There was no rhythm for meeting your rescuers quite as profound as the pinging of bullets against buildings.

In the gloom of an amber-tinted dusk, Senrii strode across the Plaza, heading for the building that Cornartis had set up as his headquarters. There were guards at every entrance and snipers at every window. Together they laid down a withering fusillade of shots at any of the Chimeras who dared to come too close.

Cornartis himself came out of the building to greet them. Senrii had only seen him a couple of times, but she recognized him from the news reports. He was already storied despite his comparatively young life and the fact that he was a red-blood. An explorer, a partisan, a militia leader...

If he could do all of those things without a Symbiont, imagine what he could do with one.

Senrii clasped his wrist. Strong grip! "Maga Ductrix Senrii, I'm Captain Cornartis. One legion, fresh and ready," he said. He glanced twice at the Chimera bringing up the rear. "Keeping strange company, I see."

"Yeah, I pick up strays," Senrii said. He's not like the others. He talks."

"Hmm." Cornartis raised an eyebrow, but that was the only response he gave to the odd information. He gestured toward the door and led them into the building. It seemed a smaller, less ornate version of the palace, but that just meant that two millennia of decay had reduced them both to beautiful amber tombs.

There were at least sixty men in this room, and that didn't even count the ones at the windows on the upper floors. Cornartis had laid out his maps on a shelf jutting out from the wall.

"Pretty detailed." Senrii joined the soldiers clustered around the maps. They glowered at the thinking Chimera but made room for her.

"Thank you, Era. Your father and I make a good team."

"Dad? What's he doing?"

"Trying to cure 100 diseases at once, I think." Cornartis narrowed his eyes as he looked at Thiyyatt. "Her."

"Yeah, she's kind of a bitch." Senrii ignored the princess's angry huff and turned back to the map. The city itself was just a blob on the paper, but the surroundings themselves were clear enough. "Is that a mountain pass that I see?" she asked. "If we head northwest, that's what, sixty miles until we're back in West Vallus?"

She couldn't wait to be out of this Chimera-infested dungheap. Leave the valley to the monsters; she'd take good human land any day.

"It is. We know nothing about the Chimera population between here and there, though. They've been on the move for some time, and we came down the same way that you did."

Drop pods, no scouts. Bile. "How did you even know where to drop?"

Cornartis grinned crookedly. "Practice." He looked at the map again. "Plus, the West Valley territory nearby is Nxtlu. We'll have to tread carefully."

"One thing at a time. Can you get me out of this deathtrap, captain?"

"Yes ma'am." Cornartis threw a salute; it was a strange one, not a fist on the heart, but a straight hand placed near his forehead. "And I'm sure you'll have a chance to help, too. Your father wouldn't want us starting this relationship out on an uneven footing."

"Relationship?"

"He seemed to have in mind that you and I would make a good match."

Senrii felt Piotr stiffen behind her. She stiffened herself, for that matter. Cornartis wasn't a bad guy, not if he'd come all this way to break her out of this place, but that didn't mean that she wanted her father arranging her marriage.

"Well," she said, putting those thoughts from her mind, "what you say we bust out of this place?"

#

Eztli spewed an invisible mist down the alley, then turned and ran for the tunnel.

Cornartis's men were painstakingly climbing over the massive corpse that Tvorh had brought down when they entered the city, but the Chimeras were closing in from all sides.

The Chimeras chasing Eztli passed into the cloud of invisible particles. She heard their flesh react with the bacteria that she'd seeded in the air; she heard the roar of flame, felt heat on her back.

That would hold that path for a minute or two, at least.

"Move, move," the red-blooded militia leader shouted. Eztli was not accustomed to taking orders from her inferiors, but she didn't mind following that command.

Cornartis's men had set up a cordon, and the lines were folding inward, retreating over the corpse and back down the tunnel. Tvorh and Senrii each had a street as well. A thicket of impaling vines that the three of them, plus Thiyyatt, had constructed together blocked off yet another of the alleyways.

Thiyyatt, despite her intractability, had as much at stake in escaping the Amber City as the rest of them. She stood like a motionless goddess in the midst of her own street, but her hair whipped about her. Gnashing snakes' heads at the ends of the strands bit and poisoned the Chimeras who got too close to her.

Vicious though Thiyyatt was, Eztli was glad that the girl was on their side.

For now.

The sounds of gunshots died away as the last of the soldiers retreated into the biomobile tunnel. The Magi followed into the darkness, and Eztli brought up the rear.

"Vines in the hole, Tvorh," Cornartis shouted.

Erus Tvorh nodded and spat out a small ball, a spike seed, toward the mouth of the tunnel. As Chimeras squeezed down past the corpse blocking the opening, Cornartis's legion opened up again on them. Bullets devoured flesh, and more Chimeras fell; one of them tumbled right on top of the seed.

The seed blossomed, drawing from the Chimera's substance to explode into a thicket wall.

The runners burst through each corpse in turn, growing larger and larger.

More of the monsters squeezed down. More died.

A terrible eight-eyed face peered through the crack from the Amber City. The Harbinger. Eztli shuddered as his spider's eyes fixed on her.

Did he recognize her from the outbuilding where they'd first met? The outbuilding where she'd started this chaos?

Because Eztli knew that this--the organization of the Chimeras, their presence here at the Amber City--had started with her. She'd released the Harbinger.

In an amber outpost a hundred miles away, she'd awakened the Synaptic Relay, or the Master-Mind, or whatever one might wish to call it. And though Tvorh had killed it with the Symbiont-killer just before they left the palace, the Chimeras were still here, still organized.

The Harbinger, that strange Chimera who was somehow wrapped up in all of this, gave a lipless shark-toothed grin and touched a growing vine of thorns.

Immediately, the thorns withered, starting from the monster's hands and working backward into the tunnel. Chimeras cracked through the brittle vegetation, spilling into the darkness after them.

Cornartis's men loosed, and the Magi unleashed their own biological weapons, naphthgel and neurotoxins and spines that ripped through the air, as the group retreated.

All but the speaking Chimera who had greeted them at the entrance to the palace. It--he--howled a bone-chilling warcry and stumbled toward the mouth of the tunnel.

As bullets zipped past him and flaming fluid splashed around him, he dropped to all fours. Lame though he was in one leg, Eztli wouldn't have wanted to be the target of that stumbling charge.

"Mind!" the Chimera screamed as it reached the barricade of bodies and thorns. It sprang straight into the Harbinger's face.

The two monsters disappeared behind the barricade.

No longer poisoned by whatever the Harbinger had been doing, the thorns sprang back into being, devouring the corpses at the wall. They tore into the Chimeras who were halfway through the passage, spilling fungal spores and ichor into the air.

"Bile," Senrii said as Cornartis held up a hand, instructing his men to cease fire. Again, cease fire. Odd words. Where did it come from? "Did a Chimera just save our lives?"

The thorns reached the massive corpse and blossomed out from its body, covering the mouth of the tunnel in a matter of seconds.

"I believe so," Eztli said, trying to control the tremble in her voice. The friendly monster's actions reminded her of Yaotl, and she had the urge to mourn for it, beast or no.

"We're clear," Cornartis said, not noticing Eztli's discomfort.

"Yeah, but we have to take care of the ones on the outside, too," Senrii said, swapping a new magazine into her pistol.

"There weren't that many when we came down. They must've chased you into the city. You're in high demand, Ductrix."

Eztli smirked. "Can you blame me for being irresistible?"

Piotr's lips tightened. It was as close to a frown as Eztli had ever seen on his face.

Enough. "Let's get these men moving again," Eztli said.

The jog through the tunnels was downright easy, and the scent of fresh air, even if it was humid and touched by the decay of the jungle, was glorious. The sun had set. Beyond the open area around the city, the jungle waited like a wall of night.

Eztli watched as they all filtered out of the tunnel. Not just Cornartis's legion, which was 200 strong, but also the compatriots with whom she had been working for the past few weeks.

Tvorh and Aoife had their heads together, and they were murmuring to one another.

Senrii came out checking her equipment. Cornartis handed over a few grenades, which she accepted with a smile.

Piotr's frown only deepened.

Irritated though she was that Piotr was allowing his personal feelings to intrude on the mission, Eztli couldn't entirely blame him. She knew what it was to suffer from a broken heart.

"Well, Ductrix," Senrii said, stepping up alongside Eztli, "now we just got an easy hike through Chimera infested jungles, making sure that several hundred men are fed and watered while we avoid carnivorous plants and keep their lungs from burning from the spore layer, and after that we'll be home free. Or you will, at least." She took a deep breath. "The rest of us will be deep in enemy territory. No offense."

"It sounds simple enough." Eztli offered Senrii a smile that she didn't feel.

"Ah, guys?" Aoife said, jerking her head toward Tvorh. He'd perked up as though he was paying attention to a distant sound. "My guess is that we've got a problem."

"Skywhales," Tvorh said. "Getting louder. They're heading this way."

"What kind of idiot captain would risk a trip over Vallus?" Senrii asked. East Vallus and West Vallus often traded with one another, but usually they traveled around the edges of the constant, crossing the center line at the northernmost or southernmost tip so as to avoid the Chimera-infested Valley.

"Not captain. Captains. A lot of them." Tvorh's voice was soft. "An armada. And... there's another noise. Like fire. Take a drop pod's engine, and multiply it by a thousand."

The beetle on Eztli's back fluttered, and she gritted her teeth, trying to ignore the disgusting sensation. "Get within the tree line and hide," she said.

"But –" Senrii began.

"Now."

Eztli suspected that she knew exactly who had come for them, and why.

The beetle fluttered again. Smoking Mirror take her uncle for inflicting her with that insectoid horror. Things were about to get much worse.