“The kids!” Priya yelled. “George was taking them toward the mountains. They-”

“On it!” Flip was in the air again immediately, spinning to throw a hand out to point behind her. “Mesa is that way!”

Priya and I stared at each other. I could feel a tidal wave of adrenaline smashing my emotional balance to bits. It hadn’t been safe to keep the kids here, so we’d sent them away in the direction farthest from all the dangers we knew about. The mountains, the damn safe mountains, had just blown their lids. Were the kids still alive? Micah would be terrified. He hated volcanoes. How far had they gotten? If they’d been up top when the eruptions happened…

Judging by Priya’s flaring nostrils and wide eyes, she was having similar thoughts. After a moment, she shook herself and grabbed my hands.

“I’m putting all I have left into healing our other flyer,” she said. “Get someone to throw me on top of a dinosaur. I’m counting on you.”

“How can I find the kids?”

“You can’t. I can’t. The flyers might be able to. If no one finds them, I’m sure George and the kids will meet us in the middle. I’m… sure they will. Your job is to get everyone else there and keep it from turning into a bloodbath.”

Her words snapped me out of my spiraling panic. I’d been thinking of charging off into the jungle, but that was idiocy. If the kids were still alive, they were probably running toward the center as fast as their legs could carry them. Running to find them wouldn’t get them to safety any faster… but I could totally see them getting to safety and wanting to turn around if Priya and I weren’t there.

“Right. Right.” I dropped Priya’s hands and slapped myself lightly on the face, trying to get my brain working straight. “I’ll figure it out. You get our other flyer into the air.”

Clarice was still standing nearby. “I’ll send people out after our… jungle teams.”

“Yeah. Get everyone back here. This is higher priority. We need to regroup and count our people, make sure we’re not missing anyone. Put William on figuring out how we’re going to carry our exhausted and injured people. And… send Andy to me if you see him.”

I didn’t know exactly what I’d do with the speedster yet, but there was one thing that was immediately obvious: the volcanoes were intended to herd us all into a confrontation in the middle. If no one had headed in that direction already, we’d all arrive at about the same time.

What had Flip said about the mesa? It was about the same size as the clearing we’d started in, so I doubted it could hold more than one team’s worth of dinosaurs and people. Keeping this from devolving into a bloodbath was going to be… difficult. Ideally, Andy could find a way to defuse tensions...

The trouble was, I had no fucking idea how to convince everyone not to fight.

“Orders, boss?” Andy skidded to a stop beside me.

This would be a great moment to pull another brilliant plan out of my ass, but none of the shit I was coming up with glittered in the slightest.

“Boss?”

I shook my head. “We need more info. Get to the center and scout it out. See if it’s empty or if people are there already, and find out what that dome is. Whatever you do, don’t fight anyone. If you get into trouble, just run. Get back here, and we’ll make a plan.”

If he was fazed by my uncertainty, Andy didn’t let it show. “Gotcha.”

He disappeared into the undergrowth and I busied myself trying to get our huge crowd of people moving. I made sure Priya was strapped securely to the back of a snakeropod, alongside five others who’d exhausted themselves. Our injured were a problem. Strapping a healthy person onto a dinosaur’s back might leave them with bruises or muscle cramps, but doing that to someone whose entire side was a mass of third-degree burns would just undo all the difficult work our healers had done to stabilize them.

It took us a precious ten minutes to rig up a solution. We cut bamboo poles and used Improvised Equipment to secure our sheets around them, then tasked twenty-six relatively-healthy people with carrying those who were severely injured on our makeshift stretchers. We also had four prisoners from Red Team who had offered surrender. They all seemed young, and ill from the gas, but we still needed to blindfold and guard them. That left only a few dozen of us ready and able to fight.

As we worked, smoke continued to fill the sky overhead, and flakes of gray ash started to rain down.

It didn’t take Andy long to make it back. “Orange and Green had scouts at the plateau, but the main bodies of their forces aren’t there yet. Each of them fired a few shots, but they didn’t hit. I don’t know if they were actually trying to hit? It seemed like they might just be trying to keep me away.”

“Were they working together?”

“No. I saw them fire abilities toward each other, too.”

It was hard to say if that was a good thing or a bad thing, so I let it pass. “What about the dome? What’s up with that? I’m guessing it doesn’t keep us out of the middle?”

“Nah. It’s not a physical thing, just like… a hologram or something. You can walk right through, and then you get a message that toxic gases and air contaminants from outside won’t pass through the barrier. So, what do we do?”

“I’m not sure yet,” I told him.

For the first time, Andy’s ebullient disposition faltered. He stared at me searchingly, looking concerned.

“Do you have any ideas?” I snapped at him.

He shook his head and took a step back, face troubled. “No. Sorry. Just… let me know when you figure something out.”

“Anyone else have any ideas?” I asked.

“We took out the Red Team-” someone started saying.

Striped Sunhat cut him off. “And some of us died! You want to die?”

It wasn’t a great start to a problem-solving session. I got us marching as people exchanged angry remarks, keeping an ear out for any brilliant ideas in the vicious argument that soon developed.

I didn't hear any.

We hadn’t gone far when Flip returned. She was coughing, and her voice was raspy. “I couldn’t stay up in the sky any longer, not out near the mountains. I’m sorry; I didn’t find the kids. Good news is, the lava is moving slow, slower than a person can walk. There’s a barrier partway up the mountains that I can’t pass through, and the flow just reached it a moment ago. So unless they got hit by debris from the initial explosion, they should be safe. Wherever they are.”

I hadn’t realized how much of my mental energy was being tied up in suppressing my own panic until I had a good reason for that panic to recede.

Okay, I told myself. Focus. The biggest threat to the kids probably isn’t the volcano itself, it’s being shoved into a tiny area in the center to fight with the other humans. How do we survive that?

Just fighting everyone was a terrible option. Aside from the moral considerations of mass-murder, it just wasn’t practical. Unless Green and Orange Teams had already torn each other to pieces, we wouldn't be able to wipe them out: we were at half-strength, at best. Maybe some kind of strategic prodigy could have figured out a plan for an injured and exhausted force to take out two larger armies simultaneously, but nothing was coming to me. And... I had a feeling that even if I'd been keeping a brilliant general in my pocket, they'd ask me if we could avoid fighting. Taking down larger, more powerful forces was definitely something that had happened, historically.

I didn't remember any battles where it had been done without casualties.

So... avoid fighting, if I could. But could I?

A fight was likely. The other sides didn’t trust us, and they’d been told we were the enemy. They’d been offered prizes for fighting us. Moreover, the central area was only a little bigger than our starting clearing. It wasn’t big enough to hold all four teams, or even two… and it looked like it would soon be the only safe place around.

Our victory over Red Team had made the prizes all-but-unreachable for the other teams. That might make them give up, but even without any extra incentive, they’d still want the plateau. Everyone would. We all needed it, if the air was going to be filled with ash and sulfur, if lava was going to ooze across the lowlands.

The volcanic flow might harden before it reached us, but I doubted it. The molten rock would move at the speed of Spectacle to the distance of Drama, ensuring we had to take action to escape a 1,000-degree death.

And in the only place to escape to, there just wasn’t enough space for all the people-

Hm.

Actually, maybe there was.