Kaiden Parles wanted to be a stunt car driver. Maybe he wasn’t so good at school, maybe he was a little skinny and scrawny and short. But he was a good kid, at least as far as he figured it – and his momma said so too so that counts for somethin’.

If further proof is needed, how about this: they say a man might be measured by the friends he keeps. Well if Kaiden’s weren’t angels, at least they were true. And yea sure, things hadn’t been easy at home, but any damage his drunk daddy might’ve done to his moral fiber got set right by his uncle. Out of all of ‘em, it was his girl that believed in him most. She was the one who listened, and dreamed, and kept him on the straight and narrow.

Funny though, at a time like this the only thing he’s thinking on is his car. A silver Honda CRX. Maybe it was a rust bucket, but it rode light and turned tight, and it was his.

A scissor of serrated folding mandibles cuts deeper into his shoulder. Oh sure, he’d love to scream, but his throat is swollen and choked. When the jaw pulls hard at his body, he can feel the floor sliding under him. It yanks, and yanks, jolting distances of inches. Kaiden bends his arm, fighting the burning cramped stiffness of his muscles. His shaking fingers reach towards his shoulder.

Then the stringer stabs him in the lung and all the air goes out of it.

Kaiden remembers the time that his older brother bought him beer for spring break and thirty of his friends had to run from the cops out the first floor windows.

The ragged saw tooth of a mandible shears through muscle and tendons and an artery pumps wet into the open air.

He remembers the time he rolled the window down at a hundred miles an hour. His girlfriend had her feet on the dashboard; and a boy in the back seat had been smoking a clove cigarette, convinced it was marijuana.

A knife stab sting punches between the bones of his forearm and leaves burning, bruising fluid inside.

What about the time his cousin’s dog chewed open the presents on his little sister’s birthday? How funny was that?

A second Redburr crab bites deep into his upper arm and pulls. Abdomen twinging, back arching, Kaiden tries to pull in a breath and it bubbles in from his wound into his collapsed lung. The next dragging pull puts the grain of grey soil scraping underneath him, and he sees in his blurring vision the shadow of a raised blue tile, and then the tunnel takes him –

...how funny was that?

Seated comfortably on a divan settled against the inner surface of a Klein Bottle, Aefore reaches an indolent hand back and motions for her sisters’ attention.

“I do believe they are performing quite well,” she purrs. Magnesium white hair streams upwards from her scalp, and her gold-red hands glitter like fire opals as they curl idly around a milky, pinkish rhomboidal crystal.

At her sister’s foot and nestled into a bed of soft cushions, Ciforre turns a page in her book and it creaks like settling stone, groans like the bones of the mountain. “Zero point one two standard deviations above performance projections on their preliminary swarm combat assessment,” she intones, not looking up.

“He’s killing everything,” Befor’s head sighs in contentment as her various fuschia parts drift like shipwreck flotsam overhead. “It’s wonderful!”

Ciforre snorts derisively.

“Oh don’t worry,” the dismembered pixie taunts back. “Your boy is in what, seventh place? Eighth? That’s not so bad,” she chortles.

“Hmm.” Amber eyes fix on Befor. “What does our mortality rate look like?” Aefore queries, changing the subject.

The trio looks down through a round spacial distortion at a bird’s eye view of the plaza. Six red markers surface in the blue of the tile, then vanish again.

“The doofus from last night, and two more, Fa Mai Lin: 42, and Kaiden Parles: 17. That poison’s super awesome by the way: no widdle voice, no widdle screams? They go bye-bye, and nobody notices.”

“I thought the Parles boy was in our top 40 candidates,” the crystal stops turning in Aefore’s fingers as they slowly curl into a fist.

“After our little Kalogeropoulos debacle,” the third woman looks up over the rim of her spectacles, “I took the liberty of more proactively reviewing our candidates’ resonant affinities.”

“And?”

“Parles top three were ‘Engine’, ‘Axel’, and the color ‘Red’”

Snarling in revulsion, Aefore waves her other hand dismissively. “Good riddance, Kaiden. But that’s only two, I see six critical life signs on the field.”

“Ugh! Cee-fee’s little crew of team-spirit weenies are gonna save the rest of them. They’ve already got whats-his-name Charles stabilized.”

The warrior considers the situation thoughtfully. “Well, we have yet to deploy the Elder Redburr.”

“After your Cultivators have already regrouped?” Scoffs a silky electric contralto: a fourth voice. “You’ll be lucky to secure two.”

Administrator Defour alights down amidst her sisters, then reaches into a small satchel at her side. Plucking with two fingers, she withdraws and then suddenly a large leather high-backed chair appears. She catches it and then settles it down carefully to face her sisters.

The missing fourth administrator is much changed, with large angular eyes, and sharp thick brows. Her animal nose, her ears, and her skull have all lengthened to exaggerate her inhuman features. Like her sisters, her face and her hands are refined and solid, but her sinuous body is a tangled, web-like volume of branching nodes and pulsing energy. Every part of her is made up from a semi-solid effervescent plasma in pale chlorine and incendiary boron.

Collapsing into her chair with a sigh, Defour throws her neuron tangle of legs over the armrest and breaks into a leering grin. “I’ve already got eight,” she gloats, pretending to inspect a fingernail.

The heavy whump of stone, flat on floor causes the green pixie to flinch back into her seat, leather blackening where it touches her. Ciforre glares at her sister, palms pressed down against her stone book.

“This isn’t a race to kill them all, sister. I saw your numbers, you’ve lost both a mid and high grade candidate already! Are you really still so aggrieved with us you would sabotage yourself? Unacceptable!”

“Peace!” In a microsecond, Aefore resides between her sisters, one fist gripping folding violet, the other snaring branching verdant. Defour snarls, her hands claws and roiling caustic plasm streaming off her. Ciforre scowls, eyes black as the void and light bending around her until it nearly starts to tear. “I said, break it up!” Aefore shoves them both either way, and they topple furniture as they fly.

Befor squeals quietly in glee, tapping her hands together in a volume-less clap while C and D slink back shamed but still angry. Aefore raises herself up to her full height, an immovable, indomitable pillar. Then she lifts the small crystal up for the others to see.

“Our strategy thus far has been to obscure our losses from the humans. It is our evaluation that this group has a high risk of insurrectory reprisal. We risk spoiling the whole batch.”

“I hardly am worried about –”

Gold cuts off Jade with a raising, warning finger. “I can see the value of your approach,” she smiles. “Very traditionalist.” Her face then grows severe again. “But losing top performers can only hurt you.”

“So what do you suggest?” Grumbles a chastised Ciforre.

The prism crystal begins to glow, and then a rising mosaic of panels flash open into the air. Each square contains an image of a face, along with numbers, statistics, connections, and projections.

“My dear sisters,” Aefore buzzes soothingly, “it’s time to start making some trades.”