Randel woke up to the sound of a door sliding shut. Footsteps, fading away. Silence. He opened his eyes. He was lying on a bed in a pristine white room. He sat up and rubbed his bruised neck. He had been stripped of his weapons and clothes, but he still had his necklace. His Player collar too, of course. Hard to get rid of that one.

He knew this place. He had been here before.

“We’re on the moon,” he said.

He slid off the bed, balancing on his foot. No crutches to help him walk this time. The room was full of futuristic-looking apparatuses, but it was a tall tube that drew his attention. Made of glass and filled with a strange green liquid, the tank had a black dagger floating in it. Randel reached mentally out for Soul Eater and the dagger in the tank reacted. His heart began to beat faster. This was it. He tried to reach out for Soul Seeker too, but couldn’t tell where it was—most likely still within the Scarlet Hand’s seal. But Soul Eater was here. That was more than enough.

“Why, though?”

Randel hopped closer to the tube and pressed his hands against it. Why was he left in this room? Why with Soul Eater? Why did the Inspectors bring them here?

“Not much time passed since they knocked us out,” Lee said. “They haven’t decided what to do with us yet.”

Perhaps. But why had they taken him to the moon for that? He had already been in a prison back there.

“Containment,” Wolf said. “They think it’s safer this way. They believe that here, in this facility, we’re completely at their mercy.”

Maybe. But then why did they leave Soul Eater with him? Why didn’t they restrain him better? Randel gave the tube a shove, rattling the glass. It didn’t look too sturdy or secure.

“It’s a trap,” Tamie said. “They want us to try … something. To break out, to escape. They want to have a valid reason for killing us.”

Now that was an idea. Inspector Hartigulmathin had given Randel permission to kill him, so it would have been unfair to punish Randel for that. If he tried to harm someone else, however? The Pheilett would have their reason to eliminate him. It made sense, except … why? Why take him here, when they had so many other options down on the planet too? If they finished binding Tanaka’s weapon to his body, that would be the end of him already.

“It’s a trick,” Suit said. “They want to see how much we know of what the Inspector knew.”

There was a numeric pad beside the tube. It was full of alien symbols, yet Randel knew it was a numeric pad. He also knew why it existed. Although every Pheilett was capable of mentally operating these devices – their brains were augmented with multipurpose chips – it was standard policy to always include a physical control panel as a fallback option. Hence, this numeric pad. The longer Randel looked at it, the more he realized that its symbols weren’t so alien at all. He was able to read them.

“Suit, you’re taking the backseat,” I said. “Sorry, it’s not negotiable.”

Although Randel had barely moved in the last several minutes, he found himself sweating. His heart hammered as if he was in the middle of a fight. In a way, he was. A battle of minds—and this one for real, unlike the sorry excuse of challenge that Tanaka had posed to him. The safety nets were off this time. One wrong move and the gods would crush him. His hands – pressed tight against the glass tube – started to shake. Whether in fear or excitement, Randel wasn’t sure. He was usually better than this when it came to controlling his impulses, but—oh, well. His lips drew back in a savage grin.

“Let’s dance, you bastards.”

Randel’s head throbbed as usual, but he was able to think more or less clearly. The brief nap he had taken helped a lot in that regard. The orange blood in his veins hadn’t fully receded, and indeed it was spreading up his face again, but at least he wasn’t bleeding from his eyes and nose yet. Randel could think, but what good did that do if the Inspectors were able read his thoughts? He had to act without thinking the thoughts they wanted him to think. He had to be impulsive. But first—

I began pressing buttons on the numeric pad randomly. Nothing happened, not even a single beep—until Wolf got impatient and smashed his fist against the device. The buttons clanged sharply, but violence didn’t work wonders and the tank remained closed. Lee shook his aching hand while he transformed Soul Eater, making it expand. The weapon couldn’t grow beyond twice its usual size; the pressure within the tube must have been greater than the force that the demonic weapon could apply. Tamie had the dagger swim to the bottom of the tank, searching for weak points. She watched the glass closely where it met the metal frame, then gave the tank another shove. It budged. Weird.

My right hand found the small piece of ivory horn on my necklace. A memory. A reminder—and now a tool. My hands shook again as I took the necklace off and rested it on my palm. Then Wolf got impatient and gripped the horn firmly, smashing it down until it got firmly wedged between the glass and the tank’s frame. He then pushed off his foot, slamming his shoulder against the tank. There was a loud creak below. Tamie continued manipulating Soul Eater. Wolf hopped back a step, then threw his whole weight against the glass tank. This time he heard a popping sound and the thick green liquid of the tank began to dribble onto his toes.

“Violence works wonders,” Wolf said, hopping back. The tank’s bottom had gotten cracked and the liquid was being sprayed everywhere now. Tamie was able to stick Soul Eater into the gap and pry it further apart. The tube was of surprisingly cheap quality, all things considered. Lee wasn’t quite sure it was a design flaw. The Pheilett wouldn’t make such a mistake. The cheap quality of the tube was a deliberate feature, designed in a way that Randel had a chance of breaking it. This realization quickly washed the taste of victory out of Randel’s mouth.

Nevertheless, the tank was loose and after a bit of wiggling Soul Eater got free. Tamie reshaped it into a dagger and retrieved the necklace too. The ivory surface of the horn suffered a few scrapes and it was drenched in green fluid, but it wasn’t broken. I breathed a sigh of relief as I put the necklace back around my neck. Things went very smoothly so far. No alarm had been raised; the Inspectors were pretending that they didn’t notice Randel’s escape attempt. He wasn’t free yet, of course—the room’s door was closed, and besides, what would he do once he got out? He was on the moon. Freeing Soul Eater was simply a warmup exercise for what was yet to come.

Lee attached Soul Eater to his thigh, shaped it into a leg, then walked to the door. It was a featureless door without any handle, sealed tightly shut. Wolf rolled his aching shoulder and braced himself to charge. I groaned inwardly.

“We’re in some kind of medical room,” I said. “I doubt that the door is very secure. Maybe we can pry it open too.”

There was a physical control panel beside the door too, of course, but Lee wasn’t able to tell how it worked. Suit could have, but she was hiding behind Randel’s minds and so none of Randel would be able to use the control panel. Tamie stepped to the panel anyway, pressing buttons randomly. The door opened. I gaped in disbelief.

“Amateurs,” Tamie said smugly.

Wolf stepped outside and looked both ways on the pristine white corridor. All clear. Deserted. He didn’t hesitate; he knew where to go next. He had been new to this body the last time he had been here, but he remembered the path clearly. The path to hundreds of captive shades. He had to free them.

It wasn’t just a sense of kinship that drove Tamie. It wasn’t just the desire to stop this atrocity of experimenting on shades, either. This was her key to freedom. If she managed to free hundreds of shades, they could overrun this place. Hundreds of Pheilett would be possessed or killed. Tamie could use that chaos to slip away; it would be the perfect distraction. She broke into a run—but it was a mistake. I tripped myself up and would have planted my face into the ground if Lee hadn’t tucked his head low and turned the fall into a tumble. He used his momentum to roll back to his feet.

“Thanks,” I said, turning around and jogging the other way. “Thanks, but we aren’t going to free the shades. That’s obviously what they are expecting us to try.”

“But now they know that we know,” Wolf said, turning around again, “we might as well go anyway.”

“No,” Lee said, stopping right beside the room he had just left. “We are not playing their games.”

Not playing their games sounded appealing. Grand, even. The only problem was the execution. How did one trick mind-readers? By not thinking at all and having no plan, or by improvising and thinking quicker than the mind-readers were able to react. The latter for winning battles, the former for winning the war.

Easier said than done, of course. Even without the Inspectors reading his surface thoughts, Randel would have had a difficult time escaping. Difficult? This was the Inspectors’ home turf. Some might have said that escape was impossible. Not Randel, though. Ideas flashed through his minds. Distract the Inspectors with something worse than him. Make the Inspectors want him to leave the facility. Get lucky by opening up opportunities to get lucky. Strike a deal with the Inspectors. Strike a deal with a party that opposed the Inspectors. Take a hostage. Destroy the entire moon.

Randel broke into a run—in the opposite direction as the shade enclosure. His plan? Could be anything. He kept changing his mind, quick and indecisive. The only certainty he had was that he had to move. Where to? He picked a direction at random. He felt a vague pull, almost physical in nature, and he decided to follow it on a whim.

He worried that this was all pointless. He let that thought go. He feared that he would never escape. He didn’t care. He felt like a lab rat in a labyrinth, following the smell of a cheese he would never get. He ignored that sense of futility. He ran, following the pull that might or might not have been real. The corridor was empty, and so was the next he turned onto. Closed doors lined the walls on both sides, but he didn’t try to open any of them. He just went with the pull.

The Inspectors were no longer pretending to be unaware that he escape from his room. No obvious alarms were raised, but up ahead, past the next intersection, a heavy door was falling slowly but deliberately from above. Randel ran faster. He was sprinting now, shapeshifting Soul Eater to push off with greater force, orange blood pumping, running with long, bounding steps. The door was too slow. If he threw himself to the floor, he would be able to slide under the closing panel just before it sealed the way off. He would just barely make it. It would be like in a movie, moving at high speed and clearing the obstacle at the very last second.

“Yeah, no.”

Randel jumped, crashing into the door and using Soul Eater to soak up the worst of the impact. Yes, he could have slid under the door—but that didn’t feel right. After a moment of reflection, he knew why; this was a high-tech facility and yet that door had been sliding shut at a snail’s pace. Just slow enough for Randel’s escape to look exciting. If the Inspectors truly didn’t want him to go that way, the door would have gotten closed either faster or sooner.

He walked back to the intersection. Left or right? He didn’t think much about it, just turned to the left while watching the ceiling. There was another door that could fall down to seal the corridor off, and yet it didn’t move. He broke into a run—but as soon as he crossed the door’s threshold, he did an about-face and thrust his prosthetic leg out while making it expand. The door slammed into his foot with so much force that he fell and hit his head against the floor hard. The silent corridor was suddenly filled with the noise of metal grinding against metal.

“Oof,” he groaned, pushing himself up. He had done it.

He had caught the door with Soul Eater – now looking like a sideways T– so that it couldn’t close completely. There was a small gap at the bottom, just barely enough to squeeze through. Randel unattached Soul Eater from his leg and slid back out under the door, then reshaped his demonic weapon and extracted it on the other side. The door fell shut with a heavy thump.

Randel reattached his leg and walked back to the intersection once more. The other direction, the one he had yet to explore, had already been sealed. That was the direction the Inspectors truly didn’t want him to go. Coincidentally, that was also the direction where the pulling sensation was coming from. Was he only imagining it, or was it truly there? No matter. With three doors closed, Randel had only one way to go: back the way he had come from.

He took a step and stumbled. Blood dribbled down the side of his head, startling him. How—? Ah, when he fell while catching the door. His head hurt all the time, so he hadn’t noticed the injury at first. He didn’t bleed for long; with the slightest bit of focus, he made his orange blood congeal at the wound. Funny, that he could do this and yet he had no control over the spreading orange veins. He knew the mysterious liquid’s name, by the way, thanks to the Inspector’s memories.

Angel blood. Not because it originated from literal angels, but because it was able to counteract demon blood. Randel supposed it was an apt name in any case. The substance had saved his life many times before; it allowed his body to go past its limits. It also did something to his brain, something he was unsure of.

Randel shook his head. He had to avoid thinking about the Inspectors memories. That was what they wanted! Oh, so where was he? In the middle of an intense escape attempt. Well, not so intense anymore. He had zoned out again, hadn’t he? His orange veins had—

“Angel blood.”

His angel blood had reached his head again. He didn’t think much about it, just began to walk. He walked at a comfortable pace. There was no need to hurry, no need to tire himself out. There was also no point in hoarding secrets if those secrets would never be put to use. This was a peculiar thought, one with great merit. The Inspectors wanted to know what Randel had learned about them. He could hide what he knew and take it to his grave—or he could use it against them. Use it now, and take advantage of it while he had a chance at all. He decided it was a good plan—except he was trying not to think about plans at all. The struggle was real.

“To think or not to think, that is the question.”

His voice echoed in the empty corridor. Foreboding. He passed door after door without giving them much attention. There was no way to tell what lay behind those closed doors—living quarters, laboratories, storage places, or something else. It was unnerving how uniformly clean and utilitarian this facility looked. No distractions, no decorations, just the sheer veneer of functionality. Was this truly a workplace for the Pheilett? Randel didn’t know. He couldn’t know. He couldn’t, if not for Suit. She knew. This was a real workplace but also more than that. Much more.

The moon also served as a space station. An old one by certain standards. Facilities like this had safety measures in place that allowed for quick evacuation—namely, portal terminals and emergency escape pods. The pods were small spaceships in their own right, capable of traveling to nearby planets. Suit just had to reach the outer sections of this facility where the escape pods were situated and then she would be out of here, flying through space. With some luck, she might even manage to shake off any pursuing ships. With some luck? More like a huge miracle. Still, some chance was better than none.

Randel walked on but as he was about to pass yet another nondescript door, Suit jumped closer to it and entered a rapid series of symbols on a small panel. The door slid open and she hurried through, pressing a button on the other side to seal the door shut.

“Commencing decontamination,” an artificial voice spoke in an alien language. “Please stand by.”

Neon lights washed over Suit’s naked body, making her skin tingle. The green goo on her necklace sizzled.

“What’s this?” Wolf asked, ducking low. He was trapped in this small room with seemingly no way out.

“Automated cleansing chamber to prevent contaminants from getting through,” Suit replied as the lights turned red and a jet on the ceiling sprayed something into the air. “It shouldn’t harm us, in spite of our different biology. Hopefully it’ll get rid of any nano-cams, though.”

“Nano-what?”

“We don’t have much time,” Suit said. “We need to think. Listen carefully.”

This was not the way to an emergency escape pod—Suit had been thinking about that only as a distraction. This place, she remembered well from the Inspector’s memories. Once the decontamination was complete, she would be allowed through to a recreational center beyond. Places of relaxation were typically shielded from mental communication to prevent mental noise and allow for rest, and so there was a good chance that the Inspectors wouldn’t be able to read her mind in there—at least not directly. It didn’t mean that her thoughts were safe, only that her collar would need to compile the data and send it through different channels. Still, if her memories could be believed, this place would slow the Inspectors down.

“Decontamination completed,” the voice chimed, and the wall in front of them opened to a bright, flooded corridor. Shallow water surged gently into the bottom of the decontamination chamber, lapping at Suit’s ankles.

Lee wondered what to do now. He had shown his hand, sort of, gaining a slight advantage but revealing that he remembered this facility. What would be his next step? Taking hostages? No. Tamie didn’t believe for a second that she would find any Pheilett in here. It was more than likely that this entire block of the facility had been emptied for this little show. She had to get far from here; rush through the facility and emerge on the other side of the moon, where they were least expecting her. But that would be problematic too, Suit reckoned. Security measures aside, these three-eyed aliens were amphibious—and so many of the rooms were underwater, designed with Pheilett in mind. Suit’s body was unused to swimming and her lungs were weak. Since many of the experiments needed air there were dry quarters too … but recreational centers such as this one were mostly underwater. Her options were limited.

“What?” Wolf asked, incredulous. “Then why did you make us come here, huh?”

“I didn’t have the chance to think that far,” Suit said, stepping out into the corridor. “This was a room that the Inspector knew very well, so I chose it.”

Water splashed and sloshed, faint light shimmering under Suit’s feet, and the floor began to move. It carried her slowly forward and saved her the effort of walking. The water felt cool around her feet, a touch too cold perhaps but bearable.

Lee stepped off the moving corridor to peer into the first room. It looked empty and completely bare, but only on the surface. Down below, under the water, the room opened up to an entirely different world. The floor was slanted, plunging deep down and disappearing from sight amid a whirlpool of saturated colors. There were lights down there, colorful lights, screens with huge displays and also some sort of kitchen area with neon signs. A bar, perhaps? Did these aliens have underwater drinks? The idea seemed absurd and fascinating.

“Focus, idiots,” Tamie said. “We need a plan. We can’t go down there. We’re trapped.”

“No, this is perfect,” I said. “This is a place for relaxation. We can finally relax.”

“You don’t say?” Tamie said. “I suppose all’s good, then.”

“I’m sorry to say,” Lee added, “but I think some of us took this only instincts plan a bit too far.”

I rolled my eyes. “You wanted me to use my talents, didn’t you? Listen carefully, then, because I’m going to do something I’m really good at. I’m going to do nothing—I mean, I’m going to relax. I’m good at that.”

I sat down in the doorway, into the cold water, crossing my legs and closing my eyes. Running around in this moon facility was pointless. I was tiring myself out with it and worse yet, the Inspectors were expecting me to struggle. They counted on it for sure. So! If I wanted to do something truly unexpected, something they hadn’t been able to foresee? I had to stop struggling. I had to stay still and relax.

“Brilliant plan,” Tamie griped. “I’m sure we’ll be safe and sound if we just took a nap here.”

“Shh,” I said. “I know what I’m doing. I am wise beyond my years. We will calm down, and we will do it together. I’m going clear our head and let these negative thoughts go. Lee and Wolf, you’re in charge of loosening the muscles in my arms and legs. Suit, uh, you’re going to supervise them and tell them how to do it. Tamie … you can count sheep or something.”

I felt Tamie’s annoyance bubble up, but I let it go. I was in charge of our head, so it was my duty. No, duty sounded too much like work. It was my pleasure to empty my head. Yeah, empty would be nice. All things considered, I was in a good mood. Way too good mood, for someone who was at the mercy of aliens after having murdered one of them. For someone who might never see the sun again. Never see Devi again. I frowned. No, if anything, Devi was the moon. Not the color-changing moon of Nerilia, but the silver coin moon of Earth. Devi was like that. It fit her well.

I wanted to cry.

I wanted to laugh.

I wasn’t very good at clearing my mind, I knew. Never been. Quite the opposite, really. In my defense, I doubted that many people would have been able to meditate in my place. I was being tested by aliens who played God, by beings who could read my mind and end my life with a snap of their fingers. My only hope for survival was to remain interesting. As soon as I lost that, my usefulness was over and any reason to spare my life would be gone.

It would have been so easy to give into panic. To give into fear, to let that sense of futility wash me away. So why did I hold on anyway? How could I hold on against such a tide? Where was this stubborn refusal to let myself fall apart come from? I didn’t know. I didn’t know, or perhaps I didn’t want to admit it to myself. It certainly didn’t fit my own image of myself. The me who always took the path of least resistance. But … enough of this! I was chewing myself up for nothing. Silly me, this was the opposite of relaxation.

The shades hadn’t been able to loosen up either; I could feel how restless my limbs were. I paid them no mind, restricting myself to my head. Weird. Curious! This was yet another thing that would rouse the Inspectors’ interest. So far, we had proven that we could work together by merging our minds—something that came quite naturally. Next, we had proven that we were capable of compromises too; we kept rapidly changing which one of us was in control. And now we were dividing up our body. It was impractical, of course, useless for anything besides relaxation. I wasn’t even certain whether it was truly possible. I had only one brain and one set of nerves, right? The motor functions of my limbs originated from the brain too. How the hell was I able to share a brain with the shades?

Nevertheless, I was doing fine. Sure, my mind was all over the place and the shades couldn’t keep my limbs still, but we succeeded in sharing a body. The Inspectors must have been salivating over the new data they had just collected. I felt a tingling sensation all over my body at that thought. Well, maybe it wasn’t because of that thought. Another shiver ran through me and I felt weirdly disoriented.

“Need to open our eyes,” Suit said and did so. She stepped out of the terminal, having successfully performed a jump to another part of the facility; Inspector Hartigulmathin’s private laboratory. I gasped at this revelation even as my legs moved me toward the nearest plastic table.

“Oh, you cheeky rascals, you tricked me!” I said in mock surprise. “You weren’t trying to relax at all but navigated to this place from memory!”

“And counted sheep too,” Tamie added drily. There was a long black rifle on the plastic table, double-barreled and without any trigger. Tamie picked it up and turned it over in her hands. It weighed less than it looked. Its smooth obsidian surface was familiar to the touch. To the eyes too; it matched her prosthetic leg. Only the orange veins were missing.

“We need to hurry,” Lee said, stepping back to the terminal. Suit pressed some buttons on it, but the terminal stayed inert. Disabled—the Inspectors were already onto her scheme. No more fast travel. No matter; she had the weapon now.

“So, what’s this?” I asked as my hands gripped the gun tighter. I yelped as something stabbed into both of my palms at once and would have dropped the gun if it hadn’t latched onto my flesh. A creepy, squelching, sucking sound was coming out of it.

“This is one of the late Inspector’s experiments,” Suit said, adjusting her grip on the gun. “He kept it as a secret from the other Inspectors, hoping it would bring him fame once he solved one last design flaw.”

“Which is?” Wolf asked just as orange lines appeared on the rifle’s surface. They transformed the rifle, the components around the grip sliding and shifting until a transparent tendril snaked out and curled around my right wrist.

“Only creatures like us can use it,” Suit replied. The tendril struck, burying itself into her wrist and she grunted in pain. Not very user-friendly, this rifle.

I staggered backward, feeling nauseous as I watched the tendril suck my blood, visibly siphoning the angel blood out of my body. I wasn’t quite sure whether losing the orange liquid was bad or not, but it sure as hell wasn’t pleasant. Already, the veins along my hands and forearm were throbbing more than ever before.

“Oh, damn.”

I forced my eyes away from the disturbing sight. Just in time too; light flashed within the terminal and a bipedal robot suddenly appeared—the same model that strangled me when I killed the Inspector.

“Oh, damn!”

The robot tried to grab me, but Suit reacted faster by pulling the rifle’s mental trigger. The entire upper body of the robot vanished into thin air and then there was a delayed, loud bang that made her flinch. The terminal flashed once more, another robot arriving, but Suit fired again and the robot disappeared along with half of the terminal. Deleted from existence. The deafening noise arrived a heartbeat later, a loud pop as air rushed into the displaced mass.

“Just what is this gun?” Wolf asked, his ears ringing. “I don’t like this. Feels wrong.”

But Lee didn’t hesitate. He pointed the rifle at the far wall and pulled the mental trigger, cutting a wide hole through the wall to the next room. No stopping now; he hurried over. The new room was full of cages occupied by all sorts of creatures. Humanoid beasts, wild and loud and little more than animals. Monkeys with four arms, gorillas with enormous palms, hairless twisted little creatures with three eyes, and more. There was a common trait in all of them, however; they all had bulging veins of angel blood.

The room’s entrance opened, but Lee fired the rifle before the robots on the other side could enter. Bang. The first wave of robots vanished but more of them were coming, so Lee aimed for the cages and let loose multiple shots in quick succession. Some of the veiny beasts disappeared right away, but the luckier ones spilled free of their cages. Panicked. Hungry. Bloodthirsty.

Lee wasted no time creating another hole through the wall to escape. Bang. He could barely hear now. His palms were beginning to feel hot, his veins burning. It was the rifle; using it wasn’t without costs. He fired another shot anyway, beheading a monkey that tried to follow him. The creature’s torso flopped to the floor in a spray of blood.

“We can’t use this gun,” Wolf said, wincing as Tamie demolished another wall. “We’re going to pay for this. It smells of the Astral.”

The next room was full of robots, but a few more shots cleared the way.

“Your instincts are correct,” Suit said. “This gun displaces a piece of the Waking World into the Astral Plane. It’s mimicking a demon’s power by bending space.”

She entered another room, barely taking a look around before blasting her way to the next one. She was close. Very close—the source of the pull that they felt all this time was just a few corners away. She turned into a corridor that was sealed off by one of those falling doors, but a single shot of the rifle put a gaping hole through it. So much destructive power! It wasn’t even a flashy thing; no light, no sound, no warning. Just the pure absence of material from one moment to the next, and then the noise of air rushing into the vacuum.

“First Soul Eater, now this,” I said, shuddering. “If these are simply replicas of a demon’s power, I hope to never find out what an actual demon is capable of.”

“Funny you say that,” Suit said, “because—”

“Must you talk so much?” Tamie said, gasping for breath as she ran down the corridor. “We’re being chased, if you hadn’t noticed.”

More robots were coming up behind them, and these ones had guns too. Gloves off already? Seemed like they really didn’t want Lee to come this way. He fired behind him before the robots had a chance to shoot, then ran on, increasing his speed—until his body stopped responding. His body flopped to the ground, carried by his momentum, scraping his skin raw on the floor. He was paralyzed from the neck down.

“The collar,” Tamie gasped, but Wolf was already reshaping Soul Eater, spreading it over his limbs, stretching it to its utmost limits to form an exoskeleton around himself. He pushed himself off the ground, fired at the robots behind him, then ran on. Wobbling, limping, constantly reshaping Soul Eater to move his paralyzed body. The pull was close.

The collar stung me, injecting something into my neck. I gasped, my mind clouding over until a coughing fit took me. I spat orange. Angel blood dribbled from my eyes and nose too—cleansing the poison. Amid all of this, Lee had the presence of mind to twist around and shoot the robots behind him. Wolf ran on.

Suit blinked the glowing liquid out of her eyes, running as if reaching the source of the pull would save her. She simply had no other option. The Pheilett sent robots to kill her, paralyzed her body, and injected poison into her veins. If she stopped, if they caught her, they might do something worse. So she ran on, her palms burning, her forearm getting heavier with each shot she fired at the robots. But she reached it.

The room Wolf had just blasted his way into was bathed in an oppressive red light. The chamber had a single occupant floating in its middle; a naked woman stretched out by her limbs, her wrists and ankles plunged through small portals. Her head was bald, a mask covered her lower face, a thick tube was attached to her chest, and that was all Wolf could take in before the robots arrived.

Lee threw himself to the ground, rolling forward, retracting Soul Eater from the waist down to turn it into a shield that covered his back and his head. He came out of the roll kneeling, huddling in front of the captive woman as the robots opened fire at him. The bullets – if they even fired bullets – slammed into Soul Eater and actually damaged the material, making it bubble and burst. Tamie set to reshaping the material, closing off the gaps. Wolf stopped breathing when he noticed that some sort of heavy gas was filling the room. Already, he felt dizzy, the burning in his veins more pronounced, his vision swimming. Either the gas or the rumored nanobots had caught him.

Randel’s skin crawled. Angel blood trickled from his nose, from his ears, from the corner of his eyes—but it wasn’t enough. He was beaten. He was falling apart, and yet he wasn’t afraid. He felt no pain. It was the strangest thing, really. He teetered on the verge of losing his body. The verge of death. But even as the robots shot Soul Eater apart, even as the gas choked him, even as he bled orange, he lifted his gun and smiled.

He looked the demon in her pupilless gray eyes as he shot her.