Something troubled him: Sheridan. Not them being caught together (though that too, oh yes), but the fact of her apparent camaraderie. Now that they were free and Layanna was unable to exert her other-self, Sheridan could very likely kill her with a conventional bullet. Sheridan should at least be trying. Perhaps Avery had misjudged her motives. Or perhaps she was just waiting for ... something.

Their feet touched ground, and they all flexed their arms, rolled their shoulders, and worked cramps from their hands. Thorns in the vines had cut Avery’s fingers and palms in several places to go with the scrapes he’d gotten climbing the tree last night—what seemed like years ago—and he thought something may have given him a rash on his cheek.

Noises sprang from the right.

Dreading what he would see, Avery looked. He wished he hadn’t. A wall of Infested was just then rounding the bend of the palace. The elephant his group had ridden in on strode at the horde’s forefront. No Infested rode it, but others rode giant worms and lizards to either side of it. As soon as the group saw the horde, the horde saw them.

“Damn,” said Janx.

The elephant barreled straight for them.

Sheridan fired at its head, to no effect. Avery could feel the thunder of its coming through vibrations in the ground.

“Run,” Layanna said.

They pelted across the lane and into the forest of pillars holding up a section of the neighboring building’s roof.

The elephant charged, weaving in and out of the great pillars, which were spaced widely enough to accommodate it but close enough to slow it down. Not enough, though. The thing was fast. The overmind pushing it on drove it mercilessly, and when Avery looked briefly over his shoulder he saw the great, lumbering corpse barreling down on him, its flesh rippling with maggots in places, in others hanging off in discolored sheets. Real maggots, not those of the Colony, writhed in sores along its sides, and it stank like an open grave.

Its trunk, long and grasping, snaked toward Avery, the slowest runner, and it too squirmed with tiny white shapes. With a scream on his lips, he ran faster.

The others rounded a bend ahead of him and made for a ruined building. Partially collapsed, many cracks showed in its sides, and the group threw themselves into the deepest-looking hole, perhaps hoping it went all the way through and would admit them into the interior of the structure. Avery piled in after them, finding himself in darkness trapped in a shallow nook.

Outside, the elephant trumpeted.

Its trunk thrust through the opening and grasped at the nearest person—Hildra. She slashed it with her hook and edged backward, but the hole they were in didn’t go far enough for her to outdistance it. The trunk crushed her against the wall, then, getting a feel for her dimensions, curled itself around her middle. The others beat at it, and Janx fired into the beast’s skull.

Heedless, it lifted Hildra screaming off the floor, began to drag her out—

Layanna laid her hand on the trunk (Avery wincing as her bare flesh touched it), and the air blurred, just briefly. The elephant shrieked, dropped Hildra, and staggered back, taking its trunk with it. Hildra slapped at her shirt, knocking off any maggots, then stomped the ground with her boot heels.

“Fuck fuck fuck!”

“What did you do?” Avery asked Layanna.

“Usurped its master’s control—for a moment.”

“Can you do it for longer?”

“I—don’t know.”

He studied the others. It was dark in here, but there was just enough light spilling in to see his own desperation reflected back at him. The Infested had found them. There was no way they could reach the Dome with the whole city boiling after them, and that was if they could even get out of this damned nook without getting trampled.

“Can you control it long enough for us to ride it to the Dome?” Avery asked.

A panting, shocked silence followed.

Slowly, Layanna nodded. “Maybe. I couldn’t control a person, but an animal, already dead and used to being controlled ...”

“Do it,” said Sheridan.

Hildra shot her a glare. “I think we should take those grenades of yours, ace.”

“Try it.”

They stared at each other. Outside, the elephant trumpeted, and in the near distance came the sound of shuffling feet: the horde had rounded the bend.

“Let’s hurry this up, folks,” Janx said.

They emerged from the crack. Layanna exerted some psychic force and the elephant stilled, then, almost surprisingly, knelt. Nonplussed, the others climbed into its litter once again, where they were safe from the maggots that squirmed along the creature’s back, and Layanna followed, just as the horde arrived.

The elephant stomped down. It crushed one Infested creature, then another. Sheridan fired, shooting out one’s brains, and Janx and Hildra opened up, too, targeting first those who carried guns. Maggoty hands grasped at the bands holding the litter.

With Layanna driving the elephant, the beast plowed a path through the horde, knocking the Infested aside or grinding them to paste, and at last pulled free, barreling down the main street toward the great black dome in the heart of the city. The rhythmic jounce of the elephant’s tread jarred Avery’s spine, and the litter swayed dangerously, threatening to break and slide off. It hadn’t been designed for such use. Avery held on tight, willing them on.

Trumpeting sounded to the left. His head whipped around to see another elephant, this one under Infested control, coming from down a side passage. Then another from the opposite direction.

Hordes of Infested streamed just behind the beasts, some riding animals, some afoot. Some fired at the rogue elephant and its riders, but the distance and movement made the shots go wild. The enemy elephants gained ground, and shapes took position in their litters. Guns flashed.

A bullet whizzed past Avery’s ear, punching a hole in the red silk wall of the litter and causing the wall to dance. He crouched, making himself as small a target as possible, while Janx, Sheridan and Hildra returned fire.

Layanna made their elephant veer left down a side passage, then turn right at the next avenue, swinging back toward the Dome, as the maggot titan had referred to it. The maneuver kept them out of the enemy’s line of sight for a minute, and at last the Dome loomed ahead, great and black and alien. For the first time, Avery realized that no vines grew on it. No vegetation of any kind. And yet the flowers came from here, the shoots running, apparently, under the wall. And inside somewhere ... the Key ...

The Dome approached, but slowly, and once again Avery had to adjust his estimate of how big it was. It reminded him of coming on a mountain, always nearing but ever far, huge beyond a human’s ability to predict scale and distance. For the first time he saw that slender towers, so small as to be almost insignificant against its vastness, rose from each of the five archways, and that the surface of the Dome was multifaceted, like a diamond. Just what was the structure? Why did the giants’ city surround it?

“Almost out of bullets,” Janx said.

“Me, too,” said Hildra.

They slapped in their last rounds. The enemy snipers seemed to have run low on bullets, as well, or had run completely out, as they’d stopped firing.

Only five roads led to the Dome, Avery saw, each running from one of the city’s great buildings. This one, like all the others, reached a grand door fully two hundred feet high, sealed completely shut. It was from the top of these doorways that the towers arose. Layanna stopped the elephant before the door, had the animal kneel, and the group climbed gratefully down. She started to direct the elephant at the pursuers, but Sheridan stopped her.

“Send it away and it could come back under their control,” she said. “Have it lay down and we can use it for cover.”

With a frown, Layanna complied, then turned her attention to the door. There was no lock, no keyhole, just a smooth black surface built by inhuman appendages in some age long ago, baked in energies that permitted no natural growth and even impeded Layanna’s ability to bring over her other-self.

“Maybe they won’t attack,” Janx said, taking position behind the prostrate elephant. “I mean, they wanted us to come here, right? At least you, blondie. Now that they’ve—”

A bullet whined through the air, striking the wall not five feet from the top of Layanna’s head—as close as the sniper could come with the elephant blocking the way—and ricocheting with a spark.

“Think again,” Hildra said.

Sheridan crouched and took aim, and so did they. When no further shots came, and their enemies weren’t much nearer, they continued to wait.

Avery studied the door, then Layanna. “Well?” he said.

“I don’t know. I think it will open for me—”