As the door slammed in front of him, Jask turned around to look at Kara. Her face was tense, her eyes narrowed, and her grip on his arm tight.

‘What was that for?’ he asked.

Kara pulled him further away, down the mercifully empty service corridor. ‘Are you blind? Did you look at her belt?’

‘The majordomo’s?’

‘Yes, who else? She had a gun, Jask. When have you ever seen anyone excepts the guards carrying a gun?’

He frowned, then replied, ‘Never.’

‘Exactly.’ Kara tugged at his arm again. ‘Will you move?’

At her insistence, he began following her along the service corridor, though where they were going he could not begin to guess.

‘There’s something going on,’ she said as they walked, ‘and I don’t trust it. Think about it for a moment. What doesn’t add up?’

Jask thought about it for a few moments. Kara had always been a quicker thinker than him, but even still, it didn’t take long for him to work out what she was hinting at.

‘We knew about the Third Lady days ago,’ he realised aloud.

‘So?’ Kara pressed.

‘Why are we only finding about this person just now?’

‘Exactly. And why is the majordomo armed?’ She glanced around, prompting Jask to do the same. ‘And just look at this. These corridors should be full of servants. Where is everyone? How big could a welcome retinue possibly need to be?’

‘So...’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t get it. What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied, ‘but I don’t trust it.’

‘Where are we going, then?’

She shrugged. ‘Somewhere away from wherever the majordomo wants us to be. She wouldn’t need a gun if it was safe.’

They walked for a while, in silence. At first Jask tried to work out what was going on, but he soon gave up. Working things out was such a new thing, and he didn’t think he was very good at it. All he could tell was that he felt very strange and just a little frightened. The change to the world had been so quick, he felt he had almost missed it. Nothing seemed to have happened and yet everything was different. The service corridors were empty, he and Kara were hiding away from the higher-ups, he was scared and couldn’t tell why ― it was all just wrong.

After a while, they arrived at a small sitting room, one of the poorly-furnished, half-maintained ones given to the servants so they could pretend they were cared for. It had three small circular windows with thick glass, and a few clusters of old chairs and tables, and it was as empty as all the service corridors they had passed through on their way to it.

In one corner, a tall, polished piece of metal acted as a mirror, and Jask looked into it for a moment, first at himself, his dark hair, the darker eyes, those protruding ears guests occasionally mocked him for. But then he looked at the uniform he was wearing instead. The simple page’s uniform: a black waistcoat over a white shirt, with smart trousers and shiny shoes, both black.

Everyone had a uniform in the Sanctuary. Servants and security and higher-ups all had theirs, unchanging, banners of their station, of rank and with it designation and purpose; the purpose to their existence, as the Sanctuary would have it. And the guests had theirs. Vibrant, diverse, fluctuating yet so very telling. You couldn’t look at a guest and see every aspect of them that mattered in that single glance, but you could look at two guests and see immediately which one of them was more important.

With a sigh, Jask walked over to one of the old chairs and sat down, crossing his arms. He was beginning to think it had been a mistake following Kara. She had spooked him with her urgency and her talk of guns and mistrust and hiding, but maybe that was all it had been ― a spook. Maybe it was just coincidence. Maybe it really was someone so important they needed all those servants. Maybe all the guests had just been whispering because they knew that too. Maybe the gun was ceremonial, or a change of protocol, or just something Kara and Jask didn’t know about. They were only servants, after all. Why should they know anything?

‘How would we know?’ he asked, suddenly, sitting up straight. ‘When it’s over?’

Kara furrowed her brow. ‘I didn’t think that far ahead. I suppose we’ll hear people outside. Or we’ll get a shift change.’ She put a finger on the glowing green face of the timepiece strapped about her wrist.

Jask looked down at his as well. Shifts were twelve hours, and the timepieces beeped when they changed. They could beep for other things, too, rare things like year-end ceremonies and whatnot, but usually it was just a reminder that another twelve hours had flown by, lost to the same ever-growing past as all the others.

Again, Jask wondered if they had overreacted, and his eyes sailed to the windows.

Outside them, something flickered.

A dark shape flitted past, across all three, in a flash. Kara, looking the other way, did not appear to have noticed it, but Jask stared. Could he have imagined it? All this had certainly set him on edge; maybe it had just been a totally innocuous shadow, or even nothing at all, just a tiny, fleeting hallucination.

Then it came again.

And then another, farther away from the windows. Far enough away that it didn’t blot everything else out, that it wasn’t a shadow, that it was in sight for more than just a fraction of a second, for long enough for Jask to recognise the unmistakable grey-green flicker of the devils.

‘Oh no,’ he said, the words escaping unbidden. He heard them almost as if they belonged to someone else, and that let him hear just how tiny and frightened they were, and he thought of them a little like how everyone always was in their dreams… floating in the ocean, surrounded by the wailing of the devils, above a deep chasm.

Kara was staring at him. ‘What is it?’

As she turned to look at the window, more devils sailed past. More and more, rising to ten, then another ten, and Jask quickly lost count. With each one he saw more of their forms. There were tentacles trailing away behind them, fins at their sides, eyes at the front, three that he could see but maybe more, and gills and scales, and arms like an octopus’s, reaching forwards, and their whole bodies rippled like waves as they moved.

‘Oh no,’ Jask said again, for he could not think of anything else to say.

‘They’re close,’ Kara whispered. ‘Right outside. How can they be right outside? They don’t come this close.’ She took a step back, away from the windows. ‘This isn’t right. What’s happening?’

Jask shook his head at nothing, or maybe at everything. ‘Do you think, maybe… Maybe the gun was for a good reason? Maybe they were trying to protect everyone… Maybe they didn’t tell us anything because they didn’t want us to―’

Something impacted the Sanctuary.

The sound came from below, a cacophonous crack and a great rumbling. The vibrations hit at the same moment, and the whole room began to shake violently, hurling Jask and Kara from their feet. They slammed against the walls and then flew back the other way, crashing through furniture until they landed near the door, and as Jask scrambled to his feet again, he realised the shaking had already stopped.

That was when the alarms started.

Jask had never heard the alarms before. He hadn’t even known that Sanctuary had alarms. But there they were, blaring from the ceiling, loud and harsh.

Neither of them needed to say anything. They both started running, with one place in mind ― the assembly station. There were assembly stations all throughout the Sanctuary, dozens to each deck, but it was so huge that the distance from where they were then was still great.

Jask was the faster runner, but he hung back. Kara had landed badly during the shaking, or maybe been hit by something, and she was limping along with a wince for every step, wobbling as though she could fall at any moment, so he heaved her arm around his shoulder and helped her forwards.

With every second that passed, the alarms seemed to be growing louder. He knew they weren’t, but his mind kept telling him otherwise nonetheless, again and again, to the point where he almost believed it.

As they neared the assembly point, they finally began to see people in the corridors again. Other servants ran past, pages and engineers and cooks and countless other purposes told of in their uniforms, each one sprinting, frightened, none of them hesitating for a second as they passed Jask and Kara. Not even for a moment did any of them consider helping.

When they finally stumbled through the heavy doors and into the circular chamber of the assembly point, it was thick with people of all ranks. Servants, guests noble or not, and higher-ups all alike were standing around shouting at each other, desperately trying to work out what was going on. Jask heard someone yell that there was a leak down below, someone else reply that there had been an act of treachery from inside the Sanctuary, and a third person scream that the devils were inside.

The sound of a gunshot silenced everyone. Over the heads of the crowd, towards the middle of the room, Jask could see that a guard had climbed on top of something and was holding his gun up in the air. An insignia on his shoulder declared him a captain.

‘Everybody calm down,’ he said, his voice loud and clear. ‘These rooms are the safest on the Sanctuary.’

‘Where is the majordomo?’ someone shouted.

The captain hesitated. ‘The majordomo… is establishing the situation. She will be with us presently. We will remain here until we receive orders otherwise. My men have sealed the doors. Nothing can get in unless we let it.’

‘Does that mean the devils are inside?’ came another voice.

‘No.’ The captain turned to face that direction. ‘We don’t have all the facts right now, but I very much doubt that’s the case. For now, I just want everyone to remain calm. We will all be fine.’

By that point, however, Jask was sure most people had stopped listening. They were all talking to each other, murmuring quietly at first, but the volume was slowly growing. Many were arguing, some were just talking, a few were crying, and all had gone pale and wide-eyed.

Jask turned to say something to Kara, but instead his eye was caught by a flash of light a few metres away. It was the lock on one of the doors, he realised. Sparking. Little spatters of electricity burst out from it, scattering through the air like tiny bright stars blazing into life for just an instant before fading out again.

As he looked at it, Jask reached out a hand and tapped Kara on the shoulder, nodding in its direction. In the seconds it took for her to turn, he felt that the sparking had intensified. And then it came ― the sound. A sound everyone there had heard before, in their dreams, those nightmares.

It was low, drawn out, half-human. A wail, a terrible deep keening. The cry of a devil.

Someone screamed, and then there was chaos.

People started running in every direction, except there were too many people and no directions to run in, so everyone was jostled about and shoved into one another. Jask found himself pressed up against a wall in an attempt to avoid it, while in the middle, the captain was yelling that the assembly points were impenetrable, but no one was listening.

Somehow, in the midst of it all, Jask lost track of Kara. One moment she was there; the next, she had vanished into the panic.

By some measure, it seemed like hours passed, even though it was really only seconds. Then a great burst of sparks and electricity crackled out from the door and it creaked and cracked and bent in the way, and two long arms slithered through the newmade gap.

On the other side of the room, some of the guards had managed to force open one of the other doors, and people had begun funnelling out of the assembly point, many stumbling over one other and driving the people in front of them into the ground in their haste to escape.

Jask followed around the edge of the chamber so that he would not be caught in the stampede, keeping careful eyes on the arms as they forced the door open further.

Somehow, he was finding a strange fascination in watching as more of them poked through, as the doors bent back, and as more of the devil became visible. He saw the forefront of its head and discovered that, seen in full, it had no less than seven eyes, all black and glistening. He saw also that its scales seemed to cover the entirety of its main body, but did not extend to its arms. He wondered briefly how difficult it would be to kill.

Then he stepped through the door and the spell broke, and he was running. He could hear the thing still wailing, and he heard screams and supposed that someone had been left behind, and hoped with all his heart that it had not been Kara.

Some way down the corridor there was a line of guards. They stood with their guns raised, and so fearsome did they look that when Jask came around the corner to face them he skidded to a halt, briefly petrified.

‘Hold your fire!’ shouted a voice he recognised as the captain. ‘Get behind us, page!’

Jask did not need to be told twice. He sprinted between the guards, pursued by the cries of the devils as they echoed down the corridor, from wall to wall, rising in volume. Everyone else was running away, heading for another assembly point, for the next deck, maybe even for escape pods, as if that would do any good, but Jask stopped and turned back.

Arms lashed around the corner, curling around doorhandles, the lights on the ceiling, anything that gave them a grip, and they pulled with them a devil, surging forwards at such speed it couldn’t turn fast enough and slammed into the wall. That didn’t seem to do much other than disorientate for a moment, but a moment was all the guards needed.

‘Open fire!’ cried the captain.

Jask clamped his hands over his ears as the corridor filled with the deafening sound of rapid gunfire. He watched, frozen, as bullets ricocheted off the devil’s scales. Some found purchase in its arms or in the tentacles trailing behind it, the few soft parts of its body, and those parts bled green blood, but the devil did not seem to care.

It pulled itself along the corridor faster than anyone could have run, though none of the guards were running. Landing in front of one, it reared up, revealing a soft underbelly. He tried to fire, but his gun only clicked, empty.

As he reached for another magazine, Jask, staring from behind him, saw two thin, intersecting lines, like a cross, on the underbelly of the devil. They widened, slow at first, then fast, as four flaps peeled back to reveal a deep, vacuous mouth filled with concentric rows of teeth. The guard stared up at it for a moment, and he did not make a sound even as the devil’s tentacles lashed forwards and wrapped around him, and as its mouth descended over his head.

Confused as to why none of the other guards were firing at it, Jask looked to them and saw they were firing at something else instead. There were more devils coming down the corridor. Their wails filled the air, louder than the gunfire, as Jask turned and ran.

He knew he wouldn’t make it far. The devils were faster than he was. The guns did nothing. There were surely more of them than the guards. He was going to die, right there, right then.

To the left there was an open door. He turned through it into a small room and came to a stumbling halt, staring at the two guests who were crouched behind a table in there.

‘Leave us, page!’ snapped one of them.

But Jask didn’t leave, because someone arrived behind him. Spinning around, he came face to face with the captain from before, who slammed a fist into the button beside the door with a wordless yell.

As the door was sliding shut, an arm slid through and wrapped itself around the captain’s waist. He dropped his gun as it pulled him backwards into the door, which was only just open enough for the arm itself to fit through; a gap much too small for the captain, and yet it was still pulling on him as he fought against it to no avail.

Jask didn’t bother thinking. He did the only thing there was to do. He grabbed the gun, held it in two shaking hands, aimed it, and fired.