming they didn’t get ambushed along the way—Blake didn’t want to have to babysit them all the way there just to make sure they arrived safely. That meant the best option was the first of what he hoped would someday be just one of many Ferros Floating Ships: the newly completed FFS Flying Toaster.

The Flying Toaster was named as such for more than simply his nostalgia for the days of his youth. The first of its kind, it felt little better to him than a flying appliance—kludgey, unsophisticated, and somewhat unwieldy. Still, he had to admit that it was a minor miracle he’d been able to create something like this at all, given his limited experience and knowledge outside the realm of mechanics and electronics.

The largest hurdle had come, as usual, from his lack of chemistry expertise. Once he’d determined that a lighter-than-air design was needed to fulfill all his design goals, the question had turned to just how to make it lighter than air. Ideally, he would have used helium like on Earth, but he had no idea how to actually acquire the gas. All he knew was that it was mined from the ground somehow. What form was it found in? Did it need to be processed and refined before it could be used? How could it be located? Since he couldn’t answer those questions, he’d moved on to other options.

The second option was, of course, hydrogen. One of the few things he could still remember from high school Chemistry class was doing electrolysis to show how water was made up of hydrogen and oxygen. It wouldn’t have been too hard to throw together an electric generator and make some hydrogen. Still, Blake hadn’t given the idea more than a second of thought before scrapping that as well. History had made well clear just what could happen if you used hydrogen. He didn’t want his precious creation turning into a fireball after one errant lightning strike.

Hot air was also out. While he hadn’t bothered to test it, he felt that the lift gained just wasn’t enough to be viable. More so, one of the few things that tucrenyx technology was unable to do that electronics could was produce heat, meaning he’d have to burn fuel to keep the air hot. Hot air was out.

That left Blake with only one option, an idea that even he had to admit was rather crazy: nothing. The only thing lighter than hydrogen was a vacuum. It didn’t require him to know anything about ions or covalent bonds or any of that shit. All he needed to do was figure out how to create tanks with the air pushed out of them that were light enough to float but still strong enough to not be crushed beneath the weight of the atmosphere.

It hadn’t been easy. After only a few tests, it became clear that there was no perfect thinness of ordinary tucrenyx, or any other metal he had on hand for that matter, that would be able to be both light enough and strong enough to do the job. That meant getting down and dirty and messing with the metal on a smaller scale.

There were times when Blake became so used to messing with tucrenyx that he forgot that his powers worked with all metals. Once he remembered that fact, Blake began searching for possible alloys to improve tucrenyx’s strength and luckily found a good one that incorporated silver and iron, two of the other metals he had in relative abundance. The alloy, when arranged properly on a molecular level, was easily three times stronger than normal tucrenyx, though far more rigid and inflexible. That didn’t matter for this use case, but still, even such an improvement was not enough on its own.

Eventually, nature came to the rescue. Specifically, Blake’s most-hated insect, bees. He was so grateful he was even willing to forgive them for years of getting stung for no goddamned reason as he built the walls of his tanks in a hexagonal, beehive-esque pattern on a microscopic level. The structure proved strong and allowed him to cut the weight even more, to the point where he finally had enough lift for what he wanted.

From starting the research to the painstaking process of actually building them, constructing the tanks took Blake weeks. After that, he’d thought his problems were over, but that had once again proved incorrect. Constructing a body around the four massive vacuum balloons ended up taking almost as long as making the tanks. If he hadn’t received that one shipment with the three massive cantacrenyx crystals, he wasn’t sure he’d have ever found a design that provided enough mobility and functionality to satisfy his needs.

But what mattered was that, in the end, he’d managed to hack together something that worked. The Flying Toaster could move at up to ninety miles per hour while carrying tons of weight. Its acceleration made the Titanic look like a speedboat in comparison, and it steered like a curling stone, but it did what he wanted and it did it well. He kind of wished he could be in Crirada right now, just to see the looks on their faces when his creation first made its presence known.

Speaking of which, it seemed that his sudden arrival had done its job. He could see the Ubrans in full retreat on all sides of the city. Blake ordered the skitters on the west side to protect the entrance to the city instead of chasing after the fleeing soldiers. He didn’t want to risk that they’d be surrounded and overwhelmed from all sides once they used up their few remaining bullets. Besides, he’d accomplished his goal; the city was safe for the moment and he didn’t have to worry about losing access to the blighted area. That meant it was time for Phase Two: introductions.

Ignoring the protests of his aching body, Blake stood up and tromped out of his chambers and over to the House of Manys. There he found Bernards Bergmanis, his clammy Many handler, ready and waiting with a Many beside him. With a nod from Blake, Bernards began rousing the Many from her trance.

“My Lord!” a peppy voice chirped as soon as an image appeared before him.

“Prepare to descend, Simona,” Blake instructed his Secretary of State. Given that somebody needed to be present to negotiate with the Eterians and he hadn’t wanted to go himself, the chipper woman had been the natural choice for a replacement. Along for the ride was the counterpart to the Many before him and Agrits, his other top Many handler. He’d chosen the laconic man to ride in the zeppelin over Bernards because Blake was convinced that the overanxious man would die of a heart attack from one look out the windows. Bernards seemed perpetually on the edge of a sweaty nervous breakdown while on solid ground; Blake didn’t want to see what would happen if heights became involved.

“Yes, Lord Ferros! I can’t wait to rub this into those Eterian bastards!” the spunky woman replied with relish. “We shall return as soon as I have an audience, my Lord.”

“Hold on,” Blake said quickly. “I won’t be able to speak to you in private when that happens, so before that, what are the three rules I told you?”

Simona’s mouth widened into a feral, toothy smile. “Don’t back down, squeeze them for everything you can, and nobody gets to ride on the airship.”

Blake grinned behind his mask. “Excellent.”

The illusion disappeared as a dark hood was placed over the face of the Many aboard the Flying Toaster so she could be moved without issue. The act of handling a Many was an involved process, more art than science. Blake found the very existence of Manys both troubling and fascinating. What he’d discovered after investigating them had shocked him and changed the way he looked at this world, but that was a topic for a different day.

Minutes later, when the hood was removed and the illusion returned, the view had completely changed. Now he saw stone walls lit by torches, the flickering light illuminating not just the room but the group of people inside it. Judging by the gauntness of their bodies and the haggard look in their eyes, the men and women in his vision had suffered heavily these past months. Still, he couldn’t help but commend them for the way they held themselves as they stood tall and proud, unwilling to shrink before his transmitted presence.

“Greetings, Lord Ferros,” one of the men began, giving him a low bow. Blake caught a particularly aristocratic vibe from this one, something that made Blake immediately dislike the man. “I am Supreme General Erizio Astalaria. I thank y-”

“Shut up.”

“Wha-! I-” the ‘Supreme General’ sputtered.

“I said shut your trap,” Blake repeated. “I don’t care who you are. I don’t care what you have to say. You don’t matter to me. Get that in your head now. I have decided to help you this time because it was convenient for me and nothing more. I will be studying the results of your... activities in the northern section of this place. It is of interest to me. As long as your presence here aids my goals, I will assist in the protection of this city for a price. But cross me, and the next day the Ubrans will find only corpses inside these walls.”

The assembled Eterians each sported an expression ranging from shock to anger and everywhere in between. The sight brought a smile to Blake’s face. It felt good to be able to throw his weight around and be an asshole for once—something for which even Blake’s own friends told him he had a talent.

“I have neither the time nor the desire to deal with you any longer,” he continued. “Simona here will serve as my representative for any negotiations henceforth. If you have a problem with any of this, you can thank your esteemed Minister Amatza Motrico. She knows why. That is all.”

With a short wave of his hand, he signaled for Bernards to cut off the transmission. The illusion disappeared, leaving just the three of them in the room. Blake nodded at the shorter, chubbier man.

“That will be all for today,” he said. “Oh, and if that bitch Motrico calls, tell her I’m busy.”

With that, Blake left the room and headed back towards his chambers. All that was left was to send down the last remaining passenger in the Flying Toaster, a small skitter sporting specialized modules designed to collect as much data as possible about the blighted area, and set his craft on a course back to Otharia. It would take a while for all the data to be collected and processed, and even longer for him to study it; after all, he didn’t even know what he was looking for. But that didn’t matter at the moment. What mattered was that everything had gone smoothly, and he could go to sleep in a few minutes with his head held high. He was going to reward himself and sleep in the next morning, he decided. He deserved it.

A soft melody emerged from his helmet as he hummed a happy tune. Today had been a fantastic day.

Blake’s eyes cracked open to the repeated high-pitched trilling of an alarm. Muddle-headed, he stretched his upper body and yawned. Glancing at the clock, Blake saw that it was closing in on midday. This last night had been the best he’d slept in a long time. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt this refreshed. One thing he could remember, however, was that he hadn’t set any alarms before going to sleep.

A light was pulsing from across the room atop the console he used to control his robots. Suddenly, adrenaline swept away the fog that still lingered in his mind. It had been so long since he’d last heard it that he’d momentarily forgotten, but he knew what that sound meant now. It meant that he’d lost a robot.

Quickly assembling the suit around his useless legs, Blake worked his way to his feet and stumbled over to the console. The console activated as soon as he sat down, the screen lighting up to show the same view he’d seen the night before: an overhead view of Crirada. Once more, the city was under attack.

Blake found this honestly surprising. He’d thought that the presence of his robots would have been enough to dissuade the Ubrans for at least a day, but it seemed he’d underestimated their courage... or their stupidity. Either way, he had to commend them. Taking out one of his Battle Skitters was an accomplishment. During the conquest of Otharia, the Otharian army had only managed to take out two themselves, and those skitters had been far weaker than the ones he’d sent to Crirada. It really spoke to the difference between the “Holy Empire of Otharia” and a real empire that the Ubrans had been able to take down one of-

Four?!

Blake did a double-take and stared at the number again. Fifteen minus eleven?! He’d lost four Battle Skitters?! The first alarm had only gone off a minute or two ago!

Quickly checking on his units’ locations, Blake discovered that all four of his lost robots had been in the group of six he’d ordered to guard the open west gate. Quickly he sent the flitter from which he was watching speeding over to the outside of the west gate to get a look at what was going on. As the small drone traveled, he sent orders to the other Battle Skitters to converge on that location.

The flitter arrived just as he finished sending the orders, and just in time for him to catch a black-haired woman with a massive, pitch black sword impaling one of the two remaining robots on hand through its center. Then, to his utter amazement, she easily hefted the still-skewered robot, which weighed several tons, up into the air and smashed it against the outside of the wall. The skitter, whose body was comprised almost entirely of solid tucrenyx, crumpled like aluminum foil as it crashed into the massive stone facade. The stone nearly exploded from the force of the blow as a crater formed in the wall’s side and large pieces rock collapsed atop the destroyed skitter, half-burying it beneath the rubble.

All around the gate, pandemonium reigned. A tide of Ubrans pushed against a desperate Eterian defensive line. Fireballs, rocks, arrows, and a variety of other projectiles fell upon the Ubrans from the wall above, while an equal amount poured down upon the Eterians from the Ubran back lines. In the middle of it all stood one lone remaining skitter, its chainsaws chewing through Ubran flesh without end, sending blood and gore splattering all around.

Due to the distributed and redundant nature of Blake’s skitter design, the five destroyed robots still had the power and circuitry needed to interface with the flitters above and by extension the control server back home in Wroetin, making finding them a simple matter even in the scrum. Three of them had been smashed into inoperability, one had been sliced and stabbed until it could no longer move, and the last one looked to have had its legs and chainsaw arms literally ripped from its body. All five of them looked like the work of the black-haired woman.

Blake had seen Feelers before, of course, but he’d never seen one this mighty. Still, mighty or not, he couldn’t understand how she’d managed to destroy all five robots without getting killed. As if to prove his point, the lone remaining skitter stepped back as the woman leapt at it, avoiding her strike, and neatly sawed off her legs its closest chainsaw as she flew by.

But something strange happened as the robot turned about, looking for its next victim. Instead of landing in an uncoordinated heap, the woman rolled about a gracefully as a legless person could as the legs seemed to evaporate into a crimson mist and reform on her body, good as new. Blake couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Such a thing was possible? Why couldn’t he do that?!

His skitter had its back turned to her as she rose back to her feet, massive oversized blade still clutched in her hand. While all his skitters had “eyes” on all sides of their bodies, both the chainsaws hung from only one side like the blades of a praying mantis, meaning that while the robot could see its incoming doom, it couldn’t do much to stop it. The woman rocketed towards his creation faster than he’d ever seen any person move before, slamming into the skitter’s side as it tried in vain to turn and face its opponent. The force of the collision knocked the skitter onto its back, and a series of sword swings left it limbless in seconds.

Blake couldn’t believe his eyes. In just moments, he’d lost almost half his force! The Eterians couldn’t hold out for much longer, especially now that the black-haired woman was freed up. He needed some way of stopping not just her, but all of the Ubrans. All he had left was eight Battle Skitters and his Sniper Skitter, which was still perched atop a tower in the center of the city. Blake regretted not moving it the night before. While useful at the time, the long-range robot’s position now actively worked against it, as the wall blocked practically every possible target. There was no point in moving it now; by the time it was in a more advantageous position, the Ubrans would already be running amok in the city.

Actually, he realized, there was one more weapon he had at his disposal—that is, if he could keep the Ubrans out of Crirada for just a little longer. He sent out the appropriate commands just as two more skitters rumbled down the tunnel and careened into the fray. Quickly, Blake set the black-haired woman as their target, locking it in so that even when she was “taken out” they wouldn’t move on to another target.

The pair of skitters responded to their new orders a few seconds later, just as the woman charged at them, her powerful legs driving her forward at inhuman speeds. No human would have been able to react to something approaching so quickly, but robots were a different story—and these ones still had ammo.

The first round ripped through her right shoulder and severed her arm from the rest of her, sending her spinning from the impact. The second round slammed into her gut and knocked her onto her back, leaving a large hole where most of her intestines should be. The impact was so forceful that her sword slipped from her hand and skidded to a stop a good ten feet away.

“No, you idiots! Keep firing! Shit!” Blake cursed as the two skitters closed the distance to engage with their downed target. It was times like these that he wished he’d put in better, more detailed control functionality into the current system. Were he there in person, he’d be able to control their behavior to the tiniest detail, but from afar his options were more limited. He could set the woman as their target and keep them from reassigning, but if that meant they wanted to save bullets and engage with chainsaws, then there wasn’t much he could do to stop them.

The woman was already nearly whole when the first of the two reached her. It swung its left chainsaw, an ovoid plane of whirring death the size of the woman’s entire body, down upon her smoothly and efficiently, aiming to bisect her from head to toe with mechanical precision. The woman’s arms shot out in a blur and the saw stopped a foot from her head.

Blake zoomed his view in to get a better view. The woman’s face was twisted into a snarl, her eyes glowing a furious, demonic red. She had clamped her hands together on the massive guide bar around which the teeth, each as big as a fist, whirled, as was holding the saw up away from her body. A moment later, she shifted her left hand up along the bar a few inches and snapped the saw in two so easily it might as well have been made of plastic. The sight made Blake want to cry.

The heavy chain, now unbound, fell towards her, but she was already rolling toward the skitter’s leg. The robot tried to back up, but the woman was too fast. She ducked beneath the skitter’s body as the skitter’s remaining chainsaw swept through her last position. The second skitter had maneuvered around the first one now, its two chainsaws lashing out towards the woman beneath its companion, but unexpectedly she grabbed the first’s nearby front left leg and pulled it up to block.

Blake involuntarily facepalmed as he watched the second skitter’s chainsaws eat halfway into the first skitter’s leg before jamming halfway inside the metal limb. This reminded him of this old martial arts flicks he’d watched as a kid, where the one hero took on dozens of assailants and somehow never seemed to get touched while all the enemies accidentally punched each other in the face, except he was on the wrong side. He would have to go over his units’ programming again and look at the friendly fire avoidance routines...

As if to add insult to injury, the woman proceeded to grab the first skitter’s back left leg and lift the entire robot off the ground, yanking the leg free of its cohort’s chainsaws, and bash the entire ten-foot-tall robot down onto the second skitter as if it were nothing more than a crude club. Blake would normally have felt insulted at the act, the equivalent in his mind to using the Mona Lisa to shield oneself from rain, but instead he just felt relief. He saluted these last two skitters. They’d sacrificed their lives, but they’d accomplished their mission.

The entire area within Blake’s viewport and more became a dust-filled haze as every part of the first six downed skitters overloaded and erupted with phenomenal force, sending thousands of shards of shrapnel flying in all directions at hypersonic speeds. Always the paranoid one, Blake had engineered his robots with extra circuit pathways that, when activated, would cause a feedback loop like the one he’d used to kill Jarec all those months ago. Each skitter housed many small crystals, and all it took was for three of them to still be connected to set off a self-destruct. After all, there was no way he could allow his technology to fall into others’ hands.

As the dust cleared, Blake found himself staring at a nightmare of blood and gore. Nobody within the blasts had survived. Thousands of corpses littered the ground, blood seeping from gaping holes and forming small crimson pools all across the area. Quickly he panned around, looking for the woman. He found her sword first, still lying on the ground where it had fallen when she’d been shot. Then, with a sigh of relief, he saw her—or, what was left of her.

All that remained of the black-haired woman was part of her torso, so ruined that it was almost unrecognizable. Half of one arm and a bit of a leg hung from a chest that looked like it had been ripped in half from top to bottom. The rest had been turned to pulp by a sudden cloud of speeding metal. Most importantly, the head was entirely destroyed. He could see bits of brain matter and skull splattered upon the damaged skitters she’d been dispatching when the rest of them went off.

As expected, the sudden loss of thousands of soldiers, combined with the rest of this skitters arriving just moments later, was enough to send the remaining Ubrans into retreat. This was not how he’d wanted to start the day, but at least it had ended on a happy note. Well, at least it had for him; it wasn’t just the Ubrans who’d been caught in the blast—some of the Eterians had been wiped out also.

Blake leaned back and rubbed his eyes as his stomach growled. He needed breakfast. Still, something continued to bother him. As he thought back through the events of the morning so far, he couldn’t erase the nagging feeling he’d had since the first time he saw the black-haired woman. Something about her had seemed familiar, like he’d seen her before, and recently too. He hadn’t met anybody who resembled her here in Otharia. Had it been somebody from yesterday? He thought about the Eterians he’d seen through the Many, but none of them had looked like her either. Then when? Had it been during the battle itself?

Leaning forward again, Blake brought up footage of the battle from the night before and began clicking about, jumping between feeds and times. Maybe it was all just in his head, but he felt the need to assuage his paranoid mind so it didn’t bug him for the rest of the day. For a while he found nothing. Then, after about a half hour of looking all about the city, he spotted something. He spotted a sword. Long, wide, and pitch black, Blake immediately knew it to be the same weapon the black-haired woman had been using earlier. He found her on one of the large stone walkways that stretched from the city wall to the castle in the middle, standing with her sword above her head over some half-dead woman.

Right, he remembered now. She’d been the first target he’d set for the sniper skitter as he entered the battle. He’d been busy and moved on to another feed almost immediately after. But still, if he’d set her as a target, then-

As if to answer his unspoken question, the sniper’s bullet shot through the woman’s head, exploding it into tiny bits as it passed through as incredible speed—a lucky shot, if he were to be honest, as the robot was programmed to aim for the center of mass. Now completely decapitated, the headless body tipped over the side of the walkway and fell out of view.

A cold dread blossomed in Blake’s gut and he rewound the footage, watching it once more. The woman’s head had been completely and utterly destroyed by that shot, and yet... Quickly, Blake switched back to the flitter drone he’d left hovering over the west gate.

“Oh, fuck,” he muttered as he surveyed the scene. The sword was gone... and so was the woman’s torso.

Blake stood up and walked towards his workshop. Breakfast could wait. In fact, everything could wait. He needed more. More skitters, more firepower, more everything, and he needed it now. Every second that the Flying Toaster hovered over Wroetin instead of heading back towards Crirada was a second closer to potential disaster. That woman was still out there, somehow, and he had a bad feeling that the same trick wouldn’t work on her twice in a row.