•

1

Exit Vector… Exit Vector… Exit Vector…

The piece-of-shit plasma screen on the far wall of the club must have been broken; through a rectangle of static the screen flashed two words, “Exit” then “Vector,” then again, then again.

Then again.

Mori blinked. Mori frowned. Exit Vector… what the fuck was that supposed to mean? Mori didn’t know, and her head spun too much to care, so she turned away, tried to fold herself deeper into the pocket of shadow she had claimed as her own at the bar. The vodka was helping, but not nearly enough. The music pounding in the club was still crap, the newsfeed behind the bar was still droning about the latest plague fatalities, and drunk as she was she was still Mori Kim Marr, seventeen years old and without a prayer or a paddle, without—the counselor at the school had loved this one—a pot to piss in. Mori Kim Marr, oh yeah, and not nearly drunk enough, oh no. With numb determined fingers Mori brought her drink to her lips and slugged it back.

Oh, Jesus, yah! The vodka was warm, disgusting. She grimaced, turned in her seat as if to puke.

The man in the next seat watched with mild fascination.

“Hey, you okay sweetheart?” But his eyes didn’t lift above her chest.

Mori gave the creep a really good sneer, all tongue and bruised lips. “Oh, take it home to your dog, man. I think Rover’s getting lonely for the big red one.”

The man flinched as if Mori had slapped him. He had recently gotten new eyes, Mori could tell—the pink outline around the corneas was always a dead giveaway. Wal-Mart must be running another special. But the man “sported” a comb-over and his nose was purple with broken veins. Pathetic, Mori thought.

“Uptight little…” The man shook his head, looked to the bartender for support. “Up-tight!” he whined.

“Leave her,” the bartender growled. “She bites.”

Mori lifted her empty glass. “Ding ding.”

•

It had rained all day, and now it was night; Mori still sat and drank, the demons still hungry for her soul.

The door to the club swung open, letting in another cluster of black laughing shadows. More teenagers. Sharp limbs, sharp hair. There was a draft of wet air from the traffic-choked street. It was still raining out there. “Hey…” And there was a sharp sudden lull in the level of conversation. Mori frowned, turned in her seat to scope the new arrival.

Arrivals. Two of them, a boy, all flash and handsome, and a woman made of metal, a robot. “Call my wife,” Mori heard someone say. “Her walking electric dildo has arrived.” No one called the robots Synths or Mechs or Artificials anymore, they were just “robots.” The boy and the lady made of metal edged through the crowd toward the bar. And the level of conversation returned to normal.

Big deal, Mori thought. Still, she felt a pang of protective streetsmarts; it wasn’t uncommon for robots to get bashed in this part of town. Not her problem, though; her problem was that her drink hadn’t materialized.

She turned back to the bar. The man with the comb-over watched the boy and lady robot take seats on Mori’s right. What was he still doing here, Mori wondered, didn’t he have an ugly wife to lie to? Oh, who cares, Comb-Over didn’t have a clue. He hadn’t sold two pints of hemo this morning, had he? Hell no! And he hadn’t swallowed all those Red-Barons that Mori had liberated from Fritz’s stash, had he, and he hadn’t… hadn’t…

A fresh drink was pushed into Mori’s field of vision. “Mori?”

“Oh,” she managed. “You’re a god, Brendan.”

“And you’re a drunk, Mori Kim Marr.” The bartender considered. “Cute one, though.”

“Give it up. You’re not getting me to pose for any more ‘art’ holos or motion captures.”

“That so? You’ve been here since morning, you’ve drunk half my stock. How do you plan on paying for all those nasty drinks?”

Mori took a long slow sip, put the glass down. She leaned forward, one hand pressed hard to her brow. “Oh…” Her eyes slid toward the man with the comb-over. “The usual, I suppose. Guess I should start being nice to him.”

The bartender grunted, shook his head with disapproval, moved away. Mori stayed as she was, hand still pressed to her head. She imagined how she must look, slumped in her stool at the bar, sitting between a creep with a comb-over and a mechanical citizen with no legal rights. Oh yeah, Mori thought, let’s hear it for the girl. She was just another rat-skinny teenager with neck-length black hair in dire need of a good wash, short black skirt, boots, bomber jacket. If she’d laid on the make-up, she’d make a passable retro-goth-army chick. Play it as if she were going for irony. As if.

Behind the bar, the newsfeed said, “—sixteen thousand dead in latest Z-12 contamination. Citizens are advised…”

The handsome boy said something quick and urgent to the robot lady, words Mori didn’t catch because someone yelled, “Oar! Fookin’ hell, Brendan! Change the fookin’ feed!”

“Oh go back to England, asshole.”

“I’m from SCOTLAND ya bastard! And there ain’t NO MORE SCOTLAND, is there?!”

“Well, thank god for that.”

The speakers in the club intoned, Woe to you o Earth and sea…

Jesus, Mori thought. She noticed that Comb-Over was checking the time. Uh oh. If she was going to get him to spring for her drinks, she’d better get it together, start being nice to him. She sat up, brushed her hair back, when, clear as a volt-signal through the best hardwire, she heard the handsome boy say to the robot lady, “How many Red-Barons?”

Mori forced herself not to turn, listening intently as the robot lady replied, “Sixteen. She should be dead.”

“Sixteen Red-Barons!” the boy hissed. “Jesus!”

Mori couldn’t help it; she turned and looked at them.

The boy was about Mori’s age, maybe a little older. He was cute: tall but not too tall, grey eyes, rakish hair. Very flash in the Crüzer coat with the short collar. And he had the ‘burns thing going. But the robot lady—she was a real piece of work. Whoever had built her had gone balls-out nuts with the 19^th century clockpunk thing. Under a broad-rimmed black hat, two eyes of iridescent orange glowed from delicately ornamented plates of gold. “Yes, sixteen, poor child,” the robot lady said with her articulated jaw, Jesus, she could actually talk!

And the boy and the robot both turned to stare at Mori.

Oh, shit, Mori thought.

She was in trouble.

Fritz. The Red-Barons she’d lifted. Hadn’t Fritz said something about a pair of well-heeled customers very anxious to make a score? Oh, damn it. Stealing the Red-Barons was bad enough; why had she taken them? All of them?

She was in very, deep, serious, no-screwing-around trouble.

“Excuse me, Miss,” the robot lady began. “We…”

Mori spun away and leaned close to the creep with the comb-over, even slung an arm around him. He wasn’t going anywhere, now; Mori decided his name was Harold.

“Brendan!” she called to the bartender. “The bitch thirsts!” Then, as if sharing a private joke with a lover, Mori brought her lips close to Comb-Over’s ear, smiling as she hissed, “Your name is Harold and my name is Maude, okay? Follow my lead and I’ll get us out of here alive, I’ll make it worth your while Harold,” then rearing back with grotesque exaggerated laughter that sounded ultra-bogus even to her ears.

Comb-Over said, “What?” But his eyes were on the robot and the boy.

The Robot Lady started to speak, then paused as only a true automaton could; she came to a complete and total stop. Her eye-servos glowed a fraction brighter. Then her chin came up and her head swiveled a few degrees with a sharp motorized whir. “Billy.” Her cute companion perked up. “Twelve meters, second room, rear wall. Do you see it?”

Poster Boy—Billy—followed the robot’s gaze. His coolness vanished. “Oh, no. No, no, no. That is not good.”

Once again unable to resist, Mori turned to see what they where looking at.

The robot and her boy were focused on the broken plasma screen at the back of the club. The screen still flashed “Exit” and “Vector” again and again.

“Trista will not be pleased,” the robot said.

“Well, it’s too late now, isn’t it.”

“Alas.”

“The whole place, then?”

“Save what you can.” Mori thought she heard the robot sigh.

The robot and Billy stood from their seats at the bar. Behind her, Mori felt Comb-Over stiffen, and he stood, too. His hand fell hard on Mori’s shoulder, hard enough to hurt, and Mori winced, “Har-HA-rold…” not quite believing what she was seeing as the robot slipped out of her trenchcoat and snapped out a pulse-cannon from her forearm.

Mori’s eyes flew open. “WAIT a minute—!”

“Yes,” growled Comb-Over behind her, his voice dropping an octave, “wait.”

“Sorry, don’t think so,” Billy said, more with regret than indifference, and he reached under his jacket and pulled out…

2

“Wait,” growled the man with the comb-over, his hand tightening on Mori’s shoulder.

“Sorry, don’t think so,” Billy said, more with regret than indifference, and even as his robotic companion uttered a half-warning, Billy reached under his jacket and flipped on a pair of eyeglasses with an attached mini-microphone.

Crazily, Mori thought Poster Boy dons his MC-headset, everybody dance! in the same second that Comb-Over savagely yanked Mori back and the robot snapped up her arm-mounted pulse cannon and held it level, the same second that Billy’s lips formed two syllables behind the mic:

“—bum—per—”

…and something invisible and hard roared past Mori, a fist of wind that hit the man behind her like a sledgehammer. There was a splash, hot and wet; the man growled, the sound twisting into a roar, not human. Mori grimaced, tried to wrench herself free, but the man’s fingers coiled and contracted like steel cables around her neck.

“—the FUCK!” Mori screamed, writhing in the shitstorm of blood and debris.

The club erupted with shouts, panicked limbs, the shocked jerky galvanism of bodies stumbling backwards from sudden violence. The bartender issued a high-pitched demand for a physically impossible sexual contortion and he dove for cover as Billy bit quick consonants against his mouthpiece and every bottle of Mori’s precious poison behind the bar shattered in a spectacular succession of broken glass, shards flying.

“Billy!” the lady robot cried, the pulse cannon still held at the ready.

Mori clawed and jabbed at the creep behind her. “Let me GO—!”

The rush of fleeing patrons became a frenzied push for the doors—but not all; some of the figures in the club stood and watched, immobile and silent, uncaring as others shoved past and ran for their lives…

…and unseen by anyone, the broken plasma-screen at the rear of the club flickered silently, “Exit” then “Vector,” again and again…

“Billy!” The robot urged with an electronic crackle. “The girl—”

“—is ours,” growled the creep who held Mori by her throat, a creep who mere seconds earlier Mori had dismissed as an over-the-hill perv with a comb-over; now she twisted in his grip with renewed fury, her teeth gritted with pain as she managed to half-turn, her fist drawn back and ready to paste the bastard in his ugly face—

Mori froze, disbelieving. His face.

It was a face carved by nightmare blades, a cranium shaped by a deviant god. Splintered spikes of yellow protruded from high and swollen cheekbones, the skin an impossible indigo, white blood dribbling from the spot Billy’s weird weapon had cracked the fucker’s skull. But the eyes—the eyes were the worst. The eyes were still human.

With a mouth that stretched long and hollow like trough in a furnace, the thing bent close to Mori and hissed, “Ours.”

“Ours,” echoed the others who had remained in the club. They stood now like bony wraiths, their hands claws, a blue electric mist curling.

Mori blinked, gaped, her heart a trip-hammer. “I… I… I…” She strained to turn around, beseeched the boy and his robot. “I’ll replace the damn drugs!”

Billy scowled, cursed, yanked off his glasses and microphone. He threw a pointed glance at his mechanical partner. “Terrible shot. All yours, Frost!”

From under the bar, Brendan the bartender shrieked,  “THE AUTHORITIES ARE ON THEIR WAY, YOU VILE, TERRIBLE PEOPLE.”

“That’s Saint Frost, you ill-mannered whelp.” The robot snapped back her arm and pulse cannon with a menacing maka-KLACK! and turned slowly, mini-motors whirring. She scanned the shadow figures who stood ready to pounce, she faced the creature holding Mori by her throat. The thing growled, the cable-like fingers of steel tightened, and Mori winced, furious, scared-shitless. Billy winked at her. Jesus, Mori thought. Drop dead, dickhead. Just let me get out of this…

The robot, Saint Frost, addressed the creature. “The girl is ours. Leave.”

Mori began, “I’m not—!”

But the thing grunted, hissed, gurgled: “I’ll TWIST you into a LAMP, you Edwardian STEAM driven PIECE of SHIT…”

“Victorian,” Saint Frost corrected, her electric orange eyes burning with an ever-growing intensity. “And this is how we dealt with unpleasant scum like you when Victoria ruled the planet.” There was a kinetic flash and eerie ZWHOP!

Two beams shot from the robot’s eyes, lanced like javelins through the gloom of the club. Mori’s cheek was nearly singed as the beams sliced past, struck the creature holding her. Roar of rage and pain, and the creature fell howling. Mori staggered forward, wrenching the creature’s (now very heavy) hand from her neck, realizing only after a beat and a half that she held the entire severed limb; the twin blast of beams had cut the creature’s arm off at the shoulder.

“Oh—” Billy began, perhaps in praise, but he never finished the compliment, for the shadow figures standing in the club leapt now like preternatural and savage cats, springing straight up into the air, then descending fast with claws outstretched.

Saint Frost extended her hand to Mori. “Child, come with us—”

Billy pulled a handgun from his jacket, a black gun with many many many barrels and opened up with rapid jagged fire on the shrieking wraiths that fell on him like a shower of broken glass.

Mori considered the outstretched hand for the barest of seconds, then swung the severed limb still in her grip and clocked the robot across her golden metal head.

The shadow wraiths fell and tore at Billy, a fury of harpies, some dispatched by the blasts of his weapon, others shrugging off the effects and reaching for him anew. They shrieked and scratched like demoniacs. “Frost!” Billy yelled.

“No,” Frost said, warding off another blow from Mori and reaching for her. “Child, please.” But Mori had had just about enough of this scene, and she shoved at Frost again, struggling to get past and out of this fucking joint—

Billy turned in Frost’s direction, saw only a half-blur of Frost grappling with a figure in black; he shouted “No!” and fired off a poorly aimed shot just as Mori fought her way clear—

BLAM!

—and Mori caught the shot square in the chest, right through her heart.

At the rear of the club the broken plasma-screen roared with a frenzy of static, then flared insanely bright with two words

EXIT VECTOR

Mori fell back slow, her hands limp at her sides, her chin tilting toward the club’s black ceiling, a large bead of blood arcing balletic out of the gunblast wound.

Across the city, on every display screen:

EXIT VECTOR

The shadow wraiths all screamed in indescribable pain and melted up as if wiped away by an eraser.

Across the continent, on every terminal, every phone, every message board:

EXIT VECTOR

Billy and Saint Frost shared a nearly telepathic No and raced toward Mori as she crashed flat, head lolling, her lips parted and dead eyes wide with disbelief.

Across the planet, every word in every line in every book:

EXIT VECTOR EXIT VECTOR EXIT VECTOR EXIT VECTOR EXIT VECTOR EXIT VECTOR EXIT VECTOR

Billy and Frost knelt frantic over Mori, cradling her head, Billy pressing his hand over the pool of blood on her chest… as a soft wind swirled in the corners of the club, catching bits of debris, lifting broken fragments and whipping them aloft, a wind that gained strength and began to howl…

…and outside, across the tangled sprawl of the city with its massive towers of concrete and plasticine and steel, the people in the street took notice of the rising wind and the ascendant alien shriek, a sound at first no more than whisper but lifting, lifting. The people frowned, looked up. The sky…

“No!” Billy hissed, cupping Mori’s face. “She can’t—!”

“She is,” Saint Frost said, the wind and the shriek lifting, the air dirty with flying debris. “She—”

Suddenly, the loudest voice in the world boomed,

“DON’T DO ANYTHING, YOU’VE DONE ENOUGH.”

3

The loudest voice in the world boomed,

“DON’T DO ANYTHING, YOU’VE DONE ENOUGH.”

Oh, those idiots had nearly ruined it, ruined everything. Trista cursed in a language long dead, words never used by a human tongue. She gathered her weapons in a single sweep—short curved blade, her amulet and staff—and then Trista was at the Numi portal, bracing herself for the barest of seconds before she went through.

The Numi portal was flat and shimmering, an upright, door-sized panel of light that hovered and pulsed in the center of a spectacularly messy apartment, every inch of the walls covered with arcane equations and occult diagrams, X-Rays and weather charts and cybernetic schematics. Trista tensed at the humming edge of the portal, her frame lithe, her skin pale amber. Her hair was white, the color of bleached bone, cut in utilitarian pageboy. She looked like a teenager. She was more than 650,000 years old.

Gathering her strength for the pain of the crossing (and the battle to come), Trista shouted, “COVER YOUR EYES, IDIOTS, I’M COMING THROUGH,” and she leapt shoulder-first into the thin glowing frame. There was a jagged flash and WHAM! of collapsed air, and Trista Ska Shearn, last survivor of the ancient Cantaran race was gone, somewhere else.

Somewhere else: a city of stone and steel and tall brooding towers, a city that shuddered under a sky gone mad, a sky turned nightmare.

Moments earlier it had been night. It had been raining.

Not now. Now the sky burned an alien orange. Now a massive shadow the size of a planet descended like an inverted cup, stretching wider and wider over the city, a dome of lowering black. Winds howled and screams filled the trash-swirled air, sirens and alarms and scattered cries, the low-throated crack and crunch of buckling concrete, streets and buildings stretched to the limits of their structural endurance.

And on every monitor, every screen, every page, everywhere across the planet, two words burned: EXIT VECTOR.

Deep in the bowels of the city, in the dim light of a club wracked by combat and carnage, Billy Wolfgang and Saint Frost knelt over Mori Kim Marr’s prone and lifeless body. “She—!”

There was a crackle, an explosion of light. “—COMING THROUGH!” A thick tube of blinding white energy slashed from one wall, shot across the ruined club and disappeared through the wall opposite, a wall that stopped an airborne and blur-streaked Trista. She bounced off, fell like a rag doll to the floor, steam curling from her limbs.

“Trista!”

“We didn’t—!”

“Don’t…” Trista grimaced, rising to her elbows, wisps of grey lifting about her face, an unpleasant odor wafting. The Numi teleport had melted the clothes on her body, reduced the fabric to ripped steaming shreds. She clawed toward Billy and Frost. “Don’t… say… anything…”

She tumbled against them, pushed them away from Mori. Trista bent close, peered desperately into Mori’s dead open eyes.

“I fear that she’s—” Frost began.

“Not yet,” Trista hissed. “If I can… Get back, Billy! You useless cur! If I can… Ah. Argghh…”

Trista swung one leg over, straddled Mori’s body. And Trista plunged her hand through the gunblast gore of Mori’s chest, fished wrist-deep in blood and flesh and bone. Trista paused when her fingers found Mori’s heart. “Oh,” she whispered, eyes narrowing. “This will cost me…”

She turned savagely to Billy. “And it will cost you, boy! Oh, you will beg for death before I am through with you!”

“But I—!”

“Be quiet, Billy,” Frost warned, for Trista had turned back to Mori, her head lowering, eyes shut in fierce concentration.

“Mori,” Trista intoned. “Mori Kim Marr…”

Outside, the city shuddered and convulsed as if in the grip of an earthquake, as if battered by the end of all storms. An airborne tangle of debris came smashing through the front window of the club, and a dirty wind assaulted Frost and Billy and Trista as they crouched over Mori…

“Mori…” Trista growled, her hair whipped by the tempest, and she bent close, focusing on Mori’s right eye, the eye open, the eye dead. Closer, closer, and the eye yawned wide, wider, a pool of brown, a well, a tunnel…

It was like falling.

Faster and faster, dizzying now, a descent through circle after circle, down and down, and Mori…

Mori Kim Marr blinked. Mori’s mouth popped open. And Mori dropped away. In an instant she was less than a speck. Mori Kim Marr was falling.

Arcing away and reeling backwards at a terrifying speed through a tunnel ethereal and unreal, sinister winds roaring, and Mori was falling falling falling…

“MORI!”

At the incredibly distant and receding vanishing point of the rushing tunnel, a tiny figure reached toward Mori and called her name. “Mori! Reach for me! Take my hand!”

Mori could only manage a pathetic,  “Wha-a-a—?”

The distant figure, Mori saw, was a girl—no, a woman. White hair, weird eyes, who—? The woman grimaced and stretched, straining to catch Mori, to match her speed, and they both plummeted like skydivers down a bottomless pit…

No, the woman—said? And suddenly the woman’s voice was bright and sharp in Mori’s head:

Not bottomless. This is the Shift Eldritch, Mori, the corridor between life and death…

Mori seemed capable only of falling and falling. “What? Who…?”

It doesn’t matter! The  Shift Eldritch is not without end! You must take my hand! And there’s something else… We are not alone here… Look.

The woman reached desperately for Mori, fingers straining, the speed of their fall ever faster, faster…

Look behind you, Mori…

Mori knew with sudden and absolute certainty that her very soul was in perilous danger. “I—”

Look!

Mori looked over her shoulder. She looked in the direction she fell.

She screamed.

There, at the rapidly approaching bottom, waited a pair of eyes, a mouth.

The eyes were twin suns, the mouth the width of a horizon. Immense. Black on black. Mori gaped, gagged. The eyes without a face was every nightmare from childhood, every unbeatable villain, Echthroi and Black Thing and Emperor, it was The Dark. And the dark mouth stretched wide, the mouth knew her name.

MORI… the thing whispered, growled, purred, roared. It was the most vile sound Mori had ever heard—spiders in her head, maggots under her skin.

“What is it?!”

Still falling, faster, faster, the woman was now nearly within reach. Nox Golgoth. Her face, innocent and as unlined as a child, seemed suddenly weary, exhausted… even amused by Mori’s terror. Now TAKE MY HAND, YOU LITTLE DRUNKEN FOOL…

With a desperate grunt of exertion, Mori reached. Their hands clasped. And the dizzying, annihilating blur of the tunnel exploded…

…you little fool…

…and all was white, and then all was nothing.

•

Mori dreamed she was high above the city, no sound, floating. She watched a massive circle of black turn slow, slower, then spin no more; she watched a dome of shadow dissipate into phantom ash and fall away with a distant rumble. An eerie alien glow of orange bled to nothing in the night. A raindrop fell, then another. The rain fell soft on the city, the people in the streets, the rain, and Mori dreamed…

…oh yeah, she must be dreaming, because she was on her back and every inch of her body hurt like fucking hell, and yet these damn creepy dream creeps lingered, bent over her, looking at her. “Oh go away, creepy fucking dream creeps…”

Mori stopped. She realized her shirt was unbuttoned and open and her chest…

…her chest was sliced apart. “What—!”

“Quiet.” It was the woman from the dream—the tunnel, the Dark Thing. Nox Golgoth. The child/woman with the short white hair bent over Mori, her fingers on Mori’s sliced open wound, the fingers pressing the flesh together. Mori felt a burning, itching sensation as the wound was closed.

“My name is Trista,” the woman said, not looking up, intent on her work. “I have been waiting for you, Mori Kim Marr, for… for a very long time.” And now she lifted her chin. Jesus, Mori thought. The bitch seemed exhausted. She studied Mori for a second with pale ancient eyes, then turned away. “Finish for me, Frost.”

The Robot Lady, Saint Frost, leaned in and touched Mori with surprisingly warm metal hands. The Poster Boy, Billy, looked on nervously. And as Saint Frost saw to the cleaning up of Mori’s wound, she said, “It’s time for some answers.”

4

Mori Kim Marr thought, Careful, now.

Pretending to barely suppress a shudder (oh that was good, perfect), Mori put down her glass and said, “Please, explain it to me again. I was… dead?”

“Yes,” said Saint Frost.

“Oh, no. No way,” said Billy.

“Maybe,” said Trista, bored with the question.

Mori looked at the three of them—the clockpunk lady robot, the handsome boy (clueless! figures!) and the weird chick from god knows where—seated around her at their small circular table. They sat cloaked by smoke and shadows in the recess of a new bar, another bar, blocks away from the carnage and horror of poor Brendan’s club; the joint had been reduced to little more than a crater with walls. Mori’s unpaid tab was now the least of Brendan’s worries. Ah well… good! Screw him!

“Yes? No? Maybe? Which is it?” Mori demanded of the three.

“You wanted answers,” Trista said. “I never said you’d like them.”

Mori wondered if that was the weird chick’s way of saying Take it or leave it; if Mori stood from the table and made for the door, would they stop her?

Probably.

Hell, the way they had patched her up and hustled her out of Brendan’s, steered her like a dizzy child through the surreal tangle of streets and sat her ass down in this dump—it was like something out of an old spy vid. Wait, Mori told herself, watch and wait. And she reasoned (for the ten-millionth time) that this was all about the fucking drugs, man, stupid Fritz’s stupid Red Barons that she had stupidly swallowed, the drugs that had finally kicked in and assaulted Mori’s head with… strange things, man. Strange shit.

But Mori Kim Marr was no stranger to strangeness, hell no. She’d had worse trips than this—

LIAR she raged suddenly at herself.

—far, far freakier trips than this, so she would be cool, she would wait, and watch. And she would listen, because the weird chick from the astral fucking plain was talking again…

“—whether or not you were technically or physically dead isn’t important, girl. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are with us now, and that you are safe. Protected.”

“Protected,” Billy echoed, his grey eyes so sincere it was all Mori could do not to laugh.

“Be quiet, Billy,” Trista spat, saying his name like a curse. “Baaah. You pathetic drooling pup. You were instructed to safeguard her, not shoot her. You idiot.”

Though Billy was clearly terrified of Trista, he’d had enough of her unending torrent of disdain. “It was the Golgothics! It was a crazy fucking fight! There were so many of them!”

“True,” Saint Frost said softly. “The drugs in the girl’s system—”

Ah ha, Mori thought. Here it comes, now we’re talking about the drugs—

“—had elevated her metabolic rates beyond critical levels. She was shining like a beacon in the murk of that establishment… Indeed, the entire city block. We detected her pulse from leagues away.”

Trista’s eyes flashed to Mori. “I had not expected her to pulse for at least another year.”

“Indeed,” Frost continued. “The amount of hyper-methemphetics she ingested should have killed her. Instead, the infusion of drugs kicked-started the pulse. The Golgothics were all around her even before we arrived, waiting in the shadows like sharks circling before the frenzy. And even before Mori was…”

Saint Frost paused. The robot looked first at Billy, then tilted her head back to Trista with a soft mechanical whir.

“…even before Mori was, ah, wounded, she was unconsciously manifesting the outer folds of the Exit Vector. You would  not have been pleased, even disbarring the occurrence of the… accident.”

“‘Not pleased?’” Trista snorted. “No, this would be more accurate: ‘Trista was so consumed with pitch-black rage that nothing less than a pretty boy’s head on a platter would suffice to ease her fury!’”

“Hey, enough, you high and mighty—” Billy began, and Trista bared her teeth at him, aching for several pounds of his flesh, but Saint Frost raised a golden metallic hand between them.

“Peace, fearsome warriors!” Frost said, affecting the high-flung diction of a poet. “Sheath your sharp and bloody swords, for you are filling yon child with terror! See, even now she quakes with bone-chilled dread!”

That’s called withdrawal, Mori wanted to say, but knew she wouldn’t be able to keep a straight face, knew she would lose it… and again Mori felt a sudden flash of anger, directed at herself. And she wasn’t sure why.

She had planned on working the “street-smart-tough-bitch-who’s-really-just-a-scared-little-girl” routine until she saw an opening and lose these jokers—hell, she could play that shtick all day—but now Mori realized she wasn’t sure what was acting and what was real, she didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh or scream, whether she was merely incredulous or absolutely terrified.

And if there was one thing Mori disliked above all else… It was not knowing.

She reached under her shirt and jacket; she touched the fresh bandage on her breast.

As Trista and Billy slowly retracted their claws and settled back in their chairs, Mori began, “That thing… you know, that thing in the tunnel…”

Trista locked eyes with Mori, remained perfectly immobile, waiting.

“That was… real, wasn’t it,” Mori said.

“Yes,” Trista said, her porcelain face now the calm detached mask of an ancient statue.

She leaned slightly over table toward Mori, eyes lowered, unblinking. “Real. The Nox Golgoth.”

“And you don’t…” Fuck it, Mori thought. “You really don’t care about the drugs, do you. The Red Barons, or the money, or… any of it. You really don’t.”

Trista the statue frowned slightly. “The what?”

“That’s… that’s what I thought,” Mori said, scarcely believing the leap she’d made.

“No, you didn’t,” Trista told Mori. “But you do now.” Then: “Good.”

“Ahem. Billy,” said Saint Frost. The robot shrugged in the direction of the bar, and she and Billy stood.

“My liege?”

“Two for me,” Trista told Frost. “Three for her. She’ll need it.”

Frost nodded, and she and Billy sauntered away through the smoke of the club.

Trista leaned back slow, her eyes still unblinking and locked on Mori. “So,” Trista began, “shall we hear a tale of long ago?”

5

“Long ago,” Trista began, “long ago…

“Those two words aren’t adequate, aren’t enough: long ago.  The same is true of numbers, measurements, dates. Almost meaningless, all of it. It’s not your fault. You are human. I am not.

“I am Triiistaaskaasheearrn, or Trista Ska Shearn, if that is easier. And I am old. I remember when the sky was devoid of a moon, I remember a world filled with fabulous creatures and life-forms never known to humanity, almost all of which are no more, wiped away. Dust. Their bones are not in your museums, their likeness not found in any book or data file. They’re just… gone. And I am one of those creatures. I am Cantaran, the last of my kind.

“Cantara. Oh, you little human saplings, with your pathetic squeaks and grunts that you call language—you have not the words to describe it. Cantara was… Glory. Power. Magnificence. Ambition equaled only by its wisdom. A civilization and a people whose accomplishments would still dwarf yours even if your bumbling pathetic species continued unhindered for a million years. Cantara rose from the lava-cracked continents of the young Earth with white towers of crystal and light. Our spires pierced the sky, our minds knew all there was to know of our young and fertile planet, and we were the rulers of all we saw.

“We shared certain traits with the other emergent life-forms—traits, mind you, similarities. Not a common heritage, no. But yes, like humanity, we rose from the oceans, we crawled for a while, we were hunted, and we became hunters in order to survive. But our evolution was a lightning bolt compared to the slow-motion twitch and shudder of other species, the nightmarish—to us—and desperate dance of biological evolution via trial and error… and error and error.

“Cantarans could talk before we used tools, for example. We had a concept and philosophy of peace before we were forced to invent a word for war. Vague, I know. For even then—even now! Especially now!—the words remain insufficient. Abstract. Ah, I have heard it before. Believe me. I have heard it all before.

“Saint Frost here, allows her cast-iron heart to swell in my favor. Yes, she grants me forgiveness and allows me much, my steadfast iron maiden; Frost thinks I dress those long-ago-times with romance, embellishment, that the world that gave me birth could not possibly be as wondrous and noble and perfect as I paint it. And Billy—ha! Poor Billy. Don’t let him fool you entirely, he does think a thought every month or so. But poor Billy the wolfpup is a sad tragic product of this world, he thinks it is utterly impossible that power can be obtained without savagery, dominance won without cruelty. Regretably, from all that Billy has seen, all that he has been taught—he’s right. You too, Mori. Savagery and cruelty are the gods to which your people kneel; it is not your fault, young ones. But I speak not of this world but another, one that is gone. And as it happens, my people—the Cantarans—became somewhat obsessed with matters of power and savagery, dominance and cruelty.

“Ah. Fuck me. I leap ahead, just a little, but still. I leap ahead. Forgive me.

“So. We evolved far, far faster than any living thing on the land or in the sea—so fast, in fact, that even very early in our history, certain Cantaran scientists and philosophers hypothesized that perhaps we had not, in fact, risen from the primordial muck of the Earth; some of them speculated that we were a test of some sort, transplanted from another place, another world, and that we had forgotten our true origins.

“This was not true.

“It was proven beyond any doubt that we had indeed sprung from the Earth. Still, even we as mastered the land and the air and studied other planets within the solar system and beyond, even as we wove wonders and refined what you might describe as ‘super science,’ troubling questions remained, questions concerning our origins, our natures, and most importantly, our ultimate destination.

“For while it was overwhelmingly clear that we were the dominant species—we were not perfect. Oh no. The Cantarans were not so arrogant as to lay claim to perfection. Deficiencies existed, imperfections were real. And that galled some of us to our core. Some, not all. No, our great arrogance resided in the growing belief that we could attain perfection. And nothing would stop us. For we were bright and beautiful Cantara. We had mastered the world, and soon the universe; might we not acquire ultimate mastery of our bodies, our minds?

“There were two primary concerns that we wished… solved.

“The first ‘problem’ really wasn’t so bad. It was a condition we had dealt with and more or less accepted since the dawn of our race. Some saw it as the ‘price’ we were levied for our super-accelerated evolution, our superior intellect, and it was this: only 1 in roughly 1,000 of our people were capable of procreation, producing children.

“It’s true, Mori. The fact that this ran counter to the reproductive ‘norm’ of almost every other life-form on the planet lent credence—for a while—to the theory that the Cantarans had hailed from a distant sun. But as I said, it wasn’t so bad. It… ‘worked’ for us. For a species gifted with hyper-intelligence, a rapid child-growth cycle and a long adult lifespan… it worked for us. Our numbers were few, and our resources inexhaustible. It was our way. All hail Cantara! The afflicted—um, that is, the chosen, the blessed of our females bore the crown of motherhood with… honor. Yes, honor. However, some of my people began to see the 1/1,000 ratio as a ‘defect,’ an arbitrary quirk of biology that the Cantarans would do well without; it was an ‘imperfection.’

“But such a crack on the mask of our greatness paled in comparison to our second—and far greater—concern.

“I said earlier that we forced to invent a word for war. It’s true. Easily the greatest accomplishment of my people—compared to humans, say—was our unwavering and instinctual allegiance to peace. Benevolence. The safety and sanctity of the Cantaran tribe was all. But you people—!

“Billy! You have a saying. Don’t you. I know you do, and it’s this: A strike against one is a strike against all! But you don’t believe that for a second! Your race has certainly never practiced it! Please, save your examples to the contrary tucked within your beating heart and under your wagging tongue because I know, I was there. For all of it. So save it, boy.

“Listen to me. When I—yes, Mori may have another drink, give it to her—when I say Cantara’s one true religion was Peace, believe it. The preservation and safety of all our people was the one thing we held Holy above all else. But there were tiny, irregular… flaws. Those of us who did not belong.

“Deviants.

“There were so few, at first. We thought them sick. Diseased. Literally diseased. As in, suffering from an airborne virus. In human terms they were the criminals, the psychotics, the terrorists.

“A murder… You can’t imagine the effect of what you call ‘murder’ was to a Cantaran. Or the harming of a child, or a rape. It was… horrible. Unimaginable.

“And those who committed such acts… They did not belong. It wasn’t enough to banish them, jail them… erase them. Not enough. Increasingly the argument was made that their flaw was our flaw, that we were all… infected. We could not attain perfection as long as this abnormality was allowed to flow in a single Cantaran vein. And so we took up our great cause…

“Yes, we were forced to invent the word ‘war.’ But it was a two-fold invention. We also had to invent the word ‘evil.’ We declared war. On ourselves. On the evil within us.”

6

“War,” Trista continued. “We declared war on ourselves, the evil within.

“As you can imagine, many of my people scoffed at the idea. There was a gene for evil? A chromosome for bad behavior? To which several of our scientists—the ones trumpeting the charge for this particular issue—responded, Yes. And they pointed to it. Here it is, they said. It was nothing more fearsome than a single shadow among other shadows, a mere blob on a graph. But these scientists claimed they had isolated the single genetic ‘thread’ responsible for… hmm… all  acts iniquitous.

“It was a thread present in all Cantarans, an evil little seed, dormant in most of us but dangerously virulent in the few: the criminals, the disrupters, the deviants. Those who did not belong. And it wasn’t just us.

“A close examination of the ever emerging orders of mammalian life on Earth proved that this genetic thread—or one very similar to it— was not only present in the ‘higher’ hominids, it was a dominant factor of their makeup. The ‘evil little seed’ was hardwired and essential to practically every act the hairy brutes performed… A fact which only served to intensify the rhetoric of those who wished to purge any trace of ‘imperfection’ from our bloodstream. Look, they cried, pointing to your predecessors and ancestors, what you call Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. LOOK at their nightmare scrabble for survival! Look at the violence, the selfishness! Do we wish to share traits with THEM? Oh…

“Oh no. No, we didn’t. We were Cantarans. Perfection lay within our grasp.

“There were protests, of course, and from the usual quarters: the philosophers, the poets. What of moral choice? the philosophers wailed. What value the day without the night? the poets sobbed. But in the span of a single generation this quest for perfection, this desire to exorcise all ‘evil’ from our blood grew from an outlandish and radical idea to a cultural and unifying obsession. This was our…”

She paused. Mori could see Trista struggled for an appropriate analogy, something the idiot humans could understand.

“This was our Space Race,” Trista continued, “only greater, more consuming… All consuming. We proceeded without the benefit of a foreign power as an adversary, without a competing ideology to discount and disprove. Any dissenting voices within our people were dismissed as romantic abstractions, for this would be our great crusade, and once it was accomplished… Ah, once it was accomplished, we would share our enlightened state of grace with all of Earth’s creatures, and there would be no more terror, no more blood spilled in order to fill a hungry belly, no more kill or be killed. Cantarans would become the savior angels of the planet, we would right every wrong of a biology turned nightmare, we… we… Ah! Damn it…

“We were so screwed. We were doomed to fail. Of course.

“Nevertheless! Ah, another one, please. Get it for me, Frost? Make it a triple. Nevertheless! All of Cantara’s  resources were poured into the construction of the great, great machine, the Magna Machina Extracorporea— oh, I like the Latin—but that is a bit unwieldy, isn’t it. Yes, it is. What would you call it, Mori? A machine the size of a continent, a machine no larger than the head of pin or a grain of sand; its physical properties are unimportant. But know that this machine dwarfed anything that came before it in the size and scale of its purpose, its scope, for it would do nothing less than strip my people of all vestiges of ‘evil.’ Tell me Mori, you filthy little drug-grubbing girl of Homo sapiea, Century 21 AD… what would you call our great, great machine?”

Mori blinked, startled. “Are you seriously asking me?”

“Yes. Quickly!”

“Um…” Mori slugged back her drink, swallowed. “How about… Ajax?”

“Ajax…” Trista said, holding the word in the back of her throat with a hiss. “Well, perhaps there is a brain not yet drowned in that ocean of alcohol you swim… Ajax. It will do. So…

“So we built our great temple, the great extractor ‘needle,’ our mighty mechanical savior. Ajax.

“Individual extraction of the undesired genetic thread from each Cantaran was deemed too costly, too time-consuming, too… cold. Too clinical. Oh, no. An individual-by-individual extraction of the ‘evil little seed’ would provide us with no ritual, no great, shared experience. Advanced as we were, we liked our little dramas, our theatres of smoke and music and incense. If we as a species were going to make that great leap, that chosen step of evolution, it would big.

“Grand.

“A holy event. And as the day, the sacred day approached, there was… Ah…

“Ah. There was… a girl…”

Trista paused.

“A stupid, selfish, unthinking little twat. A girl. Her name… is unimportant…”

“Oh, come on!” Mori interjected.

Trista’s eyes flashed like ice. “Ex. Cuse. Me.”

“Child, I wouldn’t,” Frost began, but throughout Trista’s tale, Frost and Billy had kept Mori sedated with a steady flow of drinks, and now Mori’s unease and inhibitions had evaporated.

She leaned across the little table toward Trista.

“You can’t say, ‘there was a girrrrl,’” Mori drawled. “What, she was a friend of yours or—hic—something? Huh? You already told us you were the—ack—last of your kind. It’s got to be you!”

Trista’s eyes narrowed. She considered Mori’s weaving, expectant face—considered the screaming corridors of pain she could wrench open wide within Mori’s frail human body—and thought better of it.

“Sit,” Trista said, “back.”

Slowly, carefully, Frost and Billy pulled Mori back into her seat.

Oblivious to the bullet she’d narrowly missed, Mori made huge eyes at Trista. “Well… we’re all waiting!”

“There was,” Trista continued through slow teeth, “a girl…

“This girl, this stupid, foolish girl… She was one of the blessed. She was the Holy One of the Thousand. She was with child.

“She should have been overcome with joy, the fool. But no. Not her. She was afraid. The birth and raising of a child ran counter to the grand, master design of this little bitch’s life. No matter how revered her status would be in our world, this little cooze knew only one thing: she didn’t want to have a damn baby.

“So. This girl chose the darkest path imaginable to our people, the worst sin. This was most definitely something we had no name for, for it was nearly… inconceivable. She wanted to abort her child.

“But the sacred day of the Extraction was drawing near; Ajax, the great machine, was nearly ready. The stupid, stupidgirl didn’t know what to do. How, how in the world would she be able to kill her child—if all the evil in the world was taken away?”

7

“How,” Trista said, as if to herself, “how in the world would this stupid, selfish girl be able to kill the child growing inside her—if all the evil in the world was taken away?”

“Hey, whoa,” Mori said. “Hang on for a second, Astral Goddess.” Every trace of drunken foolishness had evaporated from Mori’s face. “Abortion and Evil are not, like, automatic partners in crime. Just because this chick didn’t want to have a damn baby doesn’t make her evil by default.”

“So you say,” Trista said. “And spoken like a true citizen of your world, with every iota of the selfishness you consider a virtue. But in my world, in Cantara… Oh, Mori…”

Trista shook her head.

“I told you of our one true faith: that the good of the Cantaran tribe as all. What this… stupid, selfish, foolish little coward wanted to commit was a crime that not only ran counter to everything we held holy, it was… blasphemy. Unspeakable. Again, we had no word for it. What you blithely term ‘abortion’ was a concept that did not exist for us. We had no stories or parables to dramatize such a sin, no tales of forbidden fruit or a slain sibling, nothing. This little bitch had dreamt something entirely new and hideous.”

“Yeah, yeah, bullshit,” Mori snapped. “What about the value of her life?”

“We could joust in this troublesome little arena for a million nights, girl, and still you would not understand. So before you sit in judgment of my world and my people, save your breath, drink your toxic broth, and listen, for my question has not yet been answered.

“Long ago, a Cantaran female learned that she was with child, and she conceived a new conception: un-conception. She did not desire to see her child brought to term. This, as I indicated, was a very, very bad thing. How could she reconcile this mad and wicked impulse?

“The answer was simple.

“The little cowardly bitch didn’t have to do anything.

“Because, thanks to the labors and vision of Cantara, all wickedness would soon be stripped from her world. Obviously—or, at least, the stupid twat reasoned—she suffered from the very affliction her people wished eradicated from their blood. She dared not speak of it, she shared her unnamable sin with no one. All she had to do was keep her stupid mouth shut, and wait. Wait for the day of The Great and Sacred Extraction. And then… She would be healed. The dark and foreign thoughts would trouble her no more; she would give birth to her child with joy and pride and love, and all would be well.”

“But… hey, what about the—” Mori began, but was silenced by a subtle yet sharp gesture by Saint Frost, just a half-turn whir of her wrist and the raising of two golden fingers, yet it was enough. Mori studied the two women sitting close together in the smoky dark of the club, one mechanical, the other a thin-limbed alien sprite with weird white hair, and Mori sensed the bond between the two. She saw the slight inclination of the robot’s head, listening as her friend spoke. The metal plates of Frost’s face hadn’t changed or moved, but somehow her features had taken on the hue of sadness, shared suffering. Mori realized that Frost had heard this tale before. Not often, and not recently, but before.

Trista bolted the last of her drink, brought the empty glass down on the table with a hollow clunk. It seemed some line had been crossed in the landscape of her memory.

“More,” Trista growled.

“Billy,” Frost said softly.

“Aye aye.” Billy glanced at Mori, cocked an eye as if to say Here comes the crazy shit, then stood and shuffled toward the bar, again.

Trista continued. “The little witless bitch, as it happened, was one of the privileged few who aided in the final preparations of Ajax, the machine that would extract the collective evil of the Cantaran race, holding the malignant seeds forever in stasis…”

“Stasis?”

“Yes. Immobilized. Imprisoned. What else were we to do with it, the virulent seed from our veins? We could not send it shooting from the planet, nor even attempt to ‘destroy’ it, once extracted. No, when the purification of our people was complete, all the evil filtered from my people would be sealed forever within Ajax, a prison we would lock and never forget, but never enter.

“The day was upon us, at last. The preparations were complete. Did I say that the dimensions of Ajax were unimportant? I lied. The machine rose shimmering and beautiful, a palace of intricate needles, a mechanical snowflake the size of a city. All of Cantara was exultant with anticipation—put it right there, Billy… No, no, here, yes, you may live another hour, you cur—Where the hell was I? Ah. Yes. Exultant. The day had arrived. We were exultant, yes, but not jubilant, no. It was all too solemn, too momentous. Mysterious. No one knew exactly what to expect. My friends and I—”

Trista paused, eyes closed. And cursed herself with a whisper.

Mori knew that look… had been waiting for it, actually. She helped herself to one of the fresh drinks that Billy had set on the table. She waited for Trista.

“Yes,” Trista said at last. “My friends… and I. We all wanted to say goodbye. We didn’t know if we would still be ourselves… after The Great Extraction.

“I… of course… I had been avoiding my friends for weeks. I had been so afraid that the hideous secret inside of me would smash from my mouth like a monster. But I sang the songs with the others, I played my part of the great and mighty ritual. See you on the other side, we said to each other, or words to that effect. Words laced with hope. My friends had secrets, too; they were all afraid of a fundamental change that they couldn’t name or define. While I knew—and prayed—that The Extraction would rid me of the horrific thoughts and feelings, that I would wake up, and I would love the child growing within my body. And that I would be happy.

“The cleansing blade of The Great Extraction would encircle the planet in the space of a single night, touching every Cantaran. I lay down that night and imagined a benign shadow, a phantom sheet moving over everything, the land and mountains and water, the cities. Every Cantaran heart. My heart. Oh, my sick twisted heart. Heal me, I begged the dark, heal me, and I lay in my bed and ached for sleep.

“It never came.

“I never slept. Not for a second.

“I rose stiff and uncertain from my bed and beheld… a changed world? I couldn’t tell. It seemed very much the same world as the day before. All seemed normal. The sun, the movement in the streets, all of it. My hands met at my midsection, trembled there for a moment. My hands became talons, clawing, ripping at my clothes, my stomach.

“And I knew.

“Oh, Gods, Gods! Nothing had changed. I hadn’t changed. The child still grew inside of me… and I still didn’t want it. Any of it. I wanted it torn from my body. Whatever disease resided within me, whatever evil pulsed in my veins—The Great Extraction hadn’t removed it. The Extraction had failed!

“I am fairly certain I screamed.

“I say ‘fairly certain,’ because in all honesty, I am not quite sure exactly what I felt and thought in those initial seconds of horror and disappointment. In Cantaran terms I was young, younger than you, Mori; my friends always told me I was very emotional, dramatic, given to bursts of intense feeling…

“It was very intense.

“Still, after a few minutes I tried to take hold of myself, tried to stay calm. Perhaps I managed a semblance of ‘calm,’ but it’s safe to say I wasn’t anywhere approaching ‘rational.’

“Nevertheless, I tried.

“I looked again at everyone and everything around me. I heard no screams, I saw no crazed figures tearing at their own flesh like demoniacs. No, everyone was… normal. All save me. Unless…

“And for a moment, for a flash, I thought: what if The Great Extraction had failed not just for me but for… everyone! What if every Cantaran across the planet even now experienced this horrific fear, this lack of change, but like me, they strove to be brave and calm…?

“No. That was impossible. Look at them. They were normal. Happy. No, there was something wrong with me.

“And now my thoughts turned for the first time away from myself. I feared for my people, for all of Cantara. There was a genomic strain of evil within me that was resilient to Ajax, to The Great Extraction. And the child I carried? No doubt resilient as well.

“For the safety of my people—for my world!—there was only one solution: I had kill myself.

“As I said, only a semblance of calm, and highly doubtful on the rationality.

“I raced to the only place I could go, I went to the great machine. I went to Ajax.

“For only evil could kill evil, now. And I was small, I was nothing! I needed only the tiniest bit of evil to end my life, just a drop… Ha. I was not the fearsome she-warrior you see before you today, HA HA HA! No, no. Enough. I am an ancient, evil bitch. Oh, Gods. I would just need the tiniest, smallest drop of evil for the deed…

“I was, I admit, totally fucking insane.

“And before I knew it, I stood within the main chamber of Ajax, and there lay my proof.

“Had I doubted, even for a second, that The Great Extraction had failed for the rest of Cantara? For there it swirled within the containment chamber: Evil. The collected evil of my people. I expected it to be black, monstrous. Like ink. But no, it was thousands of colors, colors I had never seen and couldn’t name, it was motion and luster, it was alive, and it pulsed and swam within the chamber…

“I needed only…

“…a single drop…

“I made… a mistake…”

Trista paused, her head lowered. She held out her open hand for the others, palm up, as if in invitation.

“I needed only a drop… but…

“Disaster.

“I unleashed all of it. All the amassed evil of a people, a civilization, the bad dreams of billion psyches, the serpentine desires of every id—all of it. Unleashed at once in a fixed time and place.

“Disaster.

“It was the core of a nuclear explosion around me, an expanding circle hotter than the sun, louder than a thousand nightmares. I screamed, but the sound was nothing. I was… I was…

“I was just a drop. A drop in an exploding ocean of hate.”

Trista looked at the three of them, Frost, Billy, and finally Mori.

“Everything that Cantara was, all that we had accomplished… Gone. Destroyed in an instant. It destroyed my world. I… destroyed my world.

“But worse, even still: the released, amassed evil had attained not just power, but  sentience.

“It was childlike, at first. Stupid, really. But then it grew curious about me, as I was the only other intelligent life, alone on a now wrecked and barren Earth. It tormented me, it laughed at my pitiable struggle to survive in the wilderness without the benefit of Cantara’s resources. It laughed at the birth of my child… the last child of Cantara. My child did not live… for very long.

“The thing…in time I gave it a name, I called it Nox Golgoth… asked me what I wanted.

“I told it I wanted to die.

“’Oh no,’ it told me. ‘No, you will never die. You’re the only one I’ve got. I like your bad dreams.’

“And it went on… and on. And I have been battling this thing, this Nox Golgoth, for 650,000 years.”

Trista abruptly stood and threw her empty glass to the floor. The glass shattered into a thousand pieces. Mori flinched, but Frost and Billy didn’t even blink.

“Hey!” someone yelled from the shadows.

“We should get out of here,” Trista snarled. “It’s late.”

“Later than you think,” Frost sighed.

Trista stalked away. Mori drained the last of her drink, her head whirling, thinking, So… what the fuck does all of this have to do with me?

“Hey!” somebody said again.

8

“We should get out of here,” Trista snarled. “It’s late.”

“Later than you think,” Frost said, but Trista had already stalked away.

Trista moved hard-shouldered through the club’s gaunt and slow-moving patrons. It was very late, nearly morning. She had talked for hours, revealed more than she intended, and now as she shoved through the ghost crowd Trista was peppered with drunken come-ons and sordid offers. She met each mumbled proposition with a death-glance that could melt steel, yet inwardly she cursed herself anew; thanks to the violence of her teleport, her clothes were barely more than burnt rags. She caught the telepathic splinters of heavy metal ripped pixie stripper babe hot! from nearly every human male she passed. A few of the women, too.

Trista’s lips curled. You don’t want to dance with me, humans, my kisses are deadly. Her head fairly swam from the drink, the tale, the old familiar sheath of self-loathing. My kisses, she thought, my…

And as Trista pushed open the door to the fetid washroom, it struck her full-force: it was upon her. The ache. Damn it.

She swayed, steadied herself. The door swung shut behind her. A distant part of Trista’s brain reasoned that she shouldn’t be surprised: she considered the energy she had expended saving Mori, the gallons of toxins in her system, the near-crippling sorrow that the telling of the tale always brought, but still… The timing could not have been worse.

The ache.

It was upon her.

•

Mori finished her drink, watched Trista disappear into the recesses of the bar. “She, uh, going to be all right?”

“Oh, presently,” Frost said. “By and by. She’ll be herself again soon, the old girl.”

“She always freaks me out when she gets like this,” Billy said. “Remember that time—?”

“Yes, Billy. And you saved the day with your remarkable abilities.”

Billy nodded. He took out his glasses with the attached mini-microphone. He toyed with the apparatus, folding and re-folding it.

“Freaky glasses,” Mori said. “Weird weapon.”

Billy took offense. “I’m the weapon. These things—vodophones—just help me control and focus my power.”

“Huh,” Mori said, mildly impressed. “TK? Telekinetic?”

“Psionic,” Billy said.

Mori raised her eyebrows, turned to Frost.

“I have, like, a million and ten goddamn questions…”

“I’m sure you do,” Frost began. “And you shall have answers—”

“Hey!” came a voice behind Mori. “Hey, eheheh…”

“—but they will have to wait, I’m afraid. We have a visitor.”

Mori turned. “Oh, no,” she began, then caught herself.

She sat up, brushed back her matted black hair and said with an ultra-bright smile, “Oh, hi, Fritz!”

“Eheheh,” Fritz said, shaking with the telltale tremors of a bad jolt of meta-meth. Fritz was short, wore a coat of fake leather with massive spikes protruding from the shoulders, and he brandished a nostalgic bright red mohawk atop his pale, pitted skull. He shook and shook.

“Mori, eheheh… somebody… eheheh… Mori! Mori! Mori! Somebody ripped me off! Man! And the fascists worked me over in the street! Eheheh.”

“Fascists—?” Mori began. “Fucking Christ, Fritz, you look like hell! Sit down.”

“I wouldn’t,” Billy said, reaching inside his jacket…

But Mori calmed Billy with a frown and a subtle shake of her head: Harmless. She guided Fritz into a seat. “Sit. Sit. Jesus. What the fuck—?”

“Frost?” Billy asked pointedly.

Frost consulted tiny meters on her left wrist. “Harmless. Hmm. For the moment, at least.”

Mori shoved a drink into Fritz’s shaking hands, turned to Frost. “For the moment?” she whispered.

“You saw it before, in that other establishment,” Frost said in a quick, low voice. “The Nox Golgoth can make puppets of human flesh. Still, I doubt it would attack again so soon, with three of us protecting you…”

Frost paused, glanced in the direction Trista had gone.

But they needn’t have worried about Fritz overhearing, for as soon as the boy had downed six sharp gulps of the drink Mori had handed him, his mouth was a torrent of spit and information.

“—ripped off!” Fritz sputtered. “—came home chilled out beat off fell asleep woke up couldn’t find you dialed Rooney told him to blow himself then yah! Eheheh! All sixteen of my Red Barons, fuckin’ gone!”

“No, fucking, way,” Mori said, well aware that she was laying it on a little thick, yet also aware that Fritz wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. “All of them?!”

“All of them, eheheh!”

“You know who I bet it was?” Mori said, throwing herself into the role. “I bet it was that bitch, Jennine!”

“Ja-ja-JENNINE!” Fritz said with a quivering furious shudder. “Eheheh, of course! She must be in with the fascists! They’re in it together! Trying to set me up, man!”

“Fascists?” Billy wondered, actually quite bored with the little scene. Frost was still gazing toward the restrooms, looking for Trista.

“FASCISTS!” Fritz sputtered, his eyes wild and feet apart. “The police the cops the authorities they’re everywhere all over the place every street corner everyone’s fucking nuts because of last night’s terrorist attack…!”

Now Fritz had everyone’s complete attention.

“Terrorist attack…?”

“Eheheh! Don’t you fucking people pay attention to the fucking news?! It’s everywhere, on every feed! It’s the biggest story!”

“What, you mean the Z-12 Plague—?”

“What! What! What! The Z-12 fucking plague?! Eheheh! No fucking way! That was yesterday, yesterday, yesterday’s news! No, the terrorist attack that happened last night! Here… Eheheh. Here…”

Fritz dug frantically in his fake leather coat, produced a battered Sony Yama. The black plastic device unfolded from the size of a business card to that of a flat paperback book. Fritz keyed the little buttons with spastic fingers.

“Here, here, here! See?!” Fritz held up the device so they could see the screen.

It was video of the alien storm that had descended the night before, the tempest that had nearly ripped the city to shreds. Mori frowned at the eerie orange sky, the streams of debris caught in the vicious wind, the ominous half-circle of shadow lowering above it all. The little Sony’s rich, full-bodied audio swelled their corner of the bar:

“…device of unknown scale and proportions, but clearly a weapon of mass destruction. As of yet no demands have been made, but local authorities urge every citizen…

“Jesus,” Mori whispered, squinting at the little screen. “What the hell is it?”

“It’s you, Mori,” Billy whispered.

“When you were dead,” Frost said quietly. “This is not good. If the authorities are calling the Exit Vector manifestation a weapon, they might trace…” Her voice trailed off.

Frost stood. “Stay here.” And she marched with purpose toward the restrooms.

Fritz watched the robot leave, then said, “Eheheh!” And he folded the Sony Yama shut with quick spastic claps of his hand.

“You see you see you see?! Fuckin’ terrorists! And there go our fucking civil liberties ’cause THE FUCKING FASCISTS CAN’T WAIT TO SHAKE DOWN HARD WORKING BUSINESS-MEN LIKE MYSELF—”

Fritz had really started to scream; now he leapt to his feet, his hands flailing, spit flying, and the groggy patrons in the smoky bar had reached the limits of their tolerance.

“Hey, tell psycho to shut it!”

“Take it back to District 9, scumbag!”

The bartender materialized by their table, not amused. He held an antique Taser at his side.

“Your friend will have to leave,” the bartender announced with quiet menace.

“Jesus, Fritz, calm down!” Mori urged. “Billy, help me!”

“But we have to—” Billy started.

“Jesus, Billy,” Mori said through her teeth as Fritz shouted and hopped and yelped. “Just help me get him outside! I owe the jerk that much!”

Billy glanced toward the restrooms, then reluctantly helped Mori guide Fritz toward the exit.

•

Saint Frost had nearly reached the restroom when the door opened, and Trista emerged.

In a cybernetic flash Frost scanned the restroom behind Trista while the door was still open: stalls, sinks, towel racks, and the limp lifeless form of a human male on the floor.

The restroom door eased shut, and Frost sighed.

Trista seemed composed. Satisfied. “Where’s Mori?”

“With Billy. And a friend.”

Trista’s eyes flashed. “Friend?”

•

Mori and Billy and Fritz stumbled out of the club into the predawn glow of the street.

“Eheheh!” Fritz cried. “Fucking daylight…!”

“Yeah, yeah,” Billy said, having had quite enough of this drug-blitzed pain-in-the-ass…

But the pain-in-the-ass had suddenly stopped shrieking and yelling; it literally happened faster than Mori could say, What the—

Fritz drove his fist hard into Billy’s gut, once, twice, three times. Billy doubled over in shock and pain, and as he went down Fritz hit him on the side of the head with the chrome-flash of a Neuro. There was a blue electric crackle, Billy screamed in silent agony, then lay still.

—fuck, Mori finished as Fritz rose in a blur and backhanded her, hard.

Stunned, dizzy, falling, black. On her knees. Fritz talking, Fritz talking fast, Fritz forcing her hands behind her…

“—oh no, no sleepies, oh no princess, we’re walking! Yeah—”

Her hands bound behind her back, tight. Some synthetic shit. Fritz yanked her up, slapped some of the shit over her mouth. He drew Mori close, his features full of rage.

“You think?” Fritz hissed in her face. “You think I didn’t know you took my fucking drugs?!”

9

Billy Wolfgang—age 19, very good-looking but admittedly slow on the uptake, gifted with psionic abilities yet partner to a grand total of two lovers, a young man with his whole life ahead of him in a vivid and turbulent world—dearly, dearly wished for death.

Even so, through the haze of his discomfort and the short-circuit of his brain, Billy still registered surprise at the hand that choked the life out of him.

“Frost, let him go,” Bill heard Trista say from across the Grand Canyon. “This isn’t helping Mori.”

Saint Frost’s ornate metal face filled Billy’s vision, the gold plates sliding and whirring as the robot rang out the words, “YOU USELESS, FEEBLE, PATHETIC EXCUSE OF A SWEEPER’S SON—”

Billy tried to shove her away, couldn’t. For a 200 year-old antique, Frost was in splendid operating condition. Billy growled, winced, then couldn’t hold it back any longer; his eyes flared, there was a VRAKKK! and the glancing crack of a collision off Frost’s head. A fist-sized hole was suddenly gouged in the building behind her, spewing a tiny shower of rock and dust.

“Oh, stop, stop, stop!” Trista said with weary finality, frowning under the falling mist of grey debris. “Frost, let the brat be. Gods.”

Trista pulled Frost off Billy. He staggered back, hand going immediately to his throat. Billy coughed and sputtered, wishing once more for the release of death… anything to save him from the guilty weight of having fucked-up once again.

“What happened, Billy? Where’s Mori?”

“What do you think?!” Billy said with a grimace. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, he shot a quick look up and down the gloomy dawn of the street.

“That creepy little twerp suckered me, hit me with a fucking Neuro. God, I feel like every inch of my brain’s been zapped by a, a… oh, damn it…”

Billy trailed off, partly in disgust, but more in trepidation of the window he’d opened on the state of his brain. “I’ll kill him,” Billy said, and hawked one into the gutter.

“To blazes with him,” Frost said darkly as she consulted the little meters on her wrist. “What about Mori?”

“Well?” Trista asked—rather casually, given the circumstances, Billy thought. “Anything?”

“Hmm,” Frost said. “Residual traces, nothing.” She angrily jabbed buttons on her wrist, yanked down the sleeve of her coat to access the exterior panel of her forearm.

“Hey Frost,” Billy frowned, watching her. “Are you completely unacquainted with the concept of an ‘integrated system?’”

“Are you completely oblivious to the fact that I DID NOT MAKE ME, you WHELPISH SLUG?”

“Children,” Trista murmured with faint disapproval.

“And hey, Jesus, what’s with you?” Billy said, turning to Trista. He shook with fatigue and disbelief, his head pounding with the unpleasant buzz of a hundred hammers which loosened his usually well-reined tongue. “You’re pretty fucking relaxed with the whole damn scene. What are you on, a fistful of Nirvana? What the hell did you score in the damn bathroom?”

Frost glanced up.

But Trista merely held Billy’s anxious gaze, untroubled.

“You’re right, Billy. The momentary uncertainty of Mori’s whereabouts is cause for concern. Alarm, perhaps. Even panic. Then again, it’s not as if somebody shot her in the heart.”

“Arghg,” Billy growled, and stalked away.

“Something,” Frost announced, intent on her meters.

Trista gave Billy a final icy glare, then went to Frost’s side.

“Is it Mori?” Trista asked, frowning over Frost’s shoulder.

“No. That is, I don’t think so.” Frost made an adjustment, and the tiny ornate needles quivered within the dials embedded in her arm. “But it might be her ‘friend.’ Assuming he regularly ingests the same meta-methamphetics that Mori had consumed when we first found her. It’s a similar metabolic signature. Weaker. And of course, no trace of the Exit Vector manifestation…”

Frost paused. “Yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“Trista, we’re assuming Mori is in danger from this… this person. But how well do you think we stated our case to her? Mori still knows less than half the whole story, she still has no idea how important she is. We have shown her only madness and nightmare, told her a tale of a long-dead world. This friend appears, a familiar face, and he might offer Mori a return to more welcome and well-trod avenues…”

Trista considered. “She is a thirsty girl, our Mori…”

“Indeed. And if she were to indulge her near-suicidal appetite for nasty candy, restart the pulse, the Exit Vector…”

“Nox Golgoth,” Trista said. “And this time…”

“Yes. This time we may not be able to stop it.”

Trista looked up, her detached calm replaced with steel-eyed resolve. “Billy.”

Standing a few feet away at the street corner, Billy shuddered from his glowering sulk.

“Time to have your revenge,” Trista said. “Time to reclaim your manhood! We’re going to find Mori.”

Billy glanced dismissively at the slow moving rumble of traffic, the awakening shuffle of the city. He nodded. “Lead on.”

“This way,” Frost said.

And as they stalked forward, Trista made the rare attempt to lighten the mood.

“Perhaps we leap to unfair conclusions! Perhaps this is all a fantastic, dreadful misunderstanding of laughable proportions…”

Billy grunted. “I’m not laughing. He decked me, Trista, with a Neuro. He could have killed me.”

Trista chided herself. Billy was in no mood for the baldness of obvious lies. Still, Trista said, “Perhaps. Perhaps not! Who knows, Mori might be enjoying a pleasant time in the company of an old friend…”

•

Mori was indeed in the company of an old friend.

But she was experiencing nothing remotely approaching a pleasant time.

“You shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t have stolen my goddamn drugs,” Mori heard Fritz say as if from a great distance. “I am very really absolutely fucking perturbed about this whole thing. Very perturbed. UPSET.”

Fritz was… far away. A shadow. Mori floated in blackness. She…

She remembered Fritz hitting her hard, tying her hands, slapping some sticky gross synthetic gag over her mouth, then forcing her through dim predawn streets and alleys. Old building, stairs. Summoning the half-measure of a fight halfway up, only to get another clop from Fritz, oh man, oh she hated this little prick, now, oh when she got herself together, when she got her hands on him…

“You shouldn’t have taken all of them, you know—you, you, you could have left me, like, TWO. But no! YOU had to take ALL SIXTEEN. I’m very, like, disappointed in you, Mori Kim Marr…”

“Fritz…” Mori said, her voice weird, her jaw hurting, “…listen, uh! Jesus. Fritz, Listen to me…”

She forced her eyes open, wide, blinked, tried to focus.

Fritz knelt beside her. He twitched and jerked. His wet lips trembled in the gloom.

“Fritz,” Mori croaked, still dizzy. “There’s something big going down. Bigger than…”

“Oooooooh yeah,” Fritz agreed with a spasm. “Real big. Oh babe, you have no idea…”

And Fritz brought up his right hand, holding…

10

“Fritz,” Mori winced, still groggy, still out of it. “Hold on… Jesus…”

“You—you shouldn’t have taken all of them, Mori!”

Lips trembling and eyes wild, Fritz raised the knife. The blade glowed laser-blue, whining like an insect in the summer heat.

Mori woke up, fast.

“Fritz! Jesus! Stop!” And reflexively Mori tried to raise her hands to ward off the hovering blade, but her hands wouldn’t cooperate. Her arms were pinned fast at her sides—shit! She was on her back and totally immobilized, held fast by multiple wrappings of what felt like tape. Probably more of the synthetic crap Fritz had used earlier. The stuff was wound about her in seemingly endless spools, as if the little creep had decided to mummify her. And she was naked! Jesus! The shit stuck to her bare skin like glue! She saw her clothes and boots a few feet away in a heap. Oh, Fritz was dead!

Unfortunately, the “little creep” bending over her looked pretty gone, pretty damn insane, and if that was the type of knife Mori thought it was—an illegal Kirov—it could cut through her flesh like an axe through cobwebs.

Mori lifted her head from the floor and glared at Fritz.

“So what are you going to do, you twisted little perv? Cut me into pieces and feed me to your cats? Let me out of this!”

“Oh, no… no… no…” Fritz whispered. His lips quivered, issued a thin line of drool. The saliva caught the light from the glowing Kirov, glistened like a strand of liquid silk. The blade whined and buzzed. Fritz came closer. Mori grimaced. Christ, his breath was foul.

“All, all those times,” Fritz stammered, “all those days and all those nights and all those thoughts, thoughts, THOUGHTS! I never imagined, you know, never never never imagined that you and I would, you know, get together, really, get together the way the way THE WAY we were supposed to, yeah! But I never freakin’ dreamt you would stab me in the back like THIS, Mori! But you did! You did!”

“Fritz, come on—!”

“Sixteen, SIXTEEN Red Barons! Do you know, DO YOU KNOW what I had riding on those suckers?! It was a BIG SCORE, Mori! What, what, WHAT DID YOU DO? Sell them?! Did you hook up those freaky people I found you with?!”

Mori rolled her eyes, looked away, turned back. Barely held back a growl. Now she was fully awake and rapidly becoming really pissed. Not afraid. Pissed. She had hung with Fritz on many a meta-meth binge and she knew his score; he was crazy, sure, fully capable of truly terrible deeds, but he was a wimp when it came to the real wetwork. The real horror-show violence was always dispensed by a hired third party. The stupid little turd with his stupid ooooh scary phony crap … Mori knew exactly how to crush the feeb’s psyche like an egg. And the cruel, cutting words rose in her throat.

When an errant, troubling thought intruded. He had decked Billy. Really clobbered him. Mori had never seen Fritz do anything like that…

But it was too late; the words came tumbling.

“Yeah, I stole your damn Red Barons, Fritz! And you know what I did with them?! I took them, you feeb! Guess what: they sucked! I took all sixteen of them! They didn’t do anything! They gave me a headache, that’s it! So guess what, you creepy little hump, whatever you paid for them, you got ripped off! I did you a favor, Fritz! I probably saved your ass! If you had sold those Red Barons to your goddamn big score…”

The second Mori had started talking, Fritz’s mouth snapped shut and he listened, listened, his face growing pale, his expression one of slow disbelief. “You…” he began.

“You… you stabbed me in the back,” he said quietly as Mori verbally tore him a new one. “You cut me, Mori. And now I’m going to cut you…”

And just like that, he cut her.

It was so fast Mori barely saw it, just the blue flash of a laser-sharp curve.

“—ughn,” she said, mid-insult, then felt the chilling sting and displacement of flesh, the seeping ooze of warmth. Fritz had cut her on the side of her neck.

“Smart now?” Fritz whispered, unblinking.

Stupid, Mori raged at herself, the shock sinking down, down, from her face through her chest to her guts. So… fucking… stupid, she raged.

Fritz brought up the knife. Looked at the blade, looked at Mori. The knife glowed and hummed in the gloom.

“Tell me… Eheheh! Tell me again what an idiot I am, Mori…”

“Fritz…” Mori swallowed. “Listen to me. There’s more to this… There’s more to me—”

“What? Eh? What!” Fritz flashed the knife dangerously close, and Mori flinched with an involuntary hiss. She strained savagely against the flat black bands. Her bonds would not budge.

“Fritz…”

“Eheehee, is this where you offer me the, heh! Heh! Heh! The pleasure of your pale skanky bod? Tell me. You, you, you want me, now?!”

“No!” Mori said, though she had to admit that the possibility of such a ploy had flashed like a bolt through her brain only to be discarded instantly. No, through the shock and jagged reverberation of every nerve of her body, she knew deception was not an option, now. There was only one card to play: the desperation of truth.

“Listen, Fritz. Listen carefully. I am…  really, really sorry about the Red Barons… That was, that was stupid, man…”

“DAMN RIGHT!” Fritz shrieked, passing the Kirov blade from his right hand to his left then back again in a humming blur. “DAMN GODDAMN RIGHT THAT WAS GODDAMN STUPID…!”

“Yeah, okay! But listen to me! There’s something bigger going down than a fistful of stupid drugs! Those people you saw me with? The robot, the guy? I went through something major with them last night! Fritz, man—there’s like this super ancient evil force that wants to destroy the whole world… and I’m… I’m The One!”

“You’re the what?”

“I’m… The One! I have to be! It’s the only thing that makes sense! Trista—”

“Who?”

“You didn’t see her, she… she walked away. She had to do something. But she’s like a billion goddamn years old, and she told me about this ancient force, the Nox Golgoth! And I…”

Mori swallowed, fell silent. Of course it sounded totally insane.

“You, you… and you’re telling me those Red Barons had NO EFFECT?!” Fritz shrieked. “And now you, you’re… The One.”

“Yeah.” Trista and the others hadn’t told her that, Mori realized. But… what else could she be?

“It’s not just about you and me, Fritz. It’s about everything and everybody. The whole planet…”

“Eheheh,” Fritz shuddered. “I’ll tell you, eh! I’LL TELL YOU WHAT IT’S ABOUT, babe…!”

He drew close, touched the cut he had sliced on Mori’s neck with his thumb. She grimaced, hating him.

“I’ll tell you what it’s about…” Fritz held the blade close and not entirely steady under her chin; with his free hand he dug in his pocket and withdrew a small electronic device. Fritz pressed a single button…

And the black bands holding Mori snapped free like sprung coils, falling away limp and harmless.

“Now,” Fritz began, his breath ragged, the blade menacing and trembling and close to her throat, “Now, we, we’re gonna get me some of The One…”

There was a sudden BOOM BOOM BOOM! at the door.

Fritz half-turned, startled. “Wha—?”

Mori didn’t care, didn’t think; she lunged at Fritz, clawing for his eyes with both hands.

Fritz yelped with surprise and pain, blindly tried to slash at Mori with the buzzing knife, but Mori wouldn’t allow him the required movement; she sank her fingers deep into his face, her teeth gritted and bared, her elbows and forearms blocking Fritz’s clumsy jabs…

…and then they were both on their feet, struggling together, any thoughts of nakedness or vulnerability completely absent from Mori’s brain as they fought with slippery hands for the humming knife…

Outside, someone went BOOM BOOM BOOM! against the door, then gave it a good kick. The wood cracked, splintered.

Mori growled, wrenched the knife from Fritz, and plunged it deep into his gut.

Fritz gaped, gasped a word. Reached for her…

Mori glared at him. She gave the knife a good twist. “Cut me, you mother?”

Fritz sank to his knees, fell backwards. Mori stood over him, naked and bloody, victorious.

The door shuddered, was kicked a final time, then crashed boom! flat to the floor.

11

Fritz writhed on his back, dying.

His chest jerked with short, hitching spasms, his mouth thick with rising blood. His vision fogged, blanked entirely, then returned; through a dimming haze Fritz saw the newcomers cluster above him.

The robot: “You practically disemboweled him, Mori.”

The young guy with the sideburns: “Good!”

Some weird lady with white hair, eyes icy in judgment as she looked down at Fritz: “And we thought you needed help, Mori.”

“Mori!” Fritz coughed.

He reached weakly, gagging on the blood swirling in his mouth. “Mori…”

“Save it.” Mori leaned into Fritz’s darkening field of vision. She angrily shoved her arms into the sleeves of her jacket, she brushed back her hair with a quick, almost savage motion.

“Mori… help me. These people…”

Mori glared at him, her brown eyes large and unblinking, scared yet defiant. Her hand went to the cut on her neck. “Forget it, Fritz. I’m with them, now.”

Then Mori frowned. Her mouth dropped open in a half circle—compassion? She spoke urgently to the robot…

Fritz issued a gargled word, he reached for Mori, but his grasp fell short, his chest seized with a final spasm, and he went spinning out of there. The image of Mori’s face was the last thing Fritz took with him, down, down… into the dark.

•

The dark.

Far beneath the city, below the layers of concrete and the hum of distant machines, past the tangled network of pipes and ducts and earth and rock, the shadows rustled, and whispered.

There was a hiss, a thin stream of orange fire, and the frozen image of Mori’s face lit up the darkness, flickering, a portrait of embers.

The Nox Golgoth drew a long and ragged breath, the snapping of trees in its lungs, hatred in its ancient and infernal heart. It studied Mori’s still and candlelit face. The image revolved, slow and flickering… and fading. Already the trace signal was fading, slipping away. And then it was gone, and all was dark.

Oh, the Nox Golgoth would find her again, this… human… girl… thing. This pathetic assembly of flesh and blood and bone, with its 17 human years—17 microseconds—of sorrow and bad human memories, this, this…

…this strange and mysterious weapon that The Adversary had gone to great lengths to procure and protect.

The Nox Glogoth knew the vague flutter of fear in its primordial and multi-chambered heart. The Adversary—the hated Triiistaaskaasheearrn—oh, she was smart. Tricky. Clever. The Nox Golgoth should have destroyed her when it had the chance, back at the beginning. It had been foolish, then.

Not like now.

Now, this puny rock known as Earth was nearly finished. The stars beckoned, and the Universe awaited. The Nox Golgoth would soon be free, and nothing—not The Adversary, not her mysterious human weapon—would stop it.

Nothing.

It would wait, and watch. In the dark…

•

In the shadows…

Mori frowned, unconscious. Her eyes were clenched tight as if gripped by a nightmare. “No,” she murmured. Panels of light traveled across her features, and there was the smooth hum of motion. Mori’s head lolled. She frowned more deeply—

Then sat upright, her eyes flying open.

“Easy,” Trista said beside her. “Easy. My decadent little girl.”

Mori blinked in the dark, disoriented.

Trista and Mori were shadows, seated together in the rear of a vehicle. Frost and Billy in the front. It was night. They moved streamlined and fast through a vast road with many lights, like an electric signal through the circuits of a vast machine. The sound of the vehicle’s engine was a muted purr. Billy was “driving,” but he didn’t have to do anything; it was evident that the car was on auto. Billy turned in his seat to look at Mori.

“Thought you said that guy was ‘harmless.’”

“Yeah, well,” Mori said, wincing, still a little fuzzy. Her fingers went to her neck, found a fresh bandage. “Let’s just say I was never so battered and bruised before I met you people…”

She remembered now: Trista and the others tending to her, bundling her up and out of that horrid little room Fritz had taken her… Jesus. He had been so goddamn insane. He could have killed her.

Still, she couldn’t help herself. “Fritz…?”

“Dead,” Trista said, with no small amount of satisfaction, even relish. “The killing blow was dealt! Not bad with a blade, you.”

Mori grunted. “Years of practice. That was the Mishima Special.”

Now Frost turned. “Hello, Mori. I must say, you gave me a scare.”

“Sorry,” Mori told her, meaning it. She looked at Billy. “I’m sorry, Billy. That stupid jerk! Are you okay?”

“Huh!” Billy shrugged, indifferent. “It’s nothin’. Don’t even think about it. He caught me, uh, by surprise…” Billy shrugged again, then turned back in his seat, concentrated on the road… but there was nothing for Billy to actually do. He drummed his fingers absently on the wheel.

“Whose car is this?” Mori asked.

Laughter from the others, even Frost.

“Okay… where are we going?”

“Away,” Trista said firmly. “We should have swept you out of the city immediately, not wasted time with questions and answers and drinks.”

“Well, Astral Queen, the drinks were good, and a few more answers would be, like, greatly appreciated…”

“Soon,” Trista said, focusing on some distant point beyond the car’s night-cloaked window. The passing landscape was absolutely flat. There was just the road, the zoom and blur of multicolored lights, the sleepy presence of other cars humming along at the same speed. “Right now it’s imperative we put some distance between us and… the area of disturbance.”

Trista turned to Mori, raised her eyebrows. “The city. The Golgothics. The danger of old friends with bad habits! Eh, my wild urchin?”

Mori nodded, unconvinced.

“This thing… this Nox Golgoth… isn’t it, well, everywhere?”

No one responded.

“What makes you say that?” Trista wondered, finally.

“Well, I don’t know. Just a feeling, I guess. I’m starting to realize a few things on my own. I tried to explain it to that creep, Fritz, but he just couldn’t grok it…”

Now they all turned slightly, studying Mori in mute appraisal, waiting.

“Well, come on!” Mori told them. “It’s obvious! This wicked big ancient evil force? That only you guys know about? And you’re paying all this attention to me? There’s only one answer! I’ve got to be… The One. Am I… am I right?”

Frost and Billy slowly turned back to face the oncoming road, the night.

“I mean, in every story like this, there’s always The One. Like, a Messiah! Okay, so usually it’s a guy, big whoop. There’s always somebody with a special power or secret knowledge or something… and that’s me!”

“Hmm,” Trista said at last. Her eyes were far off, sad.

Slowly, Trista turned from Mori, tilted her elfin chin toward the front of the vehicle. “Billy? Frost? It’s going to be a long ride; how about some music? Something old, something good.”

Billy did not have to be asked twice. “Music,” he told the car. “Ummm…”

“Something good, Billy.”

“Vivaldi,” Billy told the car. “Gloria in D Major, in ex Terra Pax.”

And as the car swelled with slow mournful strings, an ache and a sorrow that stretched across centuries, Mori frowned, and listened. She watched the dark road unspool before her, rushing to meet her in an ever-widening embrace.

12

“Curse it, Billy,” Trista said, “slow down.”

Through the windshield the dark road was a dizzying and silent blur, as if the car sped inexorable toward annihilation.

“Relax,” Billy droned. He sat slumped at the wheel, seemingly indifferent but his eyes were wide, awake. “We’re offline, off the grid, we’re the only ones out here.” The speedometer clicked past 262kph. “We are the speed-freak phantoms of the freeway!” 264kph. “We are the warriors of the waste!” 266kph.

“We are the terrified prisoners of the backseat,” Trista said in the shadows beside Mori. “Slow down, boy, before my ancient rotten heart pounds through my chest.”

Sleepily, Mori wondered if Trista played the nervous passenger merely to swell Billy’s frequently bruised ego; everyone knew that Frost could override the car’s systems in a nano-second. Perhaps it did Billy good to kid himself, to believe that he was giving the girls a ‘good scare.’

Still… 268kph…

“Hey, psi-boy,” Mori said, sitting up with a wince and trying to stretch. They had been driving for hours. She glanced at the speedometer. “Uh, why don’t you lay off the pedal a little and tell me some more—”

“—about the time I swerved into oncoming traffic and caused a multiple pile-up? Bodies everywhere.” 272kph…

“Heh. You are a funny guy! No, tell me more about your, um… powers.”

“My powers?” Billy said, waiting. The speedometer dropped a notch. “Yeah…?”

“Yeah,” Mori said, thinking. “Can you, like, blow up people’s heads and shit?”

“Billy!” Trista said with sharp and sudden cruelty. “Tell Mori about the time the Golgothic agents chased you into a church and you hid behind a Nun.”

Billy’s mouth popped open. “Hey—!” The speedometer went down another notch.

“Oh, he didn’t!” Mori said, mock horrified.

“He did,” Trista said with the arch of a single eyebrow. “Running into the church was bad enough, hiding behind the Nun even worse—”

“Hey, hey!” Billy stammered. “That was…” The car’s speed dropped a full five kphs.

“—but when the Golgothics ripped the unfortunate Nun in two, now that—”

“Oh, God!” Mori gasped.

“Trista! You bitch! That didn’t happen! I saved her!”

Trista paused, lips pursed in a moment of self-chastisement. She shared a knowing glance with Mori. Billy waited, his eyes flicking wetly from the road to the rear-view and back again.

“Billy speaks the truth. That didn’t happen. He saved the Nun. However…”

“Careful now, lady!” 260kph…

“However…” Trista continued, “before Billy shoved the Nun out of harm’s way, he ripped the Crucifix from the poor woman’s neck. Really! And he went flying up onto the altar and, ha ha ha, this actually happened: Billy’s on the altar, holding up the Crucifix and screaming at the Golgothics, The power of Christ compels you! The power of Christ compels you!”

“Oh, God!” Mori groaned, loving it. “And the Golgothics?”

“Mori, in six-hundred and fifty-thousand years upon this planet, I have never heard laughter so foul. The Golgothics were in hysterics. They shrieked and howled, ‘Christ compels us, Christ compels us, arghgh!’ And poor Billy’s waving the damn Crucifix around, and he’s crying—!”

“No shit, really?!”

“Yes. Tears!”

“THAT’S ENOUGH,” Billy said, as the women in the backseat behind him laughed and laughed. “Jesus!” His eyes locked hard on the road ahead, he checked the speed. A mere 250! “Jesus!” He floored it. The car softly roared, the speedometer clicking quickly as Billy fumed.

“So, what happened?” Mori said.

“What do you think? Frost saved his poor sorry puppy ass.”

“Yeah yeah YEAH,” Billy snarled, his foot still on the accelerator, the kphs climbing at dizzying speed, faster and faster. “You goddamn evil women—! And hey, Frost was there, you know! It wasn’t that simple! Was it, Frost?!”

Silence. Billy frowned. The car continued to accelerate. “Frost?”

Billy glanced at the silent robot sitting beside him. “Shit, I think she’s—”

“BILLY!!!”

Billy jerked his eyes forward, almost too late; an amorphous grey white blur came rushing to fill the windshield.

Trista hissed and Mori issued a strangled half-cry as Billy spun the wheel and world veered sideways.

Mori slammed hard into Trista. The tires screamed, the car bounced. Trista and Mori hit the ceiling then fell crashing as the car hit hard earth, still moving fast, fast, fishtailing and spinning in a fury of gravel and the squeal of failing hydraulics…

Billy fought the wheel. The wheel fought back. The car bucked and veered. “Sha-shit, shit, shit…” Billy pleaded, leaning on the brakes, bracing for the big impact… bracing for the big impact…

The big impact never came.

The car rocked and pitched and slowed slowed slowed over uneven terrain, the headlights catching an up and down flickershow of shrubs and dirt. The engine rattled and coughed. The wheels crunched. And the car stopped.

The three organics in the car breathed again. They gulped. They blinked at the alien stillness of the night.

There a click, an electronic buzzz-zeep! and Saint Frost began to move. The robot lifted her head. She looked around.

“Did something happen?” Frost asked. “Are we there yet?”

Trista closed her eyes. Mori said, “What?” Billy shuddered, grimaced; his hands became slow tortured fists.

“WHERE were YOU?!” Billy demanded. “We thought you were monitoring the car!”

“I was. You said you wanted to drive. You drove. I fell asleep. Shocking as it might sound, the three of you are not eternally fascinating.”

“I—! Jesus! You—!” Billy began.

“It’s my fault,” Trista said. “Our safety is my responsibility.” Then: “Billy. How fast were we traveling when you swung to avoid that object in the road?”

Billy frowned. “Two-sixty, two-seventy?”

Trista studied him. Almost smiled. “I take back… approximately half of the cruel things I ever said about you.”

“Well, I, oh hell—”

“Save it. Do not let it go to your head.”

With stiff and shaking limbs they climbed out of the car. Mori blinked up at the night, the stars. Then she frowned, listening.

“What’s that sound?” Mori whispered.

“Crickets.”

Trista started back toward the road. “I want to get a closer look at that object…”

“I saw it,” Billy said, trudging behind her. “An accident. Nasty. Two vehicles, maybe three.”

“Wow,” Mori whispered, still wobbly, gazing about as she fell into pace with the others. “Fucking weird. So… this is nature?”

“Everything is nature, after a fashion, Mori,” Frost said.

“An accident, Billy?” Trista said. “Not a roadblock, not an attack?”

“Accident, no question,” Billy gasped, trying to keep up with her. “Looked pretty bad. Poor bastards. Way out here, no help anywhere… Hell of a speed bump.”

They reached the road, eerie in its hard vast stretch of concrete. Billy pointed. “There.”

Approximately quarter of a mile back, two vehicles sat mangled together in a lethal embrace of twisted metal, one white, the other silver, a wide thin pool of black beneath the wreck. There was no sound, no movement; the accident could have occurred moments or a month ago.

They approached, slowly.

“Frost?”

The robot consulted her meters. “Hmm. That’s odd…”

Frost looked up at the wreck with a sharp whir of motors. “Weapons. Now.”

There was a sudden ba-BANG! from the wreck, and one of the bent doors bulged, but did not open.

“Mori, stay back!”

“Oh fuck that noise, Grandma.” Mori had already reached for the Kirov blade she had wrested from Fritz, even as Billy flipped out his vodophone glasses, and Frost peeled back the right sleeve of her coat…

“Listen to me, all of you,” Trista began—

But there was a strange alien cry, and the warped door of the white vehicle flew open.

•

13

There was a sound in the dark. It was a dry rasp of a breath, the cough and cough and cough of an old man. He sat by the intricate lattice of a nighttime window, his bald head a trembling dome in the shadows. About him ticked many clocks made of wood and metal. The old man coughed. The clocks ticked.

•

The cracked door of the wrecked vehicle bulged, shuddered, then swung open. A soft prism of light cut the dark of the wide flat road. Shadows moved. Thin, spiderlike. And three children emerged from the corpse of the car, slipping out of the open hatch with eerie grace.

They stood together on the tarmac, identical in their features and manner: pale and expressionless, white hair, tiny clenched fists. They were dressed in their Sunday best, little jackets, little ties. Their eyes began to glow, blue.

“Get—” Frost began.

Her right arm snapped level, sleeve yanked-back; the bronze tube of her pulse cannon popped from her forearm with a KLAKKTK!

“—back.”  Piercing shriek, and a quick white shaft flashed toward the children, passed through them like a ghost. The conjoined wreck of the two vehicles exploded in a sudden and violent pyre that belched an ugly gush of debris. Thick smoke churned and bloomed into the night sky.

The three children stood as they were, unaffected. Three children unblinking, silhouetted against the crackling fire.

Their eyes glowed again, this time brighter.

Billy and Trista and Mori froze in mid-motion, mid-order, mid-curse. They were all still reacting to the explosion. “—unnh.”

Frost, the woman made of metal, stood unmoving for an instant. Then she glanced at her friends. Frozen like statues. Billy had a particularly idiotic expression on his face, the poor lad. Frost scowled under her broad-rimmed hat, tugged down the sleeve of her long coat, then marched toward the children, the heels of her boots loud and hollow on the black road. Tock, tock, tock.

The three children visibly tensed, standing their ground but clearly gripped with mounting agitation as the robot stepped near. Their small fists trembled. Their eyes burned like deviant stars. But the lady robot came and came, and she was upon them.

“Stop that.” Frost slapped one of the children across his cheek. The child recoiled and blinked. The blue glow vanished.

At once, Billy and Trista and Mori moved again: “Ah,” and “—now,” and “—uck.”

“Stop that. Stop. Stop it now.” Frost gently cuffed all three children, as many times as she had to, like an indulgent and stern grandmother. “Stop.” The children blinked and gaped, hands on their cheeks, stunned.

“You… you hit us!”

“And I’ll do it again if you misbehave. None of your fancy tricks. All done. Do you hear me? No phasing, no control.”

Suitable cowed, the three children nodded. It was two boys and one girl.

“Frost,” Trista called. She had kept her distance, holding back Mori and Billy with a gesture. “Do you… know these children?”

“No,” Frost said over her shoulder. “But I know their maker.”

She turned back to study each of the eerie three. “I know his handiwork. Take me to where he is!”

“We hate it. We tried to leave. We hate it back there.”

“No doubt. Take me to him, and you will have… you will have your freedom.”

The children conferred, silently. Then as one, their eyes swung up to Frost. “We will show you.”

“Lead,” Frost said.

“Freedom?

“We shall see.”

“Billy,” Trista said, watching as the three children turned, and Frost followed. “Stay with the car.”

Then Trista looked at Mori. Smiled thinly. “All right, nasty girl. We go.”

•

As they walked, the children began to speak. They were hesitant at first, but quickly began to fire a continuous stream of questions at Frost, amazed that she would answer every question they put to her. Their questions came faster and faster, until it seemed it was only Frost’s responses to the zing of insects. “Yes,” she said in a seemingly unbroken drone, “no. Eight. Pandemic. Not any longer. Uncertain. No. Double helix. Europa. Still to be determined. Yes. One point eight million. Alas, no.”

Walking behind Frost and the children, Mori whispered, “Hey… if you wanted, could you stop her?”

Trista frowned. “Frost? Well, yes, I could stop her. If I destroyed her.”

A glance. “She is not my thing, Mori. Obviously, this is important to her.”

Mori shook her head with an unpleasant expression. “Of course!”

They came to an old, old building. The steeple was bent but not entirely broken. Jagged antennae from decades past cringed on the roof.  “There,” the children pointed.

And inside…

Inside sat a bald old man with a cigarette, coughing. He was surrounded by many clocks, clocks on every wall, clocks everywhere…

…and moving toys of all manner. Animated automatons, toy boys and toy girls and toy animals, some mechanical, some fleshly. The flesh toys limped, and they stank. The room was a slow blur of sluggish, halting, whirring motion. There was a flap of dusty wings, and a robotic cherub flew to another room.

When the old man saw the three children, he began to scold, but then he looked past them. His old jaw tried to work. “Frost!” he said at last. “Oh, my Frost!”

“Wyndham,” Frost said, entering the room and gliding to the old man’s side. The toys took notice. They stopped and watched.

“When did you—how did you—? So long!”

“Shhhh,” she told the old man. “You must be tired.”

“I made so many things…” he stammered.

“I know.”

“I liked them all. I made so many! But you know… the government. The aliens! Never, never trust ’em. Bastards. You know, I especially liked those damn strange trees… and the vampires. And the…”

“I know. And now…” Frost placed a single gold finger gently against the old man’s neck. “It is time for you to rest.”

The old man started to smile, but then he was dead.

Frost eased the old man’s back against his shoulder, as if he had fallen asleep in his chair. She stood and addressed the toys.

“Go. You can all go now. Your father is dead. You have freedom, now. If you want it.”

Some of the toys were afraid.

“We’re only children. Some of us are fixed like this… forever. We can’t change any more.”

“Then you will have to do the best you can. With whatever tools he gave you.”

To the Children of the Damned, Frost said, “You three. I suspect you have a flair for leadership.”

•

They walked back together, Mori and Trista trailing several yards behind Frost.

“Will the toys leave?” Mori wondered.

“Maybe. Eventually. Those three damn brats, without question.”

“Who do you think he was, Trista? The old man.”

“Who knows,” Trista said.

“I mean, he had to be somebody, right?” Mori said. “Somebody like Frost’s father or her maker or…” Mori gestured. “Her lover?”

Trista thought about it. “Perhaps he was her son.”

Mori was aghast. “I am aghast!” she cried.

“Why, Mori? Frost is almost two centuries old. In all that time, is it inconceivable that she would want to raise a child? And that man, that inventor? Pah. He wasn’t always an old man; once upon a time, he was someone’s toy, too.”

Mori looked troubled. Trista was sympathetic.

“Who knows, Mori?” Trista said. “I have no clue, and that is all right. Now come on, let’s get to the car before Billy feels the need for speed.”

14

“Where ARE we going, exactly?” Mori said.

“Oh, the end,” Trista said sleepily. “The end.”

“Yeah, of course. But in the meantime?”

“Hmm. Well, would you believe the wreck of the Imperial Japanese Battleship Yamato, sunk more than a century ago? We shall resurrect the once mighty ship and incinerate the scourge of the Nox Golgoth from every corner of the planet! It shall be glorious. Big guns, booming music. Would you believe that?”

“I would not.”

“Nor should you. Ah, you are a savvy one, Mori Kim Marr. I always had a good feeling about you.”

•

The sleek black car swept down the empty highway under the white glare of an indifferent sun.

Frost sat behind the wheel, alone with her thoughts, silent under the hum of her circuits. Billy was awake but quiet beside the robot. Through the car’s windows the landscape flowed past in a steady stream of orange desert and brown shrub, the occasional gnarled naked tree. Trista and Mori lolled together, languid in the back seat. The vehicle was firmly under Frost’s control—it was safe to doze, dream, talk. Mori and Trista made a half-hearted stab at telepathy. It wasn’t working.

“When I was a brat…”

“Two?”

“No, six. This girl…”

“Friend?”

“Enemy. She was a selfish little cow. I hated her…”

“And you killed her, thus cementing your alienation in the orphanage and ultimately all of society, and thereafter you discovered drugs and alcohol, poor Mori…”

“No, no! Jesus. This little girl had a book I really wanted, a real book, not a digital. It had pictures…”

“Unicorns. Fairy creatures. Friends you did not have!”

“No! Demons. Lots of demons. It was an antique manga, it was falling apart…”

“…and in the pitched battle for ownership of this decades-old mass of moldy pulp, you and your enemy tore the ancient tome to shreds and nobody got to own it, and you never forgave yourself…”

“No, no, no! Jesus. Forget it. Move over.” And Mori gave Trista a semi-sharp elbow to the ribs.

“Seriously, for fuck’s sake, Moon Goddess,” Mori said. She frowned, eyes closed.

After a moment, Mori said, “Seriously. We’ve been on the road to nowhere for days. We’ve survived Billy’s driving, encountered weird children and creepy toys, but we’ve seen, like, zero evidence of the Super Evil Force, also known as Nox Golgoth. Has the big evil creep lost interest? Died of boredom? Come on, tell me the truth, Astral Queen—where the fuck are we going?”

Trista stirred, stiffened slightly. “The truth…”

“It would be a nice change, you know?”

“‘A change…’ When have I lied to you, Mori?”

Playfully, Mori began to say, “Always—” but Trista cut her off with a sharp, “—Never.”

And Trista sat up, wide awake, unblinking. She glared at Mori.

“Never,” Trista said, each of the syllables soft yet delivered piercingly between tongue and teeth.

Mori began, “Hey, I—”

“Silence,” Trista whispered, not screwing around.

She glanced toward the front. “Stop the car!”

“Is there a problem?” Frost asked.

“Stop the car!”

Frost shrugged. Her eyes glowed a fraction brighter, overriding the car’s CPU. Flaps and rudders snapped up and out from the car’s exterior, ba-KOOOSH! Powerful streams of compressed air vented from previously concealed ports; the car decelerated with a rapid mechanized whoooooom, the droning powering-down of the engine. In less than five seconds the vehicle eased to a gentle and complete halt.

“Get out,” Trista told Mori, cold. Sub-zero.

“What?! Hey, come on—!”

“Get. Out. Frost! Open the rear door!”

Pneumatic hiss and unsnapping of locks, and the rear passenger door obediently swung open.

“Out. Out. Out,” Trista commanded, pushing Mori out into the—

“ARghghGHggh! Fucking daylight!” Mori cringed. “What the fuck, you bitch?!”

“Yeah.” Billy winced. He staggered out of the car, rubbing the semi-sleep from his eyes. “What the…”

Then Billy saw the look on Trista’s face. “Oh no,” he groaned. “Oh God, no. Oh no. Oh God.”

“Perhaps…” Frost began in her most reasonable tone.

But Trista would have none of it. She shoved Mori, hard. “Move. We’re walking.”

Mori staggered back, began to protest anew but Trista merely shoved her again.

“Move. We are going for a walk, you and I!”

“Mori,” Billy called out in bleary surrender. “It’ll be…” He batted the air with a feeble hand. “It’ll be fine. Fine! You’ll be fine…” He shook his head, muttered, “Jesus.”

Billy crawled back into the safety and shadows of the car. “Jesus…”

“Stay here!” Trista said over her shoulder. She marched forward, shoving Mori before her, out into the emptiness of the desert, the wasteland.

“Ah, me,” Frost sighed, watching them go.

“What the FUCK?!” Mori protested a final time.

“You said you wanted the truth,” Trista hissed, her voice receding. “Time to look into the abyss, you rude little bitch!”

Frost sighed again. In a matter of moments, Trista and Mori were lost from sight.

•

This is torture! Mori raged. Sun and sand and rocks and shit, what GIVES, man?! She really could not believe it; one second, all cuddly and nice—nearly telepathic! But the next second, boom! Death march! Jesus! How old did Trista say she was? Was this some ancient Cantaran bonding ritual? What the flying, freaking, goddamn—

“Just walk,” Trista said behind her, as if eavesdropping on Mori’s thoughts.

“Where,” Mori said between her teeth, “are we going, exactly?!”

“Mmm, that seems to be the question of the day, doesn’t it,” Trista said airily. “You said you wanted to know the truth.”

“Yeah, well, couldn’t you fucking write it down, or send it in a—Ahhh!” Mori’s left ankle twisted in a sharp and painful misstep; her boots were built with modest lifts that made it difficult to traverse the sand and rocks. She knelt, rubbed at the throbbing ankle, the unhelpful boot.

“Take them off,” Trista said. “I discarded mine some time ago.”

Mori looked up at her. “You threw away your goddamn shoes?!”

“They’ll still be there, when we return. Take them off.” Then: “Take it all off. Everything.”

Bray of laughter. “Oh, come on!”

Trista stared down at Mori. Trista’s face had assumed the ancient quality Mori had witnessed before in that seemingly long-ago smoky bar, a face made of porcelain, a face not quite human…

Slowly, not turning from Mori, Trista pulled at the burnt and torn rag of her shirt. Up over her torso, then casting the garment aside. The shirt fell like a ghost to the sand.

Mori blinked at Trista’s bare breasts in the sunlight. “Hey, now. Astral Queen. Uh…”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Trista said, deadly serious. “You wanted to know the truth. We go to face The Abyss. The Waste. Illusions, rags—they will not shield us.”

She dug into her pocket, withdrew a small object the size of a pill. Held it out to Mori. “Take this. Swallow it.”

Mori frowned. “What… what is it?”

“Just a drop. A drop in the ocean. Take it, Mori. Trust me.”

The pill-sized object in Trista’s hand did not glitter, or catch the light, or anything. Hell, it could have been a rock. Or a Red Baron. Mori half-grunted, laughing at herself.

“Did you trust me when you where dead?” Trista asked. “When we fell together through the Shift Eldritch?”

Mori looked up at her.

“Then trust me now. It is time you knew the truth. The whole truth.”

“Do I have to get naked?”

“Just take the damn thing, Mori!”

Mori took it, swallowed.

She blinked. “Well, I…”

She blinked again. “Oh, man…”

Mori rose slowly to her feet. Her ankle no longer hurt. Nothing hurt. Her head filled with an impossible ocean and the crashing waves of the sky, the sky, the blue, the day…it was not day. It was not night. Mori teetered. Mori fell. Mori did not fall. Trista’s hand…

Trista’s hand, firm on her arm. Words. Words like a caress…

Look, Mori… that is where we are going…

And Mori saw…

15

Mori swayed on her feet. She would have fallen if Trista hadn’t steadied her. She watched a strange building take shape, a ghost structure solidifying out of sand and light and shadow. It was a cabin, a cathedral, a miniature castle with an ornate roof of spikes and spires, gargoyles. Like a ski lodge for angels, Mori thought, or vampires. It was eerie, it was beautiful. She blinked. Her head swam.

“Is that—?”

“Yes. Cantaran. My house. From long ago. A reasonable facsimile, anyway. It will do. Come.”

“But that’s not… it’s not real…”

“Real enough,” Trista said. “Come.”

Trista led Mori over the sand to the gates of the strange house. The gargoyles, Mori saw, were human. Moaning in pain and frozen forever.

“Hey, uh—” Mori began. She wanted to say, Start of a bad trip, babe…

Trista hushed her. “Don’t be a child. You’re tired, you’re filthy… your clothes! Gods.” Trista grimaced. She pulled at Mori’s jacket. “You’ll not wear these sodden togs in my house!”

“But it’s not real!” Mori protested.

“Take them off,” Trista commanded, peeling the admittedly reeking clothes down and off from Mori. “Off, off, off.” Trista tugged, unbuttoned, unzipped, and in seconds Mori was naked.

“Yeeesh,” Mori said, covering herself. She was not cold, but she shivered.

“Hmm,” Trista said, glancing at Mori with an up-and-down flash of neutral appraisal. She turned. “Come. Casa Cantara awaits. Hah!”

She went to the large arched doors, pushed them open, and disappeared inside the strange house. Mori heard the quick ripping of fabric, then a splash.

“Mori!” Trista called from within. There was a watery echo. “Come inside!”

Mori glanced at the stone human figures on the exterior of the house, writhing forever in pain. Stay out, stay out, they silently warned.

“Oh, fuck me blind, blood muffin, and you too, Jesus,” Mori whispered.

Clutching her clothes to her chest, Mori padded inside.

Her voice wafted thin from within, surprised, delighted: “Heyhey, wow! Man! I didn’t…”

The big white doors swung shut.

•

At the car, Billy sat slumped on the hood, reclining but not relaxed, his back against the windshield. He watched the sun descend into the far off hills. “What the hell…” Billy muttered to himself for what seemed the ten-thousandth time.

He snapped on the vodophone glasses and spoke into the microphone, “—dai.” A distant rock exploded with a brown shower of dirt and dust.

“Would you please stop doing that,” Frost said. She hadn’t moved since Trista had marched Mori out into the flat silent waste. “Every time you blow up a cursed rock…”

“Yeah?”

“I calculate… violent possibilities.”

“Bring it,” Billy sighed, bored. He frowned. Sighed again. Then, “What the hell!” Ten thousand and one…

He half-turned to Frost. “So what is she doing now?”

“Trista does what she does,” Frost said, standing inert by the car’s open door, electric eyes locked on the distant horizon.

“Yeah, well—it’s getting dark!”

“Afraid?”

“Oh, terrified. Protect me, robo-mama.”

“That sounds like something Mori would say.”

“Yeah,” Billy said, “it does.” And Billy sat up, arms on his knees. He frowned.

Billy said, “She’s going to tell her, isn’t she. Trista’s going to tell Mori the truth.”

Frost remained silent. She studied the horizon.

The darkness gathered.

•

“Whew-hoo-oh, oh wow,” Mori gasped, surprised but not displeased by what she beheld.

She stood in a vast chamber of white marble with a domed ceiling, every corner lit by soft amber light. Trista lolled in a circular pool in the center of the room, ripple-blurred and naked beneath the surface of the water.

“Come in,” Trista said pleasantly. “The water is—”

“Ha ha, fine, yeah, I’m sure,” Mori said, puzzled but smiling. She studied the room, the scene, everything. She smelled the warm bath salt, felt the clean smooth stone beneath her feet. Pretty damn fucking real. “Wow. That is… some pill, Astral Goddess. Damn! You could make a fortune on the street with shit like this!”

Mori shook herself, squinted at Trista. “So… this is some weird-ass-mind-meld shit, right? Outside, it’s freaky weird, but inside it’s almost normal. Is this stuff from your head, my head, what?”

Trista wiped her face, treading water. She looked up at Mori. “Some of it is yours, some mine. Does it matter?”

Mori shrugged, still smiling, still looking around. She was beginning to enjoy herself. “Not really, I guess. It’s just kind of, you know… corny. Could be worse. There could be white doves fluttering around. Candles. Big flowing curtains.”

Trista laughed. She swam away with sharp, scissor-like strokes. Mori watched, fascinated. She had never in her life seen anyone actually swim.

“I ate all the doves,” Trista said from the other side of the pool. “Drained them of every last drop of blood!”

“Ha ha,” Mori said. “You would.”

“Come in,” Trista said. “You’re tired and filthy. Really, the water’s wonderful.”

“Ah, I’m sure it is, but really, I’m good.” Mori didn’t want Trista to catch on that she was mildly terrified of the open and seemingly deep pool; Mori Kim Marr’s history with water did not extend past the rationed drizzle of showers.

“Besides,” Mori said. “It’s not really real, is it?”

“Real enough, Mori.”

Mori frowned, sat by the side of the pool. Carefully slipped her legs into the warm water. Pretty damn real. She shook her head. And quickly washed her face and body with cupped hands.

Trista watched. She considered edging over, playfully yanking Mori in, pulling her under the water. That would be evil. Trista thought better of it. She slipped up and stepped out of the pool. Mori glanced at the wet sleek flash of Trista’s bare limbs and torso, kept washing.

Wrapping herself in a robe, Trista sat beside Mori, handed a second robe to her. Mori shrugged into it. They sat together, looking at the water.

“Better, yes?”

“Oh yeah,” Mori breathed. “Hell yeah.”

“It is time we talked. Really talked.”

“Guess we couldn’t do this in the car, huh?”

“No. This is between you and me. The others already… the others will understand. Besides…” Trista nodded. “I like the water.”

Reflected light rippled on the surface of the pool.

“Yeah,” Mori said, looking at the water. Almost dreamy: “It’s nice.”

Trista studied Mori’s profile. Thoughts intruded, thoughts Trista did not want. This poor clueless squab of human flesh… Trista pushed it away. “Mori,” she began.

Trista steeled herself.

“Mori… six hundred and fifty thousand years ago… I did something terrible. Accident or not, I unleashed a monstrous force into this world. Pure, sentient evil. It destroyed my civilization in the blink of an eye, and it hungers still…”

“I know,” Mori said, not looking up from the water. “It’s really, really bad…”

“And I have… shaped the course of human history to my will. In so many ways. Oh, Gods. I have influenced nations, directed wars, measured and carved human bloodlines… for centuries. Millennia. All for one purpose. To craft a weapon. A living weapon that will finally defeat the Nox Golgoth…”

“I know,” Mori whispered. Eyes only for the water. “I know.”

“It’s you, Mori.”

“I know,” Mori frowned. “I’m the…”

Mori’s frown suddenly sharpened. “What’s wrong with the goddamn water?!”

Trista turned.

At the bottom of the pool, a cloud of deep red swirled, grew. Like a storm of blood billowing silent under the surface.

Trista leapt to her feet, yanked Mori up.

“Gods, GODS! Not now!”

The pool exploded in a frothing geyser of red, a deafening, inhuman roar.

•

Frost spun, stopped short with a harsh mechanical KLAK! Her eyes burned fierce.

“Billy. Get in the car.”

And Billy had exactly two point five seconds before Frost was behind the wheel and gunning the engine, super-charged pistons screaming, wheels spinning. Billy vaulted into the passenger seat; the car tore like a bullet across the waste of the desert.

•

Explosion of red, foam, nightmare: a massive broad-shouldered hulk rose from the pool, a thick-armed titan with spikes and claws. Unfurling toward the domed ceiling, twisting and uncoiling and changing…

“No!” Trista shouted, pushing Mori away.

The Nox Golgoth howled. Ear splitting, unearthly. Mori gaped, stumbled back.

Whip of a giant clawed hand, and long spikes flashed, shot like steel-braced javelins at Trista. The cruel thin shafts stabbed through Trista’s body, plunging through her flesh, nailing her to the wall. Trista screamed. “Mori…!”

Growl inhuman and lash of cables, coiling lightning fast around Mori’s neck. Trista screamed again, pinned against the wall yet straining for Mori even as the cables yanked Mori up into the air.

TALKING? The Nox Golgoth’s voice was an earthquake, the cracking of a glacier, the death scream of a star. TALKING WITH YOUR PRECIOUS WEAPON?

Trista’s face trembled with terrible pain and defiance, tears streaming.

The Nox Golgoth drew Mori close. Mori shrieked, struggled, all coherent thought gone. She knew terror beyond measure; to Mori the thing seemed in possession of countless faces, a thousand mouths, all of them filled with smoke and hate.

Do you KNOW what she has planned for you, human?!

The Nox Golgoth swung to Trista with venom: Tell her, tell her, TELL HER.

Trista grimaced. Blood trickled from her lips, ran down her chin, splattered in large drops on the marble floor. Trista said,

“You—you’re not The One, Mori. You’re… the Exit Vector.”

Warping, twisting with a thousand mouths and teeth like cliffs, the Nox Golgoth screamed, Tell her what it MEANS!

Mori pulled at the cables coiled around her neck. “No.” Dreading the answer. “No…”

Coughing, tears of pain streaming, Trista said, “It means… you have to die, Mori.”

And the Nox Golgoth laughed, obscene.

16

The car ripped super-sonic across the dark open desert. Billy’s face was a rictus of fear, a helpless scream rising from the quivering gash of his mouth, “Ee-eee-yaaa-yaAAAA…”

And though Frost sat absolutely impassive behind the wheel, beneath her mask of metal and armored plates there was chaos and frenzy, the clacking of gears and the scream of ancient pistons, the thudding hammer of her mechanical heart—racing, racing against critical failure, against the lowering dark that she knew would claim victory, this time…

•

Die, the Nox Golgoth purred, the sound descending into a gurgle of infernal mirth. Oh yes, death for the maiden, DEATH for the soft stupid pretty girl thing. TRAGIC design flaw in your ultimate weapon, wouldn’t you agree, Mother? Tragic! Euerr. Euerr. Euerr. In order for your precious EXIT VECTOR to WORK, she has to DIE!

“Da-damn,” Mori winced, her head lowering, fingers still tugging at the cables around her neck. Her body arched, twisting as she was held aloft; her feet kicked empty air. “Damn… you’re… fucking… ugly.”

Euerr! went the Nox Golgoth. Mori had put it mildy; the beast’s body was a twisted and molten nightmare, an assembly of countless bodies and bones, rippling in an unholy mass of liquid flesh. Mori glanced at Trista, who pulled with both hands at one of the long thin shafts that pinned her to the wall, a bone-like rod that had pierced Trista below her rib cage. Blood streamed beneath her slippery fists. Trista looked up, locked eyes with Mori. This thing, this…

massive Golgothic shadow puppet, assembled from long dead carcasses of the desert. How much…

…how much energy was the Nox Golgoth expending to control and maintain this hideous shape?!

Trista glared at her enemy, bared her teeth. Her face twisted with unspeakable effort; she screamed. And Trista snapped the impaling rod with a brittle crack, tiny shards flying. With her forearm she savagely chopped at the other thin immobilizing shafts, “Eyeearaaahh!”

EUERR!

“Yah,” Mori gasped, her vision fading, lips turning blue. “Go, go—!”

Trista pushed free and down from the broken rods, blood spurting from multiple wounds but she seemed to not care, for her face was fury and eyes were fire, and she screamed again, not from pain but with the unleashing of a battle cry, an ancient alien sound that chilled Mori to her core. The Nox Golgoth thrashed and roared, jerked Mori back with the cables, a flopping human puppet. Trista screamed the alien word again. With a jagged length of broken rod in each hand, Trista leapt high into the air and landed atop the misshapen, writhing mass of the Nox Golgoth. She plunged her makeshift weapons into its flesh again and again, stabbing in an unrelenting and frenzied assault.

The Nox Golgoth lumbered and spun and howled, trying without success to shake Trista off. Mori was whipped from side to side and back again. A marble wall came zooming.

“Whoa!” Mori gasped, squeezing her eyes shut…

…but the collision never came.

The walls of Trista’s Cantaran house dissolved in phantom sheets as the three combatants came near anything “solid,” falling away in ephemeral bits and swirls of dust. And it was so pretty and nice Mori thought crazily, losing consciousness, oxygen deprived and ready to be violently sick. The domed ceiling was wiped away, erased. Mori saw a blur of nighttime stars, then a jarring glimpse of Trista’s face, lips curled in bloodlust, battle frenzy. Jesus. She must be losing it, for every time Trista stabbed the writhing hulk of the Nox Golgoth, Mori thought she heard the pain-wracked cry of a child…

ENOUGH! The cry was loosed from a hundred tortured mouths. There came a sudden and final heave, and Trista was at last thrown clear of the Nox Golgoth.

She tumbled away, landed in a crouch and a growl on the desert floor, a jagged spike in each hand. And even as Trista rose, ready to rush back in…

Curse you, Mother. The words cut the night like the shredding of the planet’s crust. I may not know exactly how your WEAPON works, but I will be thrice-DAMNED before I let you USE IT…

Mother? Mori blinked, very out of it, nearly gone.

And even as the hulking shadow-flesh of the monster puppet began to discolor and sag and melt, the Nox Golgoth raised a massive, splayed claw…

…and there was a tearing of the atmosphere, a fissure of light like the opening of a window, and a violent, rushing wind.

“No!” Trista screamed, rushing forward.

TOO LATE. SHE IS MINE. The inhuman bulk stepped into the glare, taking Mori with it. Beams of light flashed and crossed.

“No! No! Mori!”

“Trista!”

Leaping, Trista caught hold of Mori’s outstretched hand. The Nox Golgoth growled with displeasure even as its physical body molted and faded—even as Mori was drawn inescapably into the blinding dazzle of the vortex.

Their hands clasped. Their hands desperate. Slipping. Their eyes met. Trista winced, pulled…

A sharp-barbed tentacle whipped from the fading mass of the Nox Golgoth, cracked Trista across her skull. Mori and Trista’s fingers were torn apart. Mori was sucked away.

No. Not spoken.

The fissure of light flared and crackled, disappeared with a pop and a WHOOM! And was gone.

Trista knelt alone on the desert floor—bloody, breathless, furious. Her lips shook. She lowered her head. A line of blood and spit fell to the sand.

•

A heartbeat, a universe away…

Mori’s head lolled. Her eyes fluttered. She—

She felt much, much better.

“Hey…” Mori swallowed, blinked, lifted her head.

She was moving down, down. Deeper and deeper through concentric rings, a tunnel, the core of a tornado. Mori could not lift a finger; it was as if she were being held immobile by two massive, warm, even loving hands. It was not entirely unpleasant. Down, down, down.

She had been here before.

“The Shift Eldritch,” she whispered.

Yes, said a voice from everywhere, nowhere, close.

Mori turned. Or thought she did.

The Nox Golgoth swirled around her, a ghost with a dozen, a hundred, a trillion faces, all of them like Trista’s. Vibrating. Like electromagnetic pulses viewed through flame. No, not Trista’s face, Mori realized. Trista’s people. The Cantarans. Their evil. Here, now, in the land between the living and the dead.

A thousand questions leapt to her mind. Mori breathed just one of them.

“What’s next, destroyer of worlds?”

Hmm. The Nox Golgoth considered. If you managed to wrest from your enemy a weapon of unimaginable destructive power, what would you do with it? Even if you didn’t know how it worked. Especially if you didn’t how it worked..

Mori remembered a bit of morbid history, a half-listened-to lesson from her childhood. Abraham Lincoln’s body. The steps the United States government finally took to protect Lincoln’s body from grave robbers and thieves.

“Why,” Mori began with bright innocent eyes and cheerful voice, knowing full well she was fucked. “Using my super awesome powers, I’d create a secluded tropical paradise. And I’d stash the weapon there!”

Concrete, the Nox Golgoth whispered. They encased Lincoln’s body in countless tons of concrete.

Where no one could touch it.

Ever.

“Hmm. Yeah,” Mori said. “There’s that, too.”

She remembered Trista’s confession. The words falling from blood-split lips. Death.

“She’ll find us,” Mori said. “She’ll find you.”

Oh…

Down, down, and down they went.

17

“Alive,” Trista breathed under a black sky filled with indifferent stars. “She’s alive, alive, alive…”

There came the roar of an engine. Trista lifted her battered face to the flash of harsh beams in the dark. Brakes, doors, shadows. And scuffled moments later, Trista was wincing as Frost and Billy hauled her up from the looped sprays of blood glistening on the desert sand.

Trista swayed in the glare of the car’s lights, groggy as a boxer bludgeoned into near oblivion but still standing. With torn knuckles she batted at Frost and Billy as if the robot and boy were not her friends but her opponents. “Mori’s alive, alive!”

Billy gaped, blinked. “But how do you—?”

“Because we’re all still here, you idiot,” Trista growled, clutching the gore of her midsection. She bled from a dozen wounds. “The Nox Golgoth will not dare harm Mori for fear of initiating the Exit Vector. If Mori dies at the wrong time, in the wrong place, then… we all die. Everybody dies. She’s alive!”

Frost scanned the area. “But not here,” she said, her sensors ticking and humming with quiet yet mounting alarm. There was a wheep! and Frost turned. “Not anywhere! The Nox Golgoth must have taken her to the—”

“—the Shift Eldritch, yes,” Trista hissed. “The lair between life and death. Oh, the stupid, reeking pile of feces and foul unsacred seed! I’ll—oh, oh, yarghgh! Billy! Bandages! Anything! Now, boy!”

“The car, Billy. Quickly.”

“The Nox Golgoth thinks I won’t follow it there,” Trista said as Billy returned with a bag and Trista urgently began dressing her wounds. “It thinks it won’t leave a path through the Life/Death field a mile wide! It thinks—ARGHGH!”

The veins in Trista’s neck bulged as she wound a long strip of cloth around her stomach. She pulled the knot tight.

“It thinks it can hide Mori forever, that I’ll turn away and start again… well…”

Trista finished the battle dressings. Her stomach was sheathed in a criss-cross of taut wrappings, her limbs shielded by strips of tape and bandages. Her hands became fists.

“It’s got another thing coming,” Trista said.

•

Mori said, “So why aren’t I dead?”

Who says you won’t be, soon?

Mori and the Nox Golgoth had moved beyond the ethereal tunnel of rings; now they passed through oddly tangible clouds that possessed texture and weight. Mori reached out, touched the thick swirling gas. Not exactly the density of water. Something else.

Blood, the Nox Golgoth rumbled. It flows through these parts, it never stops.

Try it.

Taste it.

You will have to ingest something. Until I figure out what to do with you.

“I have to stay alive,” Mori said, realizing it for the first time and scarcely aware she had spoken the words aloud. She rubbed the blood smoke through her fingers. “Whatever I am… watever makes me the Exit Vector… I have to stay alive.”

She looked around. The Nox Golgoth was present, but not to be seen.

“That really burns you, doesn’t it, world wrecker. You skunk wad of bad dreams.”

The Nox Golgoth said nothing, but Mori could feel its hate.

•

“My weapons,” Trista said, the words more than a whisper, almost a snarl.

Frost inclined her head ever so slightly, and a panel in the robot’s upper right leg slid open with a whir.

Trista’s weapons: blade, amulet, staff. The short curved blade went to Trista’s hip, the amulet hung from her neck, the staff assembled by snapping three pieces into one, her movements sharp, her hands a blur. Blade, amulet, staff.

She was ready.

“Portal,” Frost sighed. “You will need a portal.”

Trista’s lips hardened. She looked down at the desert sand. “I know.”

Frost studied the horizon. “Will it be me, or Billy?”

“Huh, what?” Billy said.

Trista said, “I need Billy. And you know you can’t go there.”

Frost turned. She smiled with a soft clack and a hum. “Mere rhetoric. Just… stalling.”

“Are you prepared, then?”

“Yes.” Frost let her long trench coat slip down and fall in a heap to the sand. She tilted her iron chin to the sky, stretched out her arms wide as if ready to receive final judgment, like a cybernetic martyr waiting for the epiphany. “Find her, Trista. Finish it.”

“I will.”

“Then—goodbye.”

There was an explosive snaka-BRAAAKT! and multiple bolts and braces and plates popped clear from Frost’s upper body, like a dozen springs snapping from her chest. Her inner workings were laid bare; the orange glow of her eyes grew dim, went out. The plates of her face were calm, frozen, at peace.

Billy’s jaw dropped open. “What the fuck—?!”

But Trista merely went to her inert and silent friend and plunged her hands deep into the metal cavity of Frost’s chest. Trista pulled at wires, cogs, pistons, she removed ancient relays and switches and mechanisms that had not seen sun or starlight for over two hundred years. Trista cried as she worked, but her lips were hard.

“What are you doing?!”

Trista’s cheeks were wet. Her face was stone. “Goddamn it, Billy, please shut the fuck up… ah.”

She turned to Billy, held up a crystal with five points, black wires dangling.

“Do you know what this is?”

Billy could only gape in mute horror.

“Frost’s heart. Really.”

Trista bent over the other pieces she had removed from Frost and set to work in a blaze of reconfiguration—refitting, re-wiring, reassembly.

“This is fury, Billy. This what we do when we hate so much, when nothing else matters. Only victory, or vengeance, or, oh, fuck. Does it matter? Really? When the battle has been fought for so long, when friends… oh Gods…”

And Trista looked away from her labors, her face a brief spasm of torture, self hate. She drew a single ragged breath, then continued. She snapped a final piece into place, and she stood.

Trista held up the apparatus she had made from Frost’s heart.

“Numi portal,” Trista said, her features unreadable.

She pressed her thumb against the device. The crystal heart glowed with a soft keen.

Then a beam shot forth from the device, and like a stream of paint striking an invisible wall, a panel appeared, an upright, door-sized panel of light that hovered and pulsed. The edges crackled black, like dark flames curling.

“Don’t bother with your toys,” Trista told Billy, light from the portal flickering across her features. “Your gun, the vodophones… you won’t need them. They won’t work where we’re going.”

“Huh,” Billy grunted, glancing back at the immobile iron husk that had been his friend. “You’re taking yours, I see.”

“Different. Non-mech. We have to go, Billy.”

“And where are we going?”

Trista gestured, to the portal, the dark realms beyond. “To save this damn planet and every screaming hopeless soul on it. To save Mori…”

At least for now, Trista thought bitterly.

“Come on.”

Trista set the device down, and she and Billy passed through, disappeared.

The glowing panel winked shut like the closing of a window, leaving only the night and the stars and the sand and the somehow now-frail shell of Frost, her arms still spread wide, her unmoving metal face mute witness, the sacrifice to fury.

18

Billy’s skin melted. His skull evaporated. He screamed, but there was no sound; he had no mouth.

Billy fell and fell. Down the roaring vortex, a shaft of wind and zooming circles, rushing at him mercilessly, faster and faster. Billy was assaulted by sounds, shrieks, voices. So many voices. Pleading, begging. For salvation. Not dead they cried, not dead, not dead, NOT YET!

And Billy suddenly realized that countless desperate hands grasped at him. Dozens. Hundreds. They all wanted what Billy had…

Life.

Alive, gasped a woman with an ugly gunshot wound in her temple. There was a dribble of blood, charred bone. Not dead, moaned a man with a noose around his neck and pants at his ankles and a curious contraption assembled about his privates, Accident the man explained, I didn’t, I didn’t mean to, while a trio of pale girls with needles and tubes dangling from their arms chorused as one Too hiiiiigh…

Trista’s voice, loud in Billy’s ear: “Should have warned you…”

Billy found his phantom tongue, made it work. “What the HELL—?!”

“No, not Hell. Close, though! Ha! Oh, poor little William Wolfgang…”

Trista, the bitch! Billy raged and pushed at the phantom claws that clung to him. Was Trista laughing? Did she think this was funny?

Trista said, “This is the Shift Eldritch, Billy. The lair between life and death. These people… They are confused. They are the dying, the recent dead. They cannot harm you, boy.”

“Well they’re FREAKING ME THE FUCK OUT!”

And now Trista laughed. The sound was positively wicked.

“Then make them go away, Billy. Use that vaunted power of yours. Quickly!”

Still falling at an annihilating speed, Billy grimaced. He looked up.

The tunnel above him stretched into infinity. Billy was at the end of an limitless coil of intertwined and phantasmagoric bodies, all them grasping and begging, moaning for the smallest measure of breath, the life in Billy’s chest…

Billy shuddered, let it loose. His eyes flared with a jagged psionic pulse. He screamed,

“Go away, LET GO OF ME!”

The pulse from Billy’s body tore the whispering phantoms to shreds, like wax figures decimated by the white-hot roar of a blowtorch.

Freed, Billy twisted in mid-air. He fell even faster.

“Billy!”

He saw a flash: Trista reaching for him—

And Billy struck solid ground, hard.

Trista landed beside him, lithe on her bare feet and ready for battle. She crouched, eyes sharp, her staff held in both fists.

“Get up, Boy.” Trista said, no sympathy as Billy winced and groaned. “We’ve got work to do… golgothic ass to kick.”

•

Mori realized she had called the dreaded Destroyer of Worlds a “shit-bitch” one time too many.

Because Mori was five, again. Five years old and helpless and terrified. Again.

It was the only weapon the Nox Golgoth had, but it was a good one: the horror to be tapped within Mori’s own head.

“More-reee…”

“Mistake…”

“Should have been flushed…”

“Come here, More-reee, you stupid ugly little cow, with your fat ugly stupid face…”

Enemies surrounded five year-old Mori. Phantom foes who laughed, knew her every weakness, knew exactly where it hurt, how to make the pain special. The never-known father, the long wished-for mother—they watched, too, indifferent, uncaring. And all the creeps from school… they were all there, full force. Every pang of worthlessness, every bite of self-hate…

“Stop it,” Mori heard herself whisper. “Not… fucking… real…”

When a very loud—and very real—voice rang out, “Go away, LET GO OF ME!”

“Yah!” Mori cried. She shuddered, and she snapped violently from her private torment.

She lay trembling on a cold stone floor in a chamber of her enemy’s making.

It was a real floor, a real room; somehow the Nox Golgoth had manufactured and maintained a physical environment in a place where the borders of the living and the dead were blurred. How much power…? Will Trista find them…? Mori didn’t know, couldn’t even guess. She still wore only the short robe Trista had given her minutes ago… shit, years ago. How long had she been the mega-creep’s prisoner?

What, the Nox Golgoth rumbled quietly, was THAT?

“Rats…” Mori hissed, her body laced with terrible pain, steam curling from her limbs.

She lifted her face to the shifting, amorphous shadow of the Nox Golgoth. Mori winced, showed the bastard her teeth.

“Rats in the walls,” Mori gasped, her eyes hooded with slow burning hate. “Bats in the attic, you skunk-wad, malformed, twisted…”

The Nox Golgoth drew a great vent of breath, like a volcano in reverse. Don’t make me hurt you…. again.

Mori snorted. “Big deal. You going to hit me with more bad memories? Is that the worst you’ve got—the crap I’m already carrying around in my head?”

Mori pushed herself up on her elbows.

“Bring it, shit-bitch. I’ve been eating my own pain for breakfast my whole life, you—”

Oh… the Nox Golgoth seethed. It towered over Mori, flexed its claws.

Girl, I believe it is time for some REAL discomfort…

•

At that very moment, a world, a blink, a breath away…

Saint Frost stood inert, dreaming in a repeating algorithm.

Frost was not conscious, not aware of her surroundings, but she was alive, a soft yet steady pulse looping around and around within a sub-routine. The Victorian robot remained as Trista and Billy had left her, her head tilted back and her arms spread wide, an iron orchid sprouting stiff and immobile from the desert sand.

Three shadows crept toward Frost.

Stealthy, not speaking. Three children, gliding in out of the night. Immaculate in their little suits and little ties, their pale hair perfectly coiffed. Two boys, one girl.

It was the eerie three who had been dubbed The Children of the Damned.

Following the liberation from their unhappy home, the three had intently tracked their robotic heroine, the iron lady who had answered all of their questions. Now they had found her, and they gazed up at her with quizzical and worried faces.

Dead? telepathically wondered the first boy, James.

Broken? thought the second boy, Jaidon.

No, declared the girl, whose name was Joy. She knelt in the sand, lifted the Numi portal projector that Trista had fashioned from Frost’s crystal heart. Disassembled. We can…

And the Children of the Damned shared a single thought. They looked at each other, they studied the crystal heart with its dangling black wires. Then as one, they turned to Frost.

•

“Up, Billy! We’ll need more of that psionic spunk, boy!” And Trista hauled him to his feet.

Billy winced, slapped at non-existent dust and dirt. He shook himself, looked around. “Weird…”

Trista and Billy stood on a vast and rocky landscape, mist curling. The vaulting sky was purple with black clouds.

“Is this—?”

“Gods, I wish that cursed question would evaporate! Do you not feel the ground beneath your feet? Do you not see the land before us? Real enough!”

“Hey, give me a break! Not all us are used to bouncing through dimensions! Jesus!”

“Quiet,” Trista hissed. She fingered the amulet hanging from her neck, gently rubbing the stone between her fingers. “Our time here is limited. And once I activate this…”

The amulet began to softly pulse.

“There,” Trista whispered, and her eyes flashed up to the distant horizon, the direction where their enemy lay. “There…”

•

The Nox Golgoth roared with disbelief and fury.

The BITCH! it seethed. SHE WON’T REST! DAMN HER!

“Ah,” Mori breathed. “See…”

Silence. The Nox Golgoth was black with rage.  It spun on Mori, a cyclone of hate. You… will stay safe. And STAY PUT…

Black cables came lashing, whipping tight around Mori. “Yow! Hey!”

While I…

The Nox Golgoth turned. Its fists were huge. Boulders.

…while I crunch my mother’s bones into little pieces!

19

Never, now, nowhere, here…

In an ancient and subterranean train station, a child played with his toys while a woman sat aloof and silent on a bench, her long sharp bare legs crossed, the polished black of her high heels spotless. The smoke of her cigarette curled. The train station was immense, seemingly abandoned, a labyrinthine chamber of halls and doors and archways. There was the crackle of electric announcements, the sound constant, rising and falling, the words broken and garbled. The child sat at the woman’s feet and played with his toys on the battered and filthy tiled floor. The boy had several dolls—a girl, a robot, an oddly alien lady, an action guy, and a stuffed cloth puppet with many gnarled and dangling limbs. The child bashed the figures together, the sounds of violence escaping softly from his puckered lips, “Pa-kuush” and  “Doooom,” and “Arghgh.” And as he played, the child absently sang to himself,

“When all the saints are gone and all the songs are sung,

When the sun’s given its sum and the night has finally won,

All the souls will shine at last, all souls bright and shining,

All souls, every one, forever and again…”

The boy frowned, then turned to face the woman seated above him. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

The woman, a dead ringer for Trista Ska Shearn, arched a single eyebrow. “That remains to be seen,” she told the child, and brought the cigarette to her lips.

•

“Now,” Trista said, and she lowered her hand, opened her fist.

The jeweled amulet pulsed in the center of her palm.

Trista held her breath, studied the pulse. It glowed and throbbed with mounting intensity. Trista stood tensed and ready for battle, her limbs taut under wrappings of bandages and tape, the sharp edge of her long battle-staff jagged and gleaming.

Billy Wolfgang waited beside Trista on the rocky and alien landscape. The purple sky roiled with black clouds. And tangled through the clouds snaked the long and vaporous trail of countless souls, howling as they migrated from one plane to the next. Billy tried not to shiver under the leather of his Crüzer coat.

Trista’s eyes came flashing up. “Get ready, Billy!”

Billy stumbled back, reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there, and the distant horizon exploded in a geyser of rock and dirt.

It was like a line of explosives, a shaft of ejected debris that flashed straight toward Trista and Billy. The wind shrieked and stones flew; it was the fury and speed of a tornado, the mounting roar of the Nox Golgoth.

It burst up out of the ground before them, an avalanche in reverse: broad-shouldered and multi-limbed with seemingly a thousand twisting mouths. It towered above Trista and Billy, screaming,

SHE IS MINE!

A massive fist the size of a boulder came smashing down, pulverizing the spot where Billy and Trista had stood.

Trista had thrown herself to one side. “Let it rip, Billy!”

Billy fell in an awkward roll, his features caught in a grimace of confusion and pain; he loosed the power within, unable to even aim. His eyes flashed a jagged psionic blue.

And even faster than Billy’s lightning-fork cut the air, Trista leapt high, a battle scream on her lips, her staff in one hand and her blade in the other.

She landed with the fury of an avenging angel upon the misshapen back of the Nox Golgoth. The laser-thin blast from Billy sliced through the enemy’s torso. Howl of pain, jet of black blood; the enemy twisted and writhed, striking at Billy with a nightmare extension of flesh that morphed and flowed, bony spikes jutting, jabbing at the Billy.

“Hey! Jesus!” he cried, backing up fast.

Billy’s eyes flashed again. One of the Nox Golgoth’s limbs exploded in an unpleasant shower of splintered bone and sizzling puss. Trista roared. She laughed, berserker-crazed, and she plunged her blades deep. Again. Again. And again.

The battle raged, lethal and obscene.

•

Even deep within the chamber where she lay captive, the sounds of combat reached Mori.

Mori paused, breathless and furious, nearly exhausted by her efforts to free herself.

She listened.

Billy’s voice, yelling, scared.

Trista’s too, laughing, screaming, totally insane.

The roar of the big creep.

And noise nothing short of Armageddon.

Mori drew breath through her teeth. She strained anew against her bonds, but to no avail; she lay on her side, hands bound behind her back, black cables wound tight about her upper body, her legs and ankles. There were no knots to fumble with, no way to slip free. Mori growled, shook the hair her out of her eyes.

From far off came the CRUMP! of an explosion, and Billy cried out, high-pitched with pain.

Damn it, Mori raged, spiraling into a mental cascade of increasingly foul obscenities. What the fuck could she do—?!

You will stay put, the Nox Golgoth had told her. And STAY SAFE…

Shit. Of course, Mori realized.

The creep hadn’t tied her up so she wouldn’t be able to leave; it had immobilized her so she wouldn’t be able to hurt herself.

The Nox Golgoth was afraid of her. She was the Exit Vector.

Mori remembered the news footage she seen in the club with Fritz, when she had “died.” She had nearly destroyed a city. Maybe more.

And Trista’s admission. Death.

Mori thought about it, considering. She studied her surroundings.

Bare room, walls.

Mori looked at the closest wall. She lay on her side, strands of hair falling across her eyes, her chest rising, straining against the tight bands of black.

•

Earth. The black of a desert night.

The Children of the Damned—the nearly identical children whose names were James, Joy, and Jaidon—had made a fast and furious mess of the car in their attempt to reanimate their robotic heroine, Saint Frost.

The eerie three had thrown open the hood and nearly totally disassembled the engine. Long cables snaked from the car’s battery to the crystal heart to the Numi portal projector, looping finally to the inert body of Frost. Wires and cogs and pieces of machinery lay everywhere. The children had surprised themselves; they were never, ever messy.

Hold on, try this, thought Joy, and she connected direct current.

Nothing.

Nothing! sulked James.

Wait, wait, “—wait,” said Jaidon, so excited he didn’t realize he spoke aloud. “I told you that bloody spark was buggered!”

“You did not!” cried James. “And if you’re going to talk out loud, for God’s sake, don’t talk like Father!”

“He did! He did tell you, you right smug sod,” exclaimed Joy, and she hurried to the battery, and then they were all crouched together, their small pale hands filthy with oil, their fingers nimble, their fingers quick.

A new connection was made. And the children’s faces, full of hope, swung as one toward the shadowed features of Frost.

There came a click—a single click—from the robot’s open chest cavity.

“Oh, bugger me—!”

“Shut up, you bastard!”

Another click. The three exchanged a glance, barely daring to hope.

They stood from the battery, they went slowly and silently to stand before Frost.

Her face-plates moved with a tiny, feeble whirrr…

Oh, come on, the children pleaded as one.

Her fingers moved. And one by one, interior lights blinked on within Frost’s chest. Her outstretched arms quivered, clacked, and slowly lowered with a slow but steady ticking…

“Mrrrwrwwrrrrrrr…” Frost went.

“Oh…” And the Children of the Damned knew their first happiness in a long time; their faces split wide with smiles and they began to shout.

“…..mmmrrrr-qu-quiet,” Frost told them, analyzing and understanding the situation at once. “Heart,” she said, struggling for functionality, her gold hands opening and closing. “Bring. Me. That.”

The three swung toward the five-sided crystal and Numi portal projector, still hindered and clipped with a dozen wires.

“But why?” they wondered.

“Friends. Trouble. Bring. To. Me.”

“How do you know?”

“Hunch,” Frost told them.

•

The Nox Golgoth roared, a dozen fanged mouths stretching wide with sharp-toothed fury, toxic saliva flying and sizzling, EUERRRR!

Trista screamed back. Her pupils were pins, her teeth sharp and jutting, her brow sloped and nothing short of alien. Not human. Cantaran. In the course of the battle, her features had changed.

Even through the frenzy and pitch, Billy had noticed the difference—and he was scared out his mind. Billy barely recognized Trista. She screamed, swung her staff like an ax. She roared, hungry for her enemy’s blood. She was insane, and she threw herself into a volley of blows, uncaring.

“Jesus, Trista!” Billy called, and barely got out of the way of a furious whipping tentacle of the Nox Golgoth. The flailing extremity shattered a wall of rock behind him.

“Trista!”

God, thought Billy, even the poor souls twisting and writhing in the sky—and they really were poor souls, Billy reflected crazily—even they had taken notice of the battle among the rocks. The cries of the figures in the sky had became desperate, high-pitched, terrified… the cries of the dispossessed. Billy tried to fire-off a psionic blast to take the heat off Trista for a second, but he couldn’t focus, because somewhere a child was singing in an absent voice, All souls bright and shining, all souls something-something-something…

Trista drew back her knife, ready to strike, her features contorted nearly beyond recognition…

When the whole of the Shift Eldritch flashed a massive sheet of blinding white, and the writhing figures in the sky screamed with new terror.

It was not lightning.

No, the Nox Golgoth growled, its limbs and tentacles retracting.

“No,” Trista whispered, catching herself in midstrike. She glanced up. “Mori, no!”

NOOOO! the Nox Golgoth roared, and in a black frenzy of motion, swung away and went ripping through the rock, tearing back in the direction it had come.

“BILLY!” Trista cried, reaching out and grabbing hold of his jacket. “We GO!”

And as if borne on a shaft of lightning, Trista and Billy went flashing after the Nox Golgoth. Over land and through dirt and rock, through solid matter and sheets of mists, finally through the walls of a domicile that the Nox Golgoth tore asunder, and into an empty room, empty save for a single figure…

WHAT, howled the Nox Golgoth, HAVE YOU DONE?!

“Oh, Mori,” Trista moaned.

“What have I done?” said Mori, the pretty girl who was bound hand and foot with tight coils of black cords. She had worked her way to a sitting position, her bare legs curled under her, her back against a blood-spattered wall. “Well, look at me,” Mori said, her eyes heavy, head lolling as if she were barely conscious. “Look upon me and despair, ha. I am the most powerful thing in the fucking universe, I’m the Exit Vector.”

And with a sleepy half smile, Mori dropped her chin to the hollow of her throat, then snapped her head back against the wall with a sickening crack, a sudden horizontal splash of blood.

Mori’s eyes rolled back.

Mori’s eyes turned white.

A half-circle glow of energy emerged behind Mori’s still and unmoving form, growing, expanding. Whooom, whooom, whoooom…

Trista and the Nox Golgoth shared a single word, No.

The Nox Golgoth went through the roof, literally. With a scream of unspeakable loss and pain, the multi-faced creature of teeth and shadows went soaring up and out, jagged rock falling. Trista rushed to Mori’s limp body; with a flash of her knife Trista cut Mori’s bonds and scooped the girl up. The half-circle glow of energy grew and swelled, a ghost moon of white, bigger and bigger, flares coiling. Billy staggered back, shielded his eyes. The half-circle encompassed the whole of the room, kept growing…

“COME ON!” Trista screamed in Billy’s face.

They clawed their way out, debris falling about them, the sky of the Shift Eldritch turned into a nightmare…

…for the figures in the sky were drawn inexorably into the ever-growing and seething dome of energy, screaming helplessly as they were pulled inside and destroyed…

Forever.

Souls destroyed.

Forever.

“What the hell is GOING ON?” Billy wailed.

Trista ignored him. “Not YET!” she roared at the limp and lifeless girl cradled in her arms. There were assaulted by winds, screams, whipping debris. “Mori!” She pleaded. “Mori, NOT YET. You can’t—Oh, Gods!”

And, hovering between life and death, Mori responded,

You told me… You told me I had to die…

NOT YET! Trista blazed. It’s not right, not yet, not NOW!

Mori said, So, I have to live… to wait… to die.

Yes, Trista pleaded, tears streaming. Please, Mori…

And Trista looked up from the limp girl in her arms, she gazed up at the half-circle manifestation of the Exit Vector, towering above them in the puple sky like a nuclear mushroom cloud. “Oh, Gods…”

“Hey!” Billy cried, suddenly happy.

All… Mori began.

“Hey, HEY!” Billy cried again.

All right, Mori sighed. Take me, kill me… later. Just… stop… screaming. You power mad… bitch…

“Hey!” Billy cried. “Will you guys—!”

“For CHRIST’S SAKE,” came a child’s voice, “will you PACK OF STUPID COWS TAKE MY BLOODY HAND ALREADY?!”

Trista looked up.

Three children with linked and desperate hands formed a human chain and reached toward Billy and Trista and Mori through the shimmering window of a Numi portal.

“HURRY, FOOLS,” Frost roared on the other side.

Billy did not have to be told twice. He clawed past the children, went through the portal.

Trista grimaced, drew Mori close, staggered toward the outstretched hands of the children, the portal. The screams of souls destroyed rang shrill behind her.

Mori Kim Marr, Trista blazed with clenched teeth, I am going to…

Kill me? Mori finished. Ha.

And then they were through the portal with a WUMP! of hard air, and falling, sprawling to their knees on the cool desert sand: one 650,000 year-old Cantaran, one terrified psionic, three weird children, and a girl with a crack in the back of her skull.

“Pitiful,” declared Frost, the only one on her feet. Buts she was clearly pleased.

“Shut it down!” Trista screamed at her. “Shut the portal down!”

Holding her own heart and the projector in her hands, Frost moved to make it so…

When a jet of of nefarious black shot through the collapsing window of the Numi portal. The window was shut, but too late.

The face of the Nox Golgoth filled the night sky, blacked out the stars.

Do you think, it whispered down at them, that this world has known pain before? Oh, sleep, my enemies. Sleep…

And then the Nox Golgoth was gone, and the night was the night.

“Mori,” Trista gasped, and she bent over her young friend, cradling her precious broken head, prepared to save Mori’s life.

Again.

The others all knelt, looked down at Mori.

Mori blinked up at them, whispered, “I want…”

She lay on her back, blinked up at the stars. Her head was encircled by a slow halo of blood. “I want to go home. I want a goddamn drink.”

20

Exit Rector… Exit Rector… Exit Rector…

“Exit Rector,” whispered the man seated at the bar beside Mori—too damn close, in Mori’s opinion. If she wanted, Mori wouldn’t even have to stretch to hit him. Hit him hard.

Break his nose.

Make him bleed.

Make the asshole beg, the asshole, the…

“Exit Rector,” the man said again, as if to himself.

Oh, way too close, Mori thought. The jerk had better shut up, soon.

She turned away and drank.

The bar was dark, thick with smoke. About her, losers and loners, bent over their drinks. Old music played, but nothing too obnoxious—ancient shit from the 20^th century, some moron’s idea of cool, black plastic keyboard dance crap—but really, nothing too bad, nothing too loud. And up until five seconds ago the bar had been fine, the place had been a balm, a cloak, a fucking bomb shelter. But now…

“No shit, Exit Rector,” the jerk beside her whispered, his voice climbing toward a puzzled whine. He studied his handheld Sony ATRA-P4, then glanced at the big flatscreen that flickered and pulsed behind the bar. The man raised the Sony so that the device could clearly ‘see’ the screen.

The man nodded to himself. “Yeah, yes… That’s what this one’s saying, too. ‘Exit Rector!’”

VECTOR, you fucking, dickless, shithead, dickwad, asswipe… dick, Mori thought, but said nothing. She closed her eyes, picked up her drink again. It was the sixteenth drink Mori had ordered in the last sixty minutes. She tilted it back. Oh, goddamn spring water of Mother Russia—it was cold and good. She’d splurged, ordered the expensive shit. Mori finished, a not-quite-satisfied little gasp on her lips; she winced, rubbed at her jaw.

Mori looked at the flatscreen, she studied the news item that the dickless dick beside her found so fascinating.

A lady, way old, maybe her fifties, stared straight into the camera and talked. The lady was labeled with her name (Like, who cares, Mori thought), her designation, “Professional Psychic,” and underneath that, in super-bold type: SUPERNATURAL APOCALYPSE?

“Gone,” the lady said. “Destroyed.”

Mori frowned. Very bleary. Against her better judgment, she began, “Hey, huh, so—”

“Wait whoa, hush,” the man said. “Here it comes, here comes this one’s spiel…” He carefully braced his handheld device before the flatscreen, waiting.

On the screen the “psychic” lady said, “…and Paul’s shade screamed two words before total ectoplasmic obliteration, total disintegration on the other side, oh Paul, his poor soul, he said—” and the sound of the feed dropped, the lady’s mouth suddenly concealed in a digital, bitmapped blur.

“Uh huh, uh huh!” The man nodded excitedly. “That’s it. Every damn one they talk to. They all say the same thing. ‘Exit Rector.’”

Mori was supremely unimpressed. “Facial patterns, huh?”

“Uh yeah, yes, yes,” the man said, still looking down at his grey cool Sony ATRA. “It takes a couple of passes, but eventually the comparative repetitions will narrow and determine the blocked words from the eyebrows, what’s happening in every part of the person’s face. God, they’re such idiots!”

“They?”

“The government. The media. Whoever,” the man said. He was totally bald; his head gleamed like it had been fucking polished. He wore wire–frame glasses and he had nice clothes. Thinks he’s smart, the dick, Mori sulked, ready to really start hating him, then caught herself.

Whoa. Easy, wild street-child of the ruined Earth!

Jesus, the mood she was in, the fucking card she’d drawn—she did hate everything, everyone. And it wasn’t just the goddamn drinks. Though they hadn’t helped. Or hurt. Whatever.

•

After their experience in the Shift Eldritch—after the revelation and the rescue, the inadvertent annihilation of souls by Mori’s release of the Exit Vector and the burning, healing touch of Trista’s hands on Mori’s splintered skull—the renewed vow of hate from the Nox Golgoth hung heavy over all of them, edging them into uneasy and troubled silence. Especially Mori.

What could any of them say? Mori had been summoned—forced—back to life.

So she could wait.

To die.

“It is a… biochemical factor of your body, Mori,” Trista had said haltingly, guiltily.

She and Mori stood together, feigning sullen interest as Billy, Frost and the eerie Children of the Damned replaced, redistributed, and repaired the various parts of the car and Frost’s body.

“Forgive me, but you are the weapon I struggled for so long to perfect. Your body must reach a certain, critical age—a very specific metabolic rhythm—for the release of the Exit Vector manifestation to do what it must. The final destruction of the Nox Golgoth!”

“What you designed my body to do,” Mori snapped, not looking at Trista. Mori watched instead as Billy argued with one of the boys, Jaidon. Apparently, there was an issue as to what part should go where. Frost wasn’t offering a vote. Too bad.

“Yes,” Trista said, her voice even.

Billy was shaking his head no, no. And now the other children took their brother’s side.

“The Animometer,” the three said as one and pointing together, “goes there, under the hood.”

“Don’t think so, you little douche bags,” Billy told them.

“Born and bred and destined,” Mori said, “to die.”

“I’m sorry, Mori.” Trista drew a pained breath. “I tried… I tried to tell you…”

“In a nice way?” Mori snapped. “The dream house? The soft porn scene, the pool?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

Mori sighed. Bitterness.

“Yeah, well, me too, Astral Goddess,” Mori said at last. “I can’t tell you, you goddamn bitch. I can’t get back to the city fast enough. I can’t wait to drown in vodka for a solid goddamn week.”

All civil discourse between Billy and the eerie three fell to pieces; they began to flail together, three against one. Frost could only shake her head; the robot would have walked away, but she was still wired to the car, the battery, the disassembled machinery.

“Enjoy your debauchery while you can, Mori.” Trista’s eyes were hollow. “We will have to answer for what transpired within the Shift Eldritch. You and I. There will be consequences.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yes. Consequences.”

And Trista strode away to break up the pathetic little fight. Billy looked like he needed help; the Children of the Damned were winning.

•

Now in the dark of a miserable bar with many intoxicants swirling inside her, Mori wondered again what those consequences might be. But it seemed the smart bald prick with the nice clothes and the expensive toy might tell her…

“No matter how many of these so called ‘psychics’ the media puts in front of the camera, the psychics all say the say thing,” the Smart Bald Prick said. “But then they—the media—act as if it’s some kind of massive cover-up! They’re shoving this information in front of us, but pretend it’s a government secret! You know,‘The hidden story they don’t want you to know.’”

Mori was too drunk, too tired to pretend to be impressed by the Dick’s keen societal observation and penetrating insight.

“Let me guess,” Mori winced. “You’re a writer, right?”

“How’d you—” the Bald Dick began, but Mori had already turned to get the bartender’s attention.

At that very moment, the big flatscreen boomed, “We will RETURN to the HIDDEN STORY THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW: GENOCIDE on the OTHER SIDE!!! Right after…”

“Oh shit,” the Bald Dick said, snapping his Sony ATRA shut. Then, quickly to Mori: “You have any implants?”

“Huh?” Mori said. “Oh, the adverts. No.”

“… right after these COMMERCIAL MESSAGES…”

“HEY!” the beefy female barkeep shouted to the drunks not paying attention. “SHOES OFF AND CHAIRS AWAY!”

Several patrons in the bar turned from the flatscreen, and every handheld was shuttered.

The advertisements.

In the days since Mori had been out of the city and off The Grid, all the broadcasters had laced every advertisement with new code: every electronic device, and every bio-organic implant—the artificially enhanced eyes, ears, and pacemakers—would automatically go into slave mode for the duration of the commercial.

The new adverts were designed to ‘optimize attention and focus.’ Even the music from the juke was overridden; Personal Jesus became a soft, friendly voice, “Hi, I’m a Mac…”

When it was over, the Bald Dick swore softly. “That’s what I’m talking about… Don’t they know we already have the tech to take that shit apart? Do they think we’re stupid?!”

“Yeah, yeah, society’s a terrible thing, isn’t it,” Mori said, intent on her drink. “Hey, HELGA! Empty glass alert!”

“My name,” the bartender growled, “is Francine.”

“And I’m the most powerful force in the fucking universe, sweetheart,” Mori said, her black mood waking from its brief nap.

“Keep talking like that, you ratty little street bitch,” the bartender began, “and I’ll…”

“Well, HELL,” said a new voice. “Knew you’d crawl out sometime, Mori Kim Marr!”

Mori turned. Rolled her eyes. Looked up at the ceiling.

“Oh, Jesus!” she groaned. “Oh, thank you, God!”

Three of Fritz’s posse stood behind her, decked out in their fake leather and plastic best.

“We know what you did to Fritz, Mori. You bitch! You stole his shit, then cut him open like a fish!”

“Yeah! I did!” Mori’s grin was wide, wicked. She was digging it. “Oh man, oh man, am I glad to see you three clowns!”

In grim solidarity of their fallen, drug-addled leader, the three slipped out Kirovs, the electrified blades already humming and active.

“Hey, hey! Hold on,” the Bald Dick started.

“Oh, honey,” Mori told him with disbelieving and squinting eyes. “Fuck that noise. Stand back…”

21

Mori reached past the writer, casually plucked a bottle from the bar and smashed it in the face of her closest foe.

Blood flashed with a musical plume of flying glass. The boy screamed, hands reaching for the jagged shards imbedded in his eyes and cheeks, rivulets of crimson running between his fingers. He stumbled back. His comrades gaped.

Mori tossed away the stem of the broken bottle.

“Open wide,” she snarled, and Mori waded into the two nimrods, the two Fritzophiles, Christ did they have it coming, open wide, and she swung her fist and her fist was met with the crumpled smack of flesh, she was rewarded with an accompanying cry of pain which made her feel really pretty damn good, and she hit the asshole again and again…

•

That morning, in the car, on the way home to the dark city…

Trista and Mori had sat unspeaking in the back seat, each turned away from the other, their eyes hard, hearts laced tight with unvoiced accusations, defenses, half-formed apologies. They watched the barren landscape flow past in an unbroken stream of yellow and brown.

Mori had thought, and Mori thought… Nothing.

Nothing.

There was only the landscape, the back of Billy’s head, the unspooling black of the road, the road, the grey spikes of the distant city rising from the horizon. Mori knew she should be screaming, felt that she had every damn right to vent outrage and fury in vast sheets against Trista, unleash it like a tidal wave, send it slamming against the Ice Queen, the Astral Goddess, the fucking Moon Bitch…

She glanced at Trista.

The Moon Bitch sat unmoving. Away from and above it all. Total statue mode.

Mori wanted to hate her.

But… Nothing.

Death.

Why was it just a word?

Maybe that’s all it was. A word. A state of mind.

Maybe, Mori thought, this nothingness, this numbness was sort of a weird, new level of… spiritual awakening? Acceptance? Who knew? Maybe this was…

“Death.”

Mori turned.

The eerie three—James, Joy, and Jaidon—appraised her coldly from the front seat. Three kewpies, three dolls, three heads in a row.

The Children of the Damned had initially tried to squeeze into the space between Trista and Mori on the back seat, only to be stopped by Trista’s ice-cold glare. “No,” she had told them, “the front seat or the trunk, your choice.”

Now they poked their heads over the front seat; they studied Mori, unblinking.

“This is a glimpse,” James said.

“Of your future,” Joy said.

“Death,” Jaidon whispered, “nothingness.”

Dream, Mori thought. Figures.

She frowned at the three brats. “Oh, get bent,” she told them. “I already know that there’ll be something on the other side, after this. I’ve been there, I’ve seen it! Proof. The Shift Eldritch, you little freaks.”

“Oh…”

“Not for you…”

“No, not for you, Mori Kim Marr…”

“Mori,” Billy called from the wheel but not turning, “this is where you say, ‘What you talkin’ about, Willis.’”

“Stay the fuck out of my dream, Billy.” Then, to the three: “What are you talking about?”

“The Shift Eldritch…”

“… was destroyed…”

“…No Exit, not for anyone, ever again…”

“…especially you…”

“Mori… Kim… Marr…”

Billy shook his head, sang, “You be fucked now, babe.”

“And more…” the Children of the Damned spoke now in unison, their voices a drone, mingling, their voices one….

“You are the Exit Vector. The Exit Vector violates a physical law of the universe. The Exit Vector does not transfer energy. The Exit Vector destroys all matter, all energy. Spiritual and physical. Forever. You can not exist. You will not exist. You…”

“You…” said a new voice beside Mori.

Mori turned.

Where Trista had been just a moment ago, sat Mori’s mother.

Jesus Christ, Mori thought. She… she’s younger than I am. What, she gave birth to me when she was…

“Thirteen,” the spectre of Mori’s mother confirmed. “Thirteen goddamn years old, you stupid little blotch. What was I supposed to do? If it had been legal, you would have been erased, just fucking gone, like the mistake you are, you goddamn stupid little…”

“Stop it, stop it,” Mori begged…

…and she woke up with a scream, she had woken up crying.

Billy had pulled the car off the road and Frost was leaning over her with soft words and even the creepy bratty Children of the Damned watched with open-mouthed fear, pressing their little hands toward her in consolation—they all tried to chase away the specters that had been unleashed in Mori’s head, everyone…

Everyone but Trista.

Trista sat unmoving beside her, not looking. Not even blinking. Trista studied the barren landscape as Mori cried, inconsolable. The tears were hot, the tears had stung like hell. And Mori had thought It’s okay, I understand, it’s perfectly clear, you Ice Bitch, I understand…

They both understood.

Trista didn’t have the right to offer Mori any soft words.

•

And now Mori descended behind a blur of rage and grief and pain as she rained blows upon the stupid little shit who had been stupid enough to give her lip, and she hit him and hit him and hit him…

The other boy fled, but the punk she pounded wasn’t bleeding enough, oh no, not yet…

“Enough,” said a sudden voice in her ear, surprisingly strong—it was the Bald Writer Dick, and he caught Mori’s wrist and yanked it back before it fell again on the raw bleeding…

“Come on, enough!” And he yanked Mori up, he pulled her away.

Mori realized dimly that less than five seconds had passed since she had cracked the bottle across the first boy’s face.

She looked down at the mess she’d made of the two punks on the floor.

“Sick,” Mori breathed.

“I imagine so—!”

“No, really, I, urp—”

Mori belched once, then vomited with a spectacular eruption upon the two bloody boys.

There was scattered applause and a few cheers from the dark recesses of the bar.

“Eey-yew,” Mori winced, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “I feel much better, now.”

“Come on,” the Bald Writer Dick said, leading Mori away.

22

The Bald Writer Dick was all stern and strong, as if he cared—oh, like a real man. Mori snorted with a half-breath of laughter, drunk and indifferent as the BWD took her by the elbow and steered her away from the carnage she’d wrought at the bar; he led Mori outside to the wet and sharp and cold night of the city.

Whoom! Wow. Mori’s head spun. The night was loud like an air tunnel, the street crowded and heavy-shouldered with traffic, broken by laser-bright prisms and beams. Soft rain like a kiss. Jesus. Oh boy. There was nothing, nothing like a nausea-soaked buzz and blood on her fists from a crumpled creep at her feet to let her know she was alive, man. “Alive!” Mori brayed to black sky, the towers looming above.

She yanked her arm away from the Bald Writer Dick.

“Alive,” Mori told him with a sneer. She wobbled, caught herself. She summoned her spit and hawked one onto the street. “Yeah,” she drawled, and showed the BWD her tongue. “See me? Alive, mofo.”

“My name’s Fredrick,” he offered, nicely enough.

“Huh,” Mori grunted. “It figures,” she drawled. “You,” she began with a sloppy gesture, “you… you look more like a Bono. You know? You know what I’m talking about? Serious sincere prick who acts like he gives a shit, but really, really…”

“Hey.” He reached for Mori. “Come on…”

“Hey,” she snarled, twisting away from him. “Fuck off!”

Not far away, two figures watched from the shadow of a doorway. One of them stirred, took a half step forward.

“Should we, huh, intervene?” Billy Wolfgang wondered, a nervous finger scratching at his left sideburn.

His companion, the two hundred year-old robot known as Saint Frost, considered. She tilted her head with the zippy whir of recently serviced gears. Her eyes glowed electric orange under the broad rim of her hat.

“No, let her be,” Saint Frost said. She studied Mori and the man through the veil of soft rain. “She needs…” The robot sighed. “Whatever she needs.”

“Yeah, well, how much of it is she going to need?” Billy said, striving for what he thought was a reasonable-sounding tone but hitting instead a whine of complaint.

He said, “It wasn’t easy, you know, finding those scumbag friends of Fritz and winding them up with dreams of revenge and, like, delivering them gift-wrapped at Mori’s freaking feet! And what does she do? All that work, Frost, and what does she do?”

Frost sighed again, her eyes still on Mori and the man, who reached toward Mori once more only to receive a fresh volley of drunken, sputtering insults.

“—and the horse you rode in on and your little dog, too,” Mori spewed at him.

“Yes, Billy,” Frost said. “Mori tore them apart in remarkably short order. Fifteen seconds.”

“Fifteen seconds!” Billy whined. “Jesus! ‘Mori the Mauler!’”

“Oh, hush Billy,” Frost said with a frown. She was becoming annoyed. “Mori’s hurt.” Her iron lips grew solemn. “And Mori has great anger. Oh, great anger in her…”

“What are you, Yoda?!” Billy whined. “You taking lessons from Trista?! And what’s the story with this guy, huh?! This bald loverboy creep…”

Frost blinked, turned to him. “‘Loverboy…’ Oh, Billy. You aren’t!”

“Aren’t what?”

“Billy!”

“Wha-aht?!” Billy said.

Frost cursed. Oh, flesh, she seethed in an ugly and superior flash, but cut the circuit short. She was surprised at herself. Though she was made of iron and gold, Frost was no stranger to the wild fluctuations of the heart—ill-timed as they were. And they were always ill-timed.

Trista knew, Frost reflected. After all, Trista had endured hundreds of thousands of years of heartache. And Frost’s thoughts went to her troubled, ancient friend… who perhaps even now, at this very moment, faced grave and dire consequences…

•

When they had returned, finally, to the Dark City, Trista had been unusually terse. Haunted. Doom laden, Frost had thought. Even for her.

Trista had taken Frost aside. “Follow Mori. Take Billy. Let Mori have whatever she wants—drink, boys, drugs, chocolate, dogs. Vengeance might be a good idea. Find an enemy for her to crush. Let her bathe in some bastard’s blood. Whatever her heart desires. Give it to her. But…”

“Do not let her out of our sight,” Frost had finished.

“Exactly, old friend,” Trista had whispered. Her grip tightened on Frost’s arm, and Trista moved away, her bare feet light on the dusty concrete floor.

“And you?” Frost asked.

“I?” Trista turned.

They stood in the vast and open space of an empty warehouse, as big as an aircraft hanger.

Trista appeared slender and oddly vulnerable. Almost childlike. She stood alone in the center of the looming and vaguely sinister area.

Frost noted that Trista had not changed from her “battle gear,” the torn strips of cloth she had wrapped tight about her limbs and torso in the furious minutes before she had raced to rescue Mori from the Nox Golgoth, when she had ventured into…

“The Shift Eldritch,” Trista finished for her friend. “I expect… visitors. Soon. Powerful visitors. They will want answers. They will demand an explanation for what, ah, occurred within the realm between life and death. And I…”

Trista glanced at the dusty floor, brought a hand to her brow.

“I cannot cloak our movements any longer. I cannot hold them back. They are coming. I must face them, alone. And Mori must be far from here. And safe.”

“I…” Frost began, then discarded the thought.

“What will you do,” she asked quietly.

“Do?” Trista looked at her friend, tried to smile, failed. “I will gather my weapons, I will draw my circle of power. And I will talk. Oh, I will talk. Fast.”

Frost laughed. “I excel at that, Trista. I could—”

“No, Frost.” She held the robot’s gaze. “Go, now. Please. I must prepare.”

•

All of this was processed and reviewed in a microsecond: now Frost stood in a shadowed doorway in the soft mist of falling rain, Billy at her side, the two of them unobserved as they watched Mori drunkenly curse the handsome young man, the would-be “loverboy,” as Billy had called him.

Frost forced Trista from her thoughts. It was easier—safer—to torture Billy.

As Trista would happily have done, if she were here…

No, enough, Frost told herself.

“Wha-aht?!” Billy demanded again. “I’m not what?”

“Oh, but I think you are.” Frost let the word slip like a spoonful of acid. “Jealous.”

“What?!” Billy grunted between his teeth, not so angry and stupid as to shout, but still loud enough to capture Mori’s attention.

She turned in their general direction, squinting with a drunken frown.

“Don’t move, fool,” Frost hissed, holding Billy still. “He’s not a ‘loverboy.’ I know who he is. He’s famous. He’s a social and political writer, he’s—”

“—Fredrick Stanwyck,” the Bald Writer Dick told Mori, extending his hand once again.

“Huh,” Mori grunted, unimpressed.

“I think,” Fredrick began, “I think maybe you’re in some kind of trouble? Maybe I could help?”

“Ha,” Mori told him. “Oh man, Freddie Stanwyck, also known as Bald Writer Dick, you wouldn’t believe it. Nobody knows the trouble I see.”

“You never know,” he said slowly, kindly. Rained gleamed on his bald pate, and his wire-framed glasses were slightly fogged. He didn’t seem to mind.

“I’ve been to some… pretty dark places. My column’s streamed in fifty-three languages…”

“Oh, yeah, that will get me to open up,” Mori sneered. “Smooth talking, Ace. Just, ah… go home. Go away. Just…”

Mori looked at her hands, the blood on her knuckles now streaked and running from the soft rain. She made two fists. Puny. Useless.

She raised open palms to Fredrick Stanwyck, made a pushing gesture. “Go away.”

She turned. Walked away.

But he walked with her. Not pushing it. Just keeping pace.

Mori glanced at him, swore, shook her head. But she didn’t shove him away.

She did, however, duck into the next watering hole she found, a real dive.

He followed.

“Who’s got the mighty Spring Water of Mother Russia for the girl with the bad attitude?” Mori demanded loudly at the bar. “Mother fucking VODKA, RIGHT HERE, for me, and, huh, for… for…”

Mori frowned at him, ultra nasty, thinking that this might do it. “Who are you again?”

“Fredrick Stanwyck.”

“MOTHER FUCKING VODKA RIGHT HERE FOR FREDRICK FUCKING STANWYCK, FAMOUS FUCKING WRITER IN FIFTY-THREE GODDAMN LANGUAGES, RIGHT HERE…”

It didn’t do it. He just took a seat beside her. The drinks came.

They drank.

He did not say, I think you’ve had enough, he did not try to get Mori to “eat something,” he did not try to ascertain if she had a place to stay. He just sat beside her, he matched Mori drink for drink.

And drink… for drink.

Huh, Mori thought.

When she voiced a desire for cigarettes, he produced them. Nice. He didn’t look the type—they were illegal, but really, nobody cared—but he had them in his jacket, boom, just like that. And they were good. Real. Not total synthetic shit.

And when Mori finally started to talk—not talk-talk, nothing about Trista or the Exit Vector or any of that shit, Christ, she wasn’t gone—oh, it felt good just to fucking talk to somebody, to talk about nothing, Look at that stupid jacket that guy’s wearing, crap like that.

Still, at one point, Mori leaned back with narrowed eyes. “You’re not recording this, are you?”

“No.” He had nice eyes. Grey.

More drinks came.

Mori realized she liked his chin.

They leaned close together.

“Ha, you know,” Mori began, self-conscious but happy.

“Do you like this form?” Fredrick whispered, intimate, his nose grazing her cheek.

“I—” Mori frowned. “Huh?”

“This form,” he breathed quickly, the words coming in a rush. “This form seemed a good one. I haven’t much time. This body will deteriorate in minutes. You do not know the whole truth. I am sorry if I caused you discomfort and fear within the Shift Eldritch, but you must listen to me, for there is much you do not know and little time to tell you…”

His eyes, Mori realized, were turning yellow. And the corners of his face…

His face was melting at the edges.

“The woman, that being—Triiistaaskaasheearrn, my mother, she has not told you every-thing…” He spoke faster and faster, the words running together in an inhuman rush as his face melted, “the story is notassimpleasshewouldhaveyoubelieve, youmust…”

“Jesus CHRIST!” Billy roared, suddenly rising up behind him. “Mori, GET DOWN!”

23

“In the midst of life we are in death, etcetera…”

They were old words from an old song, written and recorded decades before Mori was born, “In the midst of life we are in death, etcetera,” a moldy tune spinning on warped plastic—practically goddamn classical, Elvis or Mozart or somebody—so why did the song and the words spin and spin inside Mori’s head, Jesus, was she that gone?

She was at the bar, check. And she was doing most of the talking, check.

“In the midst of life… ”

She was talking to the Bald Writer Dick, also known as Fredrick Stanwyck, famous in fifty-three languages, check.

“We are in death… ”

And Famous Freddie Stan-Wick-Dick (whatever) was looking better and better with each sip of her drink, not that he was so drop-dead-hot and all, but he was “nice,” you know, he was…

“Etcetera… ”

And Mori was talking and talking and she was getting more stupid by the second but who cared, she was going to die, man, she was going to be wiped from every plane of existence, Trista couldn’t rake her over the coals because she had splurged on a little human contact, and now they leaned closer and closer together with the stupid ancient song spinning in the cobwebs of Mori’s brain and they were just about to goddamn kiss…

When Freddie Stanwyck said in a weird creepy rush, “This body will deteriorate in minutes…”

And Mori actually thought in a flash, Oh no, goddamn baggage already—?

But no, worse than any such trivial bullshit, far worse.

The Nox Golgoth.

“You do not know the whole truth. I am sorry if I caused you discomfort and fear within the Shift Eldritch, but you must listen to me, for there is much you do not know and little time to tell you…”

His eyes were turning yellow. And the corners of his face…

His face was melting at the edges.

“In the midst of life…”

“The woman, that being—Triiistaaskaasheearrn, my mother, she has not told you everything…” He spoke faster and faster, the words running together in an inhuman rush as his face melted, “the story is notassimpleasshewouldhaveyoubelieve, youmust…”

Suddenly, Billy. Violent, a blur.

“Jesus CHRIST, Mori! GET DOWN!”

“We are in death… ”

Billy’s gun, the one with a million fucking barrels. There was no sound, just a flash—

Mori fell back, saw the worn panels of the bar’s ceiling, the tangle of wire and tape and water damage and a jetting spurt of white blood.

She fell, cracking her head on the way down, oh excellent.

“Etcetera… ”

Darkness.

•

“No.”

Trista Ska Shearn opened her eyes.

Her lips parted with the anticipation of pain. Sweat beaded her brow, and she drew a short hiss of breath…

“No,” Trista said again. Her voice was soft yet resolute. “You can’t have her.”

Trista stood in the center of a perfect circle, a ring three meters wide she had cut into the concrete floor. The rim of the circle pulsed, soft blue, like the sleepy strobe of a beacon. Trista stood tensed and poised for battle, her feet apart and head lowered, her long staff horizontal and held firm with both fists.

Behind Trista loomed the vaulting arches and sharp angles of a massive industrial warehouse, the shadows sinister, the black impenetrable. The huge place was empty, save for Trista and her… “guests.”

They had traveled far.

“You cannot have her,” Trista said.

They were older than planets, suns, galaxies.

“I will never surrender Mori.”

They were not gods…

“And you will never pry the secret of the Exit Vector from my lips!”

…but they were powerful, and they were not pleased.

They were The Rim Walkers.

They hovered in the dark about Trista like a forest of barren trees, less than flesh but more than ghosts. There was an occasional flicker of what human beings might perceive as faces—a mouth here, an eye there—only to fade in an instant, shifting and flowing into something else… alien and old… so old… they brought with them a terrible, unpleasant sound, a hum…

—TRIIISTAASKAASHEEARRN—TRIIISTAASKAASHEEARRN—

Trista strained under the eerie sonic assault, an ear-splitting whisper…

—triiistaaskaasheearrn—

A drop of sweat stung Trista’s eye, and she blinked, wavering, and she realized—

“Trista Ska Shearn…”

Her name.

The noise was her name.

And Trista felt a selfish black stab of bitterness: had it not always been so?

“Trista Ska Shearn, Last Child of Cantara,” The Rim Walkers said in a union of disembodied voices, pleasantly enough now, though with no little cut of condescension. “We do not care about the private war you have waged for centuries with this… creature, this thing you call The Nox Golgoth, this twisted amalgamation that sprang from unfortunate circumstances…”

From another direction, behind Trista: “Nor do we care, really, about what occurred within the Shift Eldritch…”

“Nor do we care about the fate of this planet…”

“And least of all do we posses any concern for you, Trista Ska Shearn…”

“…Last Child of Cantara…”

“…oh poor, tortured Trista…”

Trista’s eyes flashed. Imagination. Had to be, she told herself. Yet Trista shifted slightly within her circle of power, unsteady .

“No. Oh no, no, no. We want…”

“Mori,” Trista growled.

“Of course,” The Rim Walkers purred. “We do not understand this power within her. It violates every law we know, every law in the universe. We want her dead. Gone. Forever.”

“Oh…” Trista could not allow herself even a sigh. “That is the… plan. Sadly. That is the way it has to work. Mori is the weapon. Total physical and spiritual annihilation. Her death will be the firing mechanism of the Exit Vector. And my enemy, The Nox Golgoth—destroyer of my people—will be destroyed. And all…”

And now Trista sighed. “All will be well.”

“Ah, but this Mori Kim Marr… she has died twice, by our measurement. She breathes even now. What tricks have you employed?”

“None!” Trista cried.

“Oh, the tiny sparks that flew from the tip of this ‘firing mechanism,’ as you call it, have wreaked great havoc. Ripples that not gone unnoticed…”

“They will not be allowed to be repeated.”

“So understand this, Trista Ska Shearn…”

“We will grant you your final battle, you may aim your weapon at your enemy…”

“But this child, this girl who’s very name means death in a human tongue…”

“Oh, clever…”

“This girl, Mori, dies.”

“No tricks…”

“Or we will burn this world…”

“This system…”

“This entire star cluster…”

“And your dreams of revenge, of saving this world…”

“Will be ashes…”

The Rim Walkers drew away, slowly, into the shadows, the brooding walls of the warehouse, whispering, screaming,

AAASSSSHHHESSSSSS—AAASSSSHHHESSSSSS—

—leaving Trista falling to her knees within her circle, the staff falling with a loud clatter as her hands went to her ears, her face contorted in pain, the hot tears threatening and the guilt—the cursed guilt— slamming in her chest.

•

Mori fought through darkness—Jesus, wasn’t she always fighting through darkness—clawing her way back up to the land of the living and the awake.

The noise. The ugliness. The faces!

Someone pulling on her arm. “—wake up, come on, wake up, babe! We have to get out of here!”

Really, Mori didn’t know what was worse: a nice guy turning out to be The Nox Golgoth, or Billy calling her “babe.” Christ, she wanted to puke.

Or cry.

Or just…

Die. Just find a dark corner and get it over with.

“Yeah yeah yeah! Jesus, Billy, get out of my face!”

But Billy wasn’t cutting her any slack; Mori saw only a glimpse of the rapidly decomposing Golgothic body of the famous ex-writer Fredrick Stanwyck in a pool of white blood and dripping alien flesh (“Oooze!” somebody in the bar cried) before Billy yanked her up and roughly shoved her out the door and into the night.

Frost stood in the rain, agitated and clearly surprised. “What happened?”

“Golgothic!” Billy snarled, shooting Mori a dirty look, as if—

“It’s not my fucking fault!” she cried. “He… I…” She reached for the tender and throbbing spot on the back of her head. “Ow. Jesus. What a horrible night…”

“Are you joking?” Frost said, looking from one to the other. “Within this establishment? That man? That writer?”

“Yes,” Mori and Billy said in unison.

“And more than that, Frost,” Mori winced. “It wasn’t just a Golgothic puppet creep, it was… Him. It. You know? The Nox Golgoth itself. And it was asking me… for help.”

And they fell silent, like the rain.

24, et in terra pax

TK

Exit Vector and all characters © Simon Drax