Van showed them to a bombed-out café front and through it to stairs that led up into several intact floors filled with shoddy apartments. He set them up in one already overcrowded with rebels and refugees, leaving them alone in a bedroom whose former occupants must have been hastily evicted—making the ugly looks a couple of the rebels had shot them more understandable. Had Michael ordered them to be given first-class service? If so, Avery felt ashamed for making others do without. They were given food—Avery didn’t ask what the meat was after making sure it didn’t come from the sea—and left alone, after one last message from Van:

“Mr. Denaris told me to make you comfortable and to give you whatever aid I could, including arms and men, to do whatever you needed to do, as long as it didn’t compromise our security. Just let me know what you need and I’ll get it done.”

“Well, this blows,” said Hildra after he had left, staring out the window and picking at her meal. It had begun to rain and a drypuss, a fur-covered octopus, was crawling up the opposite wall, hunching and bunching over the wet red brick, brown fur dripping. Avery wondered how long it would be before someone caught it for dinner. With a start, he wondered if he might have just eaten one. They were land creatures, after all.

“It’s a pretty sorry state,” Janx agreed.

“The good news is we have the nectar, or Layanna does,” Avery said. “But I confess I don’t see the way forward from here.”

By their swears and frowns he knew they didn’t either. From the floor below, someone began to sing, a woman. Another joined her, and another, and soon a swell of voices filled the air, both beautiful and terrible. It wasn’t a song of victory, or joy, but a song of mourning. Whoever the group was, they had just lost somebody. The woman that had started the song was likely a mother or lover.

For a time Avery’s party listened in silence to the dirge as rain beat against the windows, and it seemed to him as if he were in a black hole with no light able to reach him and no way out. He tried not to think of Ani but failed. She’s fine, he told himself. Idris and the other Voryses would be weathering this current conflict better than most, surely. Hell, if what Michael said was true, they were more than just all right; they were about to be on top, or make a play for the top position, anyway. Avery hoped, prayed they didn’t. If they failed and the fight turned against them, Ani would be in danger. Be safe, he thought, as he did many times every day, sending the thought out into the ether like a prayer. Be safe. Be well. I will see you soon.

With the rain to lull them, the group settled in to sleep. It had been a stressful day, and they needed rest. Despite himself, though, Avery couldn’t drift off. By the way Layanna tossed and turned on her side of the room, he doubted she could either, though both Janx and Hildra seemed to have let slumber take them. They were used to sleeping on the run, though. Avery supposed he should be too by now, but he knew he would never reach their level of casual adventurism. Nervously, afraid of his reception, Avery approached Layanna and plunked down beside her.

Her eyes had been closed, but she cracked them. “Yes?”

“I just—I wanted to talk—” He let out an exasperated breath. “I wanted to say this days ago, but there hasn’t been a chance.” You’ve been avoiding me, he didn’t add. “I wanted to say I was sorry. I really am.”

She kept silent, as if waiting for more, then said, “Well, you’ve said it. Good night.” She rolled over.

“Layanna, surely you know—I mean, with Sheridan—”

She rolled back over and fixed him with a hard look. “Yes? Just what about Sheridan?”

He opened his mouth to answer, then closed it. The truth was he didn’t know. The two women represented different things to him, though both were inscrutable and unknowable in their own ways.

“I love you,” he said suddenly.

She started. “You ...” Now it was she who couldn’t find words.

He spoke quickly, before the strength to do so left him. “I realized it in Mago. When I saw you through your amoebic sac, when I was, well, inside you. Before then I had been afraid of what you are—I still am, really—but it was then when I realized what you are is beautiful, in whichever form, inside and out.”

She stared at him. If he hadn’t known her better he would have thought he saw her eyes become moister. She looked away. Then, surprising him, she reached out and squeezed his hand. He squeezed back, his heart hammering. Part of him thought she might say it back. Part of him thought she would tell him to go to hell. He never found out, as just then she gasped sharply and clutched at her temples, an agonized expression on her face.

“What is it?” he said.

“The ray. The psychic piloting it—he’s found me. Thought I could hold him off longer—but with the ray—too strong.” Her face rigid, she added, “It won’t be long till the attack.”

Even before she finished, blinding pain drowned him.

It felt like hot lead poured over every fissure of Avery’s brain, all at once. He screamed and fell to the floor, rolling about, insensate, as waves of agony came over him, and oceans of stark raving fear. He was plunged into a madness of terror and pain, his whole world one of horror. It filled his head, pulsing, growing, so that it seemed it must burst from his skull and take on a life of its own like a clutch of cockroach eggs hatching in his brain …

As if the ocean was a veil that had been torn aside, the pain and fear and cockroaches receded, and he found himself shaking and gasping, drenched in sweat, on the floor of the apartment, a trickle of urine, thankfully just a little, running down the inside of his leg. Janx and Hildra were in similar states, and shouts and cries echoed from the surrounding rooms, indicating that everyone in the area had been likewise affected.

Shakily, Layanna said, “I can hold him off—for a time. But they’ll be—”

Gunshots erupted from the street.

Breathless, the group rushed to the windows and gazed outside, seeing lines of Navy storm troopers breaching the barricade, mowing down all resistance. Bodies pitched to the ground before them.

“They know we’re here,” Layanna said. “They came for me.”

“We need to move,” Hildra said, opening the window onto the fire escape.

“Hate to leave these folk,” Janx said, and by the look in his eye Avery knew he must be thinking of the singing, of the family on the floor below that had just lost somebody, or many somebodies. In the violence to come, they would certainly lose still more, and that’s if any survived.

“If we stay we die,” Hildra said, “and then these people will’ve died for nothing.”

Reluctantly, the four took the fire escape to the roof. Troops were there before them, but the roof abutted another, and they moved across, then passed over several rickety jury-rigged bridges that led to still more roofs; Hissig was home to a ragtag rooftop culture, and that came in handy now. Shouts followed them, and shots, but they pulled the bridges to their side, or heaved them over into the alleys, anything to discourage pursuit, and soon the noises faded.

“Shit,” Hildra panted, when they slowed to catch their breaths. “Where can we go? I mean, damn.”

“I don’t know where we can go that the ray can’t find me,” Layanna said. “I emit a strong extradimensional signature.”

“Perhaps ... surrounded by others with extradimensional signatures?” Avery said. Shots sounded in the background, still distant, but he jumped. “I-infected people, I mean. Could enough of them mask you?”

“Perhaps. A mutant ghetto?”

“We wouldn’t know what’s waiting for us there,” Janx said. “We need somewhere where we have friends.”

“I was thinking,” Avery said, mentally cursing himself, “about what Michael said. Denaris located Jeffers in some place called Muscud.”

They watched him.

“A mutant town in the sewers,” Layanna mused. “That might work.”

“You know it?” Avery asked Janx and Hildra.

Hildra nodded, if not happily. “Come on, then, if we must. I know the way.”

“Fuck all,” said Janx.

“Oh, you don’t even have a nose, you big ape. Let’s find some flashlights.”

Chapter 4

“You sure about this, Doc?” Janx said, finding a manhole cover and levering it up. A foul reek curled up. Gunshots fired nearby, and Avery tried not to imagine the rebels dying senselessly back on the barricade block, cut down by Haggarty’s troops as they hunted Layanna. Not senselessly, he told himself. Hildra’s right. They died so that we could do what we need to do. Let’s just make sure we do it. Looking into the darkness at his feet, Janx added, “The Collossum lives down there, most likely. Remember the body.”

“There’re a bunch of towns down there,” Hildra said with a frown. “He could be anywhere.”

“If we get close enough to him, I’ll sense him,” Layanna said.

“Yeah, then what?”