In the distance, the sound of the mob drew nearer, moving more swiftly than before. They’d heard the noise.

A stinking, pinkish limb strained toward Avery, dripping vile fluid, and he poised his knife over a cluster of hoses leading to the body storage container.

“Do it and I kill this body!” Avery shouted, aware of the high pitch of his voice.

The squid paused, just slightly. Then the limb started toward Avery again.

“Gwen!” Avery shouted.

“Then I’ll cut this one!” she said, knife poised over the bunch of wires and hoses leading to the other container in its corner, and the squid turned a huge eye on her. These hoses evidently connected to the body its brain belonged to, as the creature actually drew back the two tentacles it had been sending toward her. Avery’s heart sang.

“Leave!” Avery shouted. “Leave or we make sure you can never return to your body, and you’ll have to stay a squid in the sewers for the rest of your days!”

Avery could almost feel the rage of the squid in its baleful eye and the agitated movements of its limbs. It truly hesitated, weighing its own life against its duty, and in the end it chose the latter. With almost palpable regret, it extended its limbs toward Avery and Denaris.

Its hesitation had given Janx the time he needed. He’d ripped the side prongs off, turning the trident into a harpoon. With a howl he drew the weapon back, coiling his arm, and hurled the harpoon into the creature’s head. It sank deep, transfixing the brain. The squid’s limbs stiffened, and blood or ichor leaked around the wound, then went limp. Taking the weapon with it, the squid sank through the hole it had ripped in the floor and out of sight, its many limbs, now flaccid, trailing behind it.

Avery, Janx and Denaris looked at each other, breathing heavily.

“We did it,” Denaris said. “We—”

The door slammed opened, banging against the dresser Janx and Avery had shoved against it earlier.

“Get away from there,” Avery said.

Denaris had gone to the corner of the room closest to the door, where the coffin had been. She moved away from it now, eyes wide, then teetered on the brink of the chasm the squid had made. She could not get to where Avery and Janx were without going wide around the hole.

“Hurry!” Janx said.

She edged around it, face pale.

With greater force, propelled by several shoulders, the dresser slid clear, and the mob burst through the door, Sheridan at their lead. Instantly she punched Denaris across the jaw, laying her out, and passed her off to two men in uniform to carry as the mob surged around them, fury in the faces of priests and pilgrims alike. They glared across the ruined room to Avery and Janx, who backed away toward the far door. Sheridan had pulled out a gun, but through the shifting forms of the mob she couldn’t get a bead on either of them.

The mob began to edge around the hole.

Hating to leave Denaris but knowing there was no choice, Avery let Janx lead the way from the room, then slammed the hatch behind him. Sheridan screamed something on the other side, and at first her voice was muffled by the metal, but then he made out her words:

“What do you thinking you’re doing, Doctor? If you kill the Collossum, the Starfish will destroy the city!”

*   *   *

“You know the way out?” Janx shouted over his shoulder as they ran. “I’m turned around.”

“No,” Avery panted, “but I remember a stairwell ...”

“Don’t get treed,” Janx said. “Up is a trap.”

Heeding Janx’s advice, Avery passed the stairs without comment, but when they heard noises coming from ahead, then again after they darted down a side-hall, Avery led the way back to the stairwell and up it, taking two stairs at a time, even as the sound of a hatch crashing open reached them from the direction of the laboratory. Janx didn’t protest.

Almost immediately Avery wondered if he’d made a mistake. It was darker upstairs, and the halls were even more labyrinthine than those below. Worse was the smell ...

“What is that?” Janx said, smacking his lips and spitting. He had no ability to smell, of course, but he seemed to be able to taste the reek.

“I don’t know,” Avery said. It stank like mold, rot, unwashed bodies and filth, mashed together and concentrated into a deadly miasma. Fewer alchemical lamps burned up here, letting the reek of the sewers in, too. And there was some other chemical smell.

The din of their pursuers increased. Janx and Avery picked up speed, rounding a bend and coming into a room full of miserable figures all chained to the wall. These weren’t the sex slaves of below but something altogether different and more awful, or at least so Avery guessed. Each one was infected, and they ranged in age and sex and general raggedness, but every one turned hopeful eyes on the two intruders.

“Please,” one begged, an old man with livid bruises on his cheeks. In a rasping voice, he said, “Please help us.”

“What happened to you?” Avery said.

“Help us ...”

Janx moved to the wall and began tugging at the old man’s chain. This wall proved of sturdier stuff than the one on the first floor, and it gave him trouble. Sweating, he continued to strain at it.

“We’re food to the god,” a woman said from not far away, confirming what Avery had assumed. “When it’s ready, it will take us.” With tears in her eyes, she said, “It took my son yesterday. He ... he was fourteen ...”

“Fuck!” Janx growled. He quit pulling at the chain and moved to another, but this one proved just as stubborn. Whoever had bound these people had been more intent on their task than those who bound the sex slaves. Whoever had done this served a god.

The noise of the mob picked up, and Avery heard distinct clatters on the stairs.

“They’re coming,” he told Janx. “We have to go.”

“No!” said the old man, voice quavering. “Please ... don’t go ...”

“You can’t leave us,” said a young man from the opposite wall. “If you do, it will get us.”

“Don’t leave!” another said, and more picked up the chant: “Don’t leave us! Don’t leave us! DON’T LEAVE US!”

Avery’s heart twisted, and he saw frustration in Janx’s eyes, but there was nothing for it. With noise of their pursuers reaching the top of the stairs, the two turned and fled through a doorway, the chants of the doomed still echoing in their ears—and those of their pursuers. They would bring the mob right to them. Avery slammed every door he passed through, locking several, but he knew that would barely slow them.

“Which way?” Janx said. “Do you see light? A window—”

They stumbled into a figure traveling the other way, and both sides recoiled. It was, to Avery’s surprise, once again the pilgrim they had met earlier, Rigurd.

“Oh! Oh!” Rigurd said. “I didn’t expect to see you here. It seems our destiny to keep bumping into each other.”

“What’re you about?” Janx said.

“I do not have to explain myself to you,” Rigurd said, straightening. “Now, if you will, I meant to inquire as to the noise and fuss. Know you what it pertains?”

Janx grinned cruelly. “There’re fugitives about. Dangerous men.”

“Oh! Oh!”