Chapter Two

Berangere blew a hot, angry breath. She went on her toes, bounced a little impatiently, then paced the alley briskly. Chiyo's dwarven eye tracked her every moment for a few monents, then whirred and clicked shut, never stirring even a flicker in Chiyo's red-faced calm.

Jezera slouched against the alley wall, causing the stones to creak.

"No, no, no," shouted Chiyo.

"What? Is Loren okay?"

"I wish I knew," grumbled Chiyo. "The Albatron changed scene."

"Why?" groused Jezera. "That thing's always been logical."

"How would you know?" muttered Chiyo.

"Well, I'm a keen observer of character. Even in magic mirrors. And I've known that mirror longer than any of you, having watched Suvani use it on her throne."

"I'm learning as I go," said Chiyo. "By logical, you mean it's likely showing me the destination."

"Your guess is as good as mine."

"Her guess is better than ours," said Berangere. "She sees now what we can only hope to see today."

"Right. Sorry, Bear." Chiyo flashed a quizzical smile. "Do you care if I call you that?"

"Why does that matter right now?"

"Humor me. I'm the one with the magic mirror. You want to know its secret workings, and I want to know Berangere's secret workings."

"If you must know, I never cared until today. Loren gave me a good nickname, better than most anyway. But since we left the Mansion of the Shining Prince, Loren has taken full possession of my nickname, so that it's now more of a term of endearment. And when she cares, I can't stop myself from caring too."

"Oh." Chiyo's cheeks pinked. "You're not just friends anymore."

"We're whatever we choose to be. Again, why do you care? You should be more concerned with you, given that Conrad is kissing the supervillain queen."

"Actually, I don't know if he is."

"Isn't that what you told us?"

"Well, yes, except even Suvani can't be in two places at once. And I'm looking at her now."

Berangere's heart skipped a beat. "She's here? Suvani's here? On Earth?"

"It's strange."

"I'll say."

"Suvani's raven-haired, right? But this platinum blonde is dyed with a streak of pink, clad in whiter fur than Cruella de Ville, and sneering through cell bars at Vieno..."

"Vieno? She's here too?"

"I didn't recognize her right away. She's a wreck, a husk of the tyrant she was. Not like Suvani,

whose face I knew instantly, though I was puzzled by her pink punk hair."

"Where are they?"

"How should I know?"

"Then why are we doing this?" growled Berangere. "We're losing ground!"

"What do you see?" asked Jezera.

"Vieno curls on a cot, facing the stone wall as if she fears this pink Suvani." Chiyo shuddered. "I fear her too. How has she come to Draden, when we left her in Alsantia?"

"Suvani knows of other worlds, and it is not for lack of power that you have never seen her here."

"I'm looking at her now!"

Jezera barked a snarling laugh. "This painted doppelganger is not Suvani. The Alsantian Queen is much too vain, and would sooner blast all of Alsantia blonde than whitewash any part of her own self."

Berangere ignored the ogress as she channeled her slipping, ebbing focus onto Chiyo. "Describe the walls."

"Stone, like a basement."

"Wall-hangings? Calendars, posters, paintings?"

"No. Only two security cameras in the corners. Wait--now that you mention it, there is a tattered old poster which reads Science is Golden."

"You mean 'silence is golden.'" said Berangere.

"I know how to read," said Chiyo. "Under a golden apple, its core and seeds shining through translucent skin like a light bulb filament, is printed Science is Golden."

"I know that place," said Jezera. "That's the Institute, our point of contact on reaching Earth.

Theyprovided our fake uniforms, the exterminator truck, and other apparatus, as well as food and crusty, scratchy cots like that one."

"I never called them crusty or scratchy."

"You've only seen the place. I've been there."

"Can you take us there?" asked Berangere.

"I know where it is, but can hardly take you there, unless we commandeer a vehicle."

"Commandeer? We're not carjacking anyone!"

"Suit yourself. It's all the way across town."

"We'll take the bus," said Chiyo.

"Did you stuff any cash in your armor? I left my credit card on my nightstand in the mansion." Chiyo rolled her eyes at Berangere's sarcastic tone. Not only had Berangere never had a credit card,

but their nightstand was a creaky old shelf stained with mug rings and shadowed by ingrained dust.

"The scene changed. Wait. Follow me." Chiyo stepped out of the alley way into a street thick with bumper to bumper cars, so snarled in traffic that at first they looked parked. She headed straight for a parked taxicab with flashing blinkers and no one inside, not even the driver.

When Chiyo opened the driver door, and stooped inside, Jezera yanked her back.

"It's okay," said Chiyo. "The Albatron showed me how."

"With you in the driver's seat? You can't reach the pedals."

"Are we stealing a taxi?" Berangere's voice piped high with outraged incredulity.

Jezera opened the back door, gripped Berangere's shoulders, and steered her in the cab. After Chiyo clambered in after, the ogress slammed the passenger door, then scooted in the driver's seat gingerly, but the taxi still lurched a few inches to the left, and dipped down under her massive weight.

"This lesson you can't learn in princess school."

"What?"

"Situational ethics. Do we steal a car, or through inaction let your best friend be taken?"

"Like we'll get anywhere in this traffic," sulked Berangere.

"Actually..." As Chiyo pointed out the window, the bumper-to-bumper cars picked up speed and raced away. "The Albatron flashed this scene too."

"A literal window of opportunity," grunted Jezera, then turned the key in the ignition and pulled away from the curb, accelerating until her bumper nearly grazed the cars pelting away from them, until a receding driver reached back to give them a very rude gesture. "That's what your toy is, you know. I would love to have it for a few weeks, should we be so lucky as to make our way back to Alsantia. I'd be queen in two weeks, and empress in another two." As she bragged, she tilted her head to make brief eye contact with Chiyo and Berangere.

"Shouldn't you keep your eyes on the road?"

"Hmm." Jezera grunted. "Now that's a philsophical question, isn't it?"

"How? Safety first is hardly a philsophical question."

"But she said she saw all this, as if it had already happened to the Albatron. Does it matter what we do? We'll get there anyway." Barking a laugh, Jezera raised both hands from the wheel.

Berangere lunged and grabbed the wheel. "You're crazy!" But when she yanked, the wheel wouldn't budge, no matter how she twisted, and the car veered, inexorably, into the oncoming lane.

When she unbuckled to lean further, and bring both hands into play, she couldn't wrench its doomed careen away from the onrushing windshields--then she saw Jezera's knees, pressed to the bottom of the wheel, sidle left, pitching the car back into the right lane. Placing one hand to Berangere's chest, the ogress pushed her back into her seat.

"I'm no idiot," said Jezera. "but you are, for unbuckling at this speed. I was steering with my knees all the while."

"You had me scared for my life!"

"As you should be," chuckled Jezera. "You don't think I had time to get my driver's license here, do you?"

"Here's a question," said Chiyo.

"Fire away!" bellowed the loud-mouthed ogress, flashing a smile in the rearview mirror, then made a hair-raising, hairpin left that nearly turned them around, entering a cross road that angled so sharply from the intersection, it ran near parallel back the way they came.

"Why?" shouted Chiyo.

"You'll have to be more specific?"

"Why take that turn so quickly? It's not even the right direction!"

"Right now, our rearview mirror is more prescient than your dubious magic mirror. No doubt due to its huge blind spot."

"What are you talking about?"

"Have a look in the mirror." Jezera snickered. "Not yours, but the taxicab mirror."

As the rearview mirror was angled for the ogress, the girls could see only sky and skyscrapers reflected in it, so they strained against their seatbelts to gaze out the rear window. Chiyo's face whitened, and she hunkered down instantly.

"What is that?" Berangere had no idea what she was looking at, but as it flitted, it whittled down the distance with every passing second. It gleamed, bristled with wings and fins, and jetted a stream of silver steam.

"Get down and hold on." Hunching over the wheel, Jezera made another sharp turn, this time against traffic, steering into blaring honks, veering, screeching tires, and a shrieking of steel gouging steel, scraping the right taxi door, and sending their left wheels skipping over the curb, and blasting the fender into a trash can, which was wrenched from the sidewalk to clash against a splintering storefront window. As they hurtled by, the window hung together, swaying and twisting like a crinkling, glittering curtain before showering glass. Still half-on the sidewalk, the lurching of their leaning car smacked Chiyo's head into Berangere's, and would have again, had Bear not clutched the door, but when there was an enormous pop, and the lurching left side clanked and rattled, their seat belts jerked hard, stopping just short of smacking their heads into the front seats. "No, no," shouted Jezera. "Get out! Get out!"

Berangere smacked her seat belt, woozily stumbled out the creaking door swinging from the still rolling vehicle, and kept her footing with a running stagger, but Chiyo slumped in her belt, and Jezera had to tear the door free, take Chiyo into her arms, turn, and huddle over the girl, just as the flitting, steam-trailing rocket punched the taxicab.

For a frozen moment, Berangere floated and spun, the raw heat gusting in her nose, drying her tears of anguish, and pitching her into a somersault, which would have likely brained her or broken every bone had her good arm not flailed out, catching onto a walk light post.

As her other arm was still in a sling, she slid, one-handed, down the pole, resting on the sidewalk to stare at the wreckage of the car.

What happened? What was that thing? As the frozen world resumed its hectic pace, running people screamed noiselessly, as if the streaking missile had not only demolished their cab, but pulverized every stray sound. All Berangere could hear was her roaring ears. From her sore throat and breathless panting, she realized she had been screaming, but too deafened to know it.

When she was scooped up by Jezera, her head dangling near Chiyo's sleeping eyes and wide open mouth, she felt the slap of deja vu, then her roaring ears numbed before their ringing split her in half, hatching a stinging headache. The trod of Jezera's boots scuffled lightly as she mazed through sidewalks and alleyways, the cars becoming a buzzing, and the sirens like struck gongs, clashing the scuffing boots and buzzing cars. When Jezera's tread squeaked to a patter, and the buzzing cars became droning traffic, Berangere realized the ogress had been talking.

"What?" Berangere's own voice sounded not only a hundred feet away, but like an echo plumbed from underground. This was when she had her best idea that day, although she was too rattled to keep it in mind and too frazzled to do more than stammer.

"Which what do you mean? I've been going on for a while. Honestly, I thought you'd have more to contribute, being a princess on the rise to queen."

"Don't speak of that ever again," groaned Berangere. "How is Chiyo?"

"She's breathing, and I didn't see any shrapnel wounds, but she does have a lump on her forehead."

"That was me. I mean that was my head. I mean, our heads knocked together." When the ogress guffawed, Berangere took an indignant tone. "As if I did it intentionally! It was your driving!"

"Should I have hit the brakes and take it dead-on?"

"It did hit us dead-on!"

"Not before I got us a little breathing room."

"If you wanted breathing room, you should have stopped sooner. By running, you only gave it time to catch up!" Berangere remembered her idea. "We should have gone underground."

"Literally or metaphorically?"

"Both! We have to hide from this mad science Suvani and her drones."

"Is that what you call them?" Jezera sounded pleased.

"Who cares what we call them?"

"We use the same word. Translated, of course."

"You have drones in Alsantia?"

Jezera only grunted as she stomped a convoluted path through alleyways and side streets.

While she had no idea where they were, Berangere guessed they must be a mile or two from the wrecked taxi. "You're right," the ogress growled, as a cold wind burst through, blasting them with the rainwater collecting on the back alley bricks.

Berangere wrinkled her nose in consternation, sighed, and wiped the rain from her eyes. "About what? We said a lot."

If the ogress was ruffled, she did not show it. "Your idea is your best shot."

While there's only a slender y between our and your, that sliver of difference was like an ice chip, chilling Berangere to her core. "What do you mean your?"

"Don't fret, princess. I won't abandon you here. I only mean you're in charge. I would never take credit for your decision."

Berangere was glad that her huge whew of relief was blasted apart by panting to keep pace with Jezera. She tried to keep a neutral tone. "That's good. I'll never forgive your putting my arm in this sling, but I've appreciated your help since then."

"Thank you. However, I may not be able to come the entire way."

"What?" As Berangere expressed her shock with slackjawed dismay, this exclamation had come from Chiyo, who groggily flailed her arms. "You'd leave us now?"

"Will you abandon your plan to rescue your pet monster?"

"Of course not," said Berangere. "At this point, we might even rescue you, if we had to."

"I'm touched." If Jezera's growl was far from touched by sentiment, it was grubby with sarcasm. "While Draden's jagged skyscrapers no doubt have an underbite of vast subways and sewers, this underground likely only bites so deep, and may not accomodate an ogre the full distance."

"Like you would know," fumed Chiyo. "Put me down. I want to look in my mirror."

"It's your mirror now? How nice. It was such a big help with the drone strike."

"You're not telling us something." When the ogress grinned, Berangere added, "worse, you're not telling us everything."

"You wound me, princess. I have been more than forthcoming in much."

"But you're holding on to something."

"When have I had the time to tell my story? Suffice to say I've been here."

"We know that." Chiyo rolled her eyes. "It wasn't that long ago you knocked on our door in exterminator overalls, ogre."

"No, I mean I've been here. Not only have I visited Draden before for that memorable outing, but I've literally been here, not only on this sidestreet, but where we're going."

"You know the people that took Loren."

"I wouldn't say that. I've seen their little goosestepping uniforms, their sciencey gadgets. and their leader, even, but they don't know my name or face. Which is a strange thing, seeing that I know half of hers."

Berangere's brow knit in puzzlement. "You know half of her name and face?"

"That is, I know her face but not her name. In fact, I knew her face before I saw it."

"That's impossible. You're talking nonsense."

"Not if she's Suvani's double."

"She is not!" Chiyo's eyes widened, then rolled back as she dove back into the Albatron. "I don't trust you, but I will verify."

"So when you ask, 'what if,'" said Berangere, "as to whether the sewers will accomodate you, you already know."

"I tried that route on arrival. While you children were our chief objective, we were also to ascertain the origin of signals and portals tapping Alsantia. So before we stopped at your brownstone,

we needed access to a more guarded building. As to the underground route, the sewers are unsafe for you and slow-going for me, and the subway only stops in the neighborhood, but by no means runs the entire way to The Institute."

"So how did you access this Institute?"

"Well, having no drones crashing on us, we had the time to mongrelize my brute force with my cohort's subterfuge, hatching a kind of manticore plan out of his ingenuity, my instinct, and our combined dumb luck. In short, I stoved in an exterminator van that rolled up to the property, and by good fortune, one of our victims was grossly obese, and his uniform jacket just happened to fit, if only just."

Chiyo's sharp intake of breathwas like a birdlike cheep. As she dropped one handle, the Albatron dangled from her other hand and clanged on the sidewalk. The blackened glass held,

but the scraping handle dinged and sparked, and a flash transfixed the dark center of the mirror.

"Have a care, little spy. Aside from my sword and our tattered armors, that is our only useful weapon." Jezera's grin was topped by her sneering nose, and above that, a clenched and furrowed brow that somehow underscored the smirk below with malignant intent as she leaned over Chiyo.

If what Chiyo saw staggered her, seeing the ogress bow to a bullying stance broughr her back to herself, and she sucked in a proud breath, stuck out her chest, and boldly glowered in Jezera's eyes, each of which was somewhat larger than Chiyo's tiny fists, and the dwarven eye whirred and sparked, as if trying to deploy an awful, deadly bolt.

"Take that back!"

"But you are a spy. You might insist on the figurative sense, as you peek into private affairs with your Albatron, but even a god who hides his prying eyes is a spy in the literal sense. "

"If I didn't use the magic mirror, one of you would be the spy!"

"And we appreciate your noble sacrifice. I only said to take care of your magic mirror, if you will go on making your sacrifice." As Jezera stopped smiling, her eyes twinkled malevolently, and Berangere knew the ogress had not meant the Albatron made a spy of Chiyo. Just as the ogress appeared lighthearted when she was deadly serious, her pretend metaphors were also invariably literal. Jezera believed Chiyo an actual spy. Was she an agent for Daiko?

"What did you see?" When Berangere nudged Chiyo, she scowled back, as if Berangere had called her a spy. Chiyo held the stare for a moment, as if peering into Berangere's soul to scrutinize what she really believed, then exhaled her puffed-up chest in a huge sigh. In that uncomfortable moment, Berangere had felt more mirror than girl. And Chiyo's anger and irritation had stuck to Berangere, as if the other girl had rubbed off on her, reversing the physics of reflection.

"I saw her, Bear." While it had always irked Berangere when Loren called her that, she had bore it with a smile. They were best friends, after all. When Chiyo called her Bear, with Jezera's plausible accusation hanging in the air, Berangere ground her teeth and forced a smile, When Chiyo stalled mid-speech and mid-breath, still reddened from embarassment or anger and a sidelong glare at the ogress, Berangere forced a smile to coax back her attention. "I saw this...blonde Suvani."

Although Berangere had never met Suvani, and Ephremian graffiti artists were fond of depicting her skeletal caricature with hellfire eyes, all drew Suvani with raven black hair. "Not the real Suvani? You're sure?"

"Even if she found a way to Earth, Bear...." Berangere ground her teeth again. "...would the infamously vain Queen Suvani ever alter her features? No, they just share the same face."

"How"

"Doppelgangers," snorted Jezera. "Is that all you did? I thought you were hunting an ogress-sized tunnel to the Institute."

"Well, the street entrance has double doors of crystal-clear glass."

"Must I repeat myself?" growled Jezera. "Look at me! While they might look at you two twice, they will care less about two kids in cosplay. But I'm four hundred twenty pounds, and sixty pounds of armor on top of that."

"You could take the armor off? It's not like anyone here believes in ogres."

"I might make a few believers if I try things your way," Jezera sneered. "Just take a look around back."

Chiyo seethed, but bowed her head and hefted the Albatron in both hands. Having a brief hold on it earlier that day, Berangere realized Chiyo was stronger than she looked, as her unshaking arms held it gingerly in her fingertips, as if no heavier than a paperback.

"What's taking so long?" groaned Jezera. "We're losing time."

Something nagged at Berangere. Every time it tried to surface in her brain, her uplifted concerns for Loren drowned her doubts and displaced this thought to the back of her mind, so that she was not alerted by the facts, as she would have been if she was thinking rationally, but by the echo of facts, so that the obvious had to hammer in many times, repeating itself to make itself clear until Berangere's inner voice had raised to an inner shout.

Why should a paid mercenary care so much about their speed and pace?

Even if working in Berangere's best interests, Jezera had long been a vocal critic of Loren

and should seem more reluctant in her rescue. No, this was Jezera taking care of number one, like one who had skin in the game. Berangere's next awful thought: what if Jezera was a double agent? Despite protestations to the contrary, and loudly trumpeted rhetoric on work ethic and honor, Jezera had switched allegiance from Suvani to Kiera to herself so quickly one might wonder why there wasn't more overlap in her affections. What if she was working for this doppelganger the whole time? Or worse, the real Suvani.

Jezera's eyes flashed to Berangere. "You're looking at me like there's something you don't like. What is it? My sash?" Said purple silk sash embellished her armor. "My hair?" Said dishwater-blonde braid was no doubt tied weeks ago, given that it was flecked with the blood of her enemies, perhaps a few spurts of Kiera's valiant blood given how long they fought on a battleground spanning two worlds.

To mask her shudder, Berangere clasped her arms to her chest. When she glared at the ogress, to her surprise, Jezera turned away and chuckled. With Jezera's back turned, Berangere no longer had to disguise her shudder, and let her fear-wracked body shiver as she pressed the back of her hand to her sweating brow.

When Chiyo looked up from the Albatron, at first Berangere did not understand her pattering, droning voice for as it grated on her ears, it seemed to grind down on her lingering earache, making Chiyo's droning exposition a resurgence of the taxicab explosion, so that the other girl wasn't talking so much as going off in her ears. Tuning her out had become a matter of survival. Moreover, her attention was on Jezera's antagonistic questions, for the only answer Berangere could come up with made her realize her dishonesty, not only to the ogress, but to herself, for Berangere didn't like a single thing about Jezera. Her spirits were crushed by the obvious compromise she had made, enough that the realization extinguished whatever small hope she had in finding Loren. However impossible it would be without an ogre's help, Berangere wanted to send Jezera away. But now it was no longer an option,

not if Jezera was working for the enemy, for as soon as Berangere dissolved their relationship, Jezera would only knock them out, toss them over her shoulders again, and take them to her true master. Or, she might simply alert this false Suvani to their coming arrival, so that the ogress would only reinforce the uniformed guards and drone-flinging mad scientist. While this option was equally horrible, bringing Jezera along would at least have the advantage of keeping her in the dark.

"Bear, what's wrong?"

When Berangere's grinding teeth scraped the nerve hammered by the explosion and drummed by Chiyo's monotone patter, she flinched a little. "Just tell me what you saw."

"Around back is an old movie theater. While the marquee has cracked and dusty light bulbs,

and the window is dark, the Albatron showed me guards pacing the faded carpet inside."

"That's our way in." Jezera started down the alley, but when she wasn't followed, she stopped short, turned on her heel, and looked as angry as she was bemused.

"If you're Bear's protector, why not check things out? Also, why didn't you scout this out last time? Just what are you leading us into, ogre?"

Berangere froze, her own lie left unsaid on her lips, for Chiyo had blurted the suspicions she would prefer to remain secret.

"You don't know me. Not like she does." Pointing to Berangere's slung arm, Jezera snickered. "My mind may be sly, but I like to go through things. If I can't use the front door, I make my own entrance. And last time, I had no children in tow, so why sneak around back?" She snickered, and favored Chiyo with a feral smile. "Not that my boss at the time wasn't a child at heart. He's a part of me now. Or rather, a part of him is a part of me now. What I didn't eat died. You remind me a little of him, but then I have a quirky sense of taste."

While Chiyo whitened at these intimidating insinuations, Berangere found Jezera's frank admission of cannibalism more puzzling than chilling. If the ogress had betrayed them, why confess this horror to those whose trust she wanted to win?

"You're having second thoughts, I see," mused Jezera.

"Can you blame me?" When Berangere shrugged her good shoulder, her hand clasped her sling unconsciously. It was hard not to be constantly conscious of the damage Jezera had inflicted so off-handedly. "If you ate your old boss, who's to say you won't do the same to me?"

"But you've been trying so hard. Your stress and my guilt would spoil the meat." As Jezera paced the alley, she cracked her knuckles. "And you're hardly being honest, princess."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I'm far from the first thing on your mind. Something else is holding you back."

"What isn't holding me back? The evil queen, her mad science doppleganger, uniformed, gun-toting minions, or the double-minded ogress?"

"Some other monster?"

"You underrate yourself a bit," said Berangere.

"I doubt that. Concern for your own skin is too common for the likes of you. If you weren't afraid for Loren, we wouldn't be here." A snarl seemed to cut through Jezera's constant smile. "Lest you forget, without me you wouldn't be here either."

"No one said anything different."

As the snarl widened, ogre fangs glinted. "Had you called me two-faced, you'd be scouting some other monster for your dirty work. But two-minded? That's a compliment. Isn't your brain capable of juggling a handful of complexities at once, princess?"

"Come on." Berangere tugged at Chiyo's hand.

"You go ahead." Chiyo backed away, tucked the Albatron under arm and held up her hands. "It's crazy in there. Even in the old movie theater, uniformed guards stroll through with rifles, grinning like they're hoping to shoot someone."

"Fine." Jezera shooed Chiyo with her giant hand, then crooked her finger towards the Albatron.

"Suvani's handmaiden was better with that thing, anyay. Just leave it with us. I'm sure our princess will have a knack for it."

"No way," said Chiyo.

"Leave it willingly, or I'll take it from you."

"Stop it. Both of you." Berangere turned to Chiyo. "Don't go, Chiyo. Where would you even go? The mansion is rubble, and we have no way back to Alsantia. If we wanted to go back there."

"The Albatron will find a way."

"You'd leave me behind, Chiyo?"

"I see your looks. I know what you think of me, Berangere." As Chiyo said her whole name, her face wrinkled in a sneer, as if it had a bitter taste. "You don't care about me."

"Why wouldn't I? I've known you my whole life. Stay with me, Chiyo. I have no one else."

"You've got the ogre."

Jezera laughed. "That she does. Hand it over."

"Chiyo, what if there's a way back to Alsantia inside?"

"Whatever," Chiyo scowled. "Let's get this over with."

When they broke into a trot, their pattering sandals and boots echoed on Draden's old brick alleys, decrepit with dust and cracks running with bugs and rain. It reminded Berangere of the view from the mansion. While the mansion was a toadstool compared to the Continental Finance Building across the street, both the library and TV room had a decent view of surrounding businesses, their roofs pooling rainwater collecting algae, mold, and birds diving down to snatch up waterbugs, so that from their barred windows, they had a view on an entire ecosystem, and there seemed more life in those patches of water than their room with a view.

It was strange to be back in Draden, so much so that she felt like she no longer belonged,

like an interloping shadow, and she felt the strange irony that she was here to meddle with Earth's history, to take a hand in directing events, if only to throw a monkeywrench into the false Suvani's plans for Loren. For now, she was Earth's Stranger.

Had the Stranger set foot on Earth before, she wondered. Did his plans for Alsantia include making making inroads to Earth? Was Alsantia's Stranger the devil of this world?

When they had touched on Earth mythologies in Worlds class, it had been hard not to be curious of this many-named bringer of sin and knowlege, fire and fruit: Satan, Lucifer, Prometheus, Loki, Hades, the fallen star, the enemy, the rebel. Having read these captivating fables and scriptures with an attention to detail, it had been hard to imagine these wicked personalities as persons with identities and faces, as more than bright or shadowy outlines emanating their denials, taunts, and promises. Having trailed through the shadows of one world into another, it was hard not to feel his influence creeping down her spine, just as the chilling shade of Draden's alleys clung to her back sweat like the touch of death. Before leaving Earth, she suffered the drabness of these alleys and streets, but now they concealed eldritch science and inexhaustible black magic.

When the alley funneled out beside a newsstand piled high with magazines, newspapers, and comic books on one hand, and the savory smell of falafel and warm pita wafting from the food cart on the other hand, hunger won out over curiosity, and she poked her head around the grumbling throng,

hoping for a glimpse of piled-high pitas. This falafel-slinger wasn't stingy, either, heaping cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, tahini, and large, deep-fried falafel balls in fragrant pita bread.

Jezera's hulking, growling shadow darkened the food cart. "She wants a sample."

"I'm sure she does," grunted the falafel seller, his eyes lit with humorous condescension as they alighted on Berangere, no doubt judging her grubby cheeks, dirty nose, and hair strewn with debris from two worlds, the shattered hull of the airship and the rubble of the mansion.

"Do I look like her mother?" As Jezera's growl slid up a notch, darkening to an even more menacing tone, the people thronging the food cart slipped away, but not before flashing resentful and regretful looks at the hulking woman overshadowing the delicious food.

"No." The vendor's firm denial brooked no hint of fear. "You certainly don't."

"I'm her bodyguard. You assume we have no money, when we've simply had a bad day, our car breaking down and stranding us across town."

"Why not call a cab? Or hitch a ride on your smartphone? There's an app for that." Falafel-man was quickly becoming Berangere's hero, the way he called the ogress on her nonsense, but even so,

she was hungrier by the second, and fervently began to hope he would cave, and said cave-in would result in an outpour of hot, savory falafel. "I suppose you left your wallet in the car."

"As a matter of fact, we did," said Jezera with the hard-nosed authority that comes from bald-faced lying, then leaned on the food cart, denting the metal between her fingers. She gripped the corners as if she meant to pulp the cart to bits, as if in her hands, it was no metal cart, but an overripe watermelon.

"Do you intend to pay?" he asked.

"Perhaps you have a listening problem..."

"No, but you have a paying problem," falafel-man shot back.

"We'll pay." Berangere's head bobbed up and down as she made the highly improbable promise. With no mansion, her father dead, and her mother fallen through Loren's shadow-portal, she could not imagine coming this way just to settle a tab. While unfinished business waited in Alsantia. her chapter on Earth had come to a definite close. It felt good to admit this. While she wasn't in love with either world, it was obvious she had always been a stranger to Earth and belonged in Alsantia. Her struggle to get home was lying to herself, and more about fleeing Loren's transformations than her fate on a magical world.

While far from a habitual liar, she had always lied for a good reason. She had never been this hungry either, and forced a smile. She could at least pay him with a smile, not Jezera's strong arm. "We'll pay for the damage too. Just not now."

"Seeing as I have no other customers..." Falafel-man's frown seemed to smile as well, despite the definite downturn of his lips. "...thanks to you, why not. I can't stand being idle." He had finished Berangere's pita, and was starting on Chiyo's, when he looked sidelong at Berangere, his head still bowed over the food. "Whatever prevents your honoring this promise, I'll consider it paid in full if you pay it forward."

"Pay it forward?"

"It's a saying from a movie. As I'm doing something nice for you, do something nice for others. That goes for all of you."

"I don't like it," snorted Jezera. "That turns this from a simple, honest transaction to an infectious outflowing of charity. And not infectious like laughing at kittens or babies, either, but like a virus that lives by doing its dirty work through carriers."

"Honest," snickered falafel-man. "As honest as thievery."

"I like you," said Jezera. "I suppose I will accept your terms." Jezera chomped half-way through her falafel pita in one bite.

As Berangere savored hers slowly--finding the pita not only freshly baked, but deep-fried crisp and crunchy, a mouthwatering combination that fogged all thoughts of the fearful ogress and her hapless friend--Chiyo gobbled hers as fast as Jezera, as if she was fitted with an ogre stomach as well as a dwarven eye.

"Not to rush you, but we're here." Holding her pita two-handed, Chiyo nodded to indicate the immense structure. While only eight stories tall, it squatted on several city blocks, and its inspiring white stone facade was embedded with double glass doors twice as tall as Jezera. Suits and lab coats climbed white, blocky stairs to pass through the revolving door, which flickered with a red light before admitting them freely.

"It's some kind of security measure. They're being scanned." As Chiyo still carried the Albatron underarm, it was strewn with strands of shredded lettuce and spotted with tahini dressing. Chiyo had always been a messy eater, but now outdid herself, as if trying to one-up Jezera's inhuman powers of consumption.

"You already said as much. Now the hard part. Well, not the pita." Jezera's mouth was half-full of falafel, pita, and vegetables, the sauce spattering her lips. "But just after that."

"I thought we aren't going in the front door?" Even at her daintier pace, Berangere was now half-finished with the delicious pita, and felt simply obsessed with devouring the rest without any further delay, as if she had picking up speed going over the hump, and now headed downhill into the yummy falafel. In lunging for a bigger bite, she had the satisfaction of chomping down her best mouthful yet, the falafel still hot inside, an explosion of spices and deep-fried chickpeas.

"We're not." Having finished her pita, Jezera reached over the glass to grub a handful of falafel, sneering at the outraged vendor. "Why so mad? I'll pay these forward too." One hand full of falafel, and the other cupping Berangere's shoulder, Jezera led them from the hissing falafel-man toward the sluggish traffic. "Don't look now, but this is the hard part."

"Crossing the street."

"It's our biggest risk today. Well, after my fancy driving."

"I wouldn't call it driving." Chiyo moodily rubbed her chin where Berangere's skull had collided in the drone-strike.

"Long distance crashing, then," Jezera hooted. "We would have been here a while ago if not for you."

"What did I have to do with them sending a drone?"

"Well, assuming you're as innocent of spycraft as you claim, what alerted them to our arrival in your old church? One thing comes to mind--ever since Loren yanked you out of Havala, you've been glued to that magic mirror."

"So?"

"Suvani either has eyes in their labor gathers intelligence by monitoring the cognivoir and dynavoir. Which do you think is the medium of your farseeing mirror?" She snickered. "I only know those words by making her repeat herself several times."

"You made the queen of Alsantia repeat herself?"

"What's that?" Jezera cupped an ear and stooped, as if bending near a distant insect far beneath the ogress.

"You made Suvani repeat herself?" The shout streaked Chiyo's face red.

"See? It's not so hard. All you do is play deaf or dumb. Although I get better results by pretending stupidity, which all are too willing to believe my inborn, ogrish inheritance. While there's more than enough stupidity to go around in Alsantia, Earth, or any other world, my cranium could fit both of yours, and still make room for a bushel of cabbages." Jezera's head faced forward, but her eyes darted to rooftops and windows. "Your little dome is a watery vacancy swimming with stupid, sightless ideas." She knock-knocked Chiyo's skull. "I had held out hope for you, spy, until you shouted our enemies out of hiding." She sighed. "This may be worse than the drone, I think. Well, here we go." Then the ogress strolled into the crosswalk, ignoring the sluggish traffic, which began to coast through the green light.

Chiyo's cheeks burned brighter, but the rest of her face paled like whitening ash as Berangere clasped her arm and hustled her behind Jezera, who maintained her stony demeanor and implacable advance even under the barrage of horns, as one bumper jutted into the crosswalk, nearly grazing Jezera, while a gigantic rusted sedan kept gliding, an overlong left turn that tapped Berangere's knee,

then stopped, its husky, black-bearded driver laying on the horn and shaking his fist, one finger straying straight upward. Berangere blushed.

"Don't you know a princess when you see one?" Jezera bellowed, stoving her mammoth fist through the rusted grill, screeching and sparking through the engine block to disgorge a jet of steam,

a splatter of oil, and the flapping hood, which shot straight up, mirroring the driver's finger.

"Are you kidding me!" hissed Berangere, grabbing Jezera's sleeve, tugging vainly, and nearly falling over when, to her surprise, the massive ogress yielded to her pulling, a lunge that tore down an opposing alleyway, so that Chiyo had to drum up her steps to match the ogress's pace.

Chiyo's gasping bubbled with giggles. "And you called me..."

"Don't finish that thought," Jezera grumbled moodily, "as thinking had little to do with it. You've had an itch that needed scratched, I'm sure. We have maybe two minutes."

"Two minutes!" Berangere echoed down the black brick alley. Their steps splashed through a puddle of spilled juice leaking out the back of a restaurant door. "Two minutes to enter the Institute and flee with Loren!"

"That's overly optimistic. You assume she's still alive." At Berangere's pained flinch, the Jezera's caustic sneer dropped to a soothing tone. "Sorry. Not that I feel sorry, but I feel the lack of my apology like a missing puzzle piece to fill in. Another scratch to itch. "

"We call that missing piece common sense," said Berangere.

"Ouch," snickered Chiyo.

"This isn't funny," said Berangere. "Loren must be alive. She has to be."

"If I'm under orders to say so." Jezera raised her forefinger in a lazy salute. "Then your shadow beast lives. Who knows if she can be killed? She might be like a puddlegulp, whose image reflects both life and death. I'm at home in such ambiguity, being Alsantian. Ogres debate whether humans are alive all the time."

"How can we not be alive?" At Chiyo's scoffing snort, the ogress did not bat an eyelash.

"Don't let her bait you," said Berangere.

"I'm not baiting anyone," Jezera grinned. "I'm distracting you, in the hopes of suppressing more shouts, screams or other telltale noises to attract the unwanted attention of drones and bullets. And as for whether or not you're alive, you can't judge us, when humans have debated whether poultry is alive or dead."

"Of course chickens are alive!"

"But humans are too clever by far, stuffed with so many contrary ideologies and philosophies that they live in a state of nausea, like turkeys dreading the axe. Just as Alsantian scientists have claimed chickens are a kind of meat engine, wound up in the egg to shower humans with omelets and spicy wings, ogres have had similar ideas about humans being meat engines, wound up in your coaches, houses, and cities for us to barbecue and sauce. I doubt your scientists are any different, as science tends to serve the whims of interest, rather than that humdrum common sense I've rarely seen in the wild."

"That's crazy!" jeered Chiyo.

"He's not wrong." Berangere's voice dipped to a low tone,

hissing through her grinding teeth and great reluctance to agree with Jezera.

"On Earth, the practice of vivisection,

the live dissection of animals,

originated in science that claimed animals, being soulless, were mere mechanisms,

and felt as much pain as broken clocks."

"No way," scoffed Chiyo. "I don't believe that."

"I don't believe it either," said Berangere. "But it's a fact."

"See." Jezera chuckled. "It's a miracle we became somewhat enlightened, and stopped thinking you little meat robots, or I would be raiding villages, shepherding a human farm, or, I don't know, stocking a pond."

"You know we don't breathe water?"

"But I don't have to believe that. Not if I don't want to. That's the problem with empiricism and skepticism. Nothing can be proved to an overly rational mind, one that has discarded the closure of logic in favor of the perpetually spinning wheels of rationalization. I can go on thinking you have no souls despite our lengthy conversations, and persist stubbornly in believing you amphibious even after observing you flail in a pond. Our scientists are even more stubborn than yours, for, unable to prove their theories true or false, many go on as quacks, and despite being more duck than ogre, are no less esteemed for their ridiculous quackery."

They had now circled through the alley to the cracked brick street running behind the Institute,

a remnant of old Draden, its bricks scuffed by boots and tires, and its crammed, thin storefronts stretched to three stories tall, like the set of an old western, aside from the monolithic movie theater,

which shot twice as high, and ranged a short city block, from one alley to another, its dusty windows pasted with faded posters of blockbusters now only found on VHS. Parked along the old street were gleaming vans painted hospital white, semi trucks with long, black trailers, and, here and there, pricey sports cars that showed the mad scientists made bank, so much cash that they parked their beloved Italian imports in a narrow alley when running late.

"This is perfect," said Jezera. "I take back everything I called you, except the stupidity and the spying."

"There wasn't anything else!" Chiyo seethed.

"You should have heard what I was shouting in my mind. It was so loud up in here I couldn't hear myself think. In fact, I'm sorry to say, I've been so preoccupied by your bungling, I haven't made much of a plan." She cleared her throat, shrugged her shoulders, and stoved in the glass door. While the shards flew in, the glass dust crackling in the air followed a less linear physics, and when Berangere's good forearm flew to her eyes, they zinged there like light rain, so light that she was shocked when blood welled in the scratches, not enough to drip, but just enough to blaze red trails in the sleeve of her gown.

Chiyo shrieked.

"Are you ok?" Berangere asked

"I don't know," she wailed. Chiyo was about to rub her eye when Jezera grabbed her hand.

"That will only make it worse." She groaned. "We have no time for this. Let me see." She peered into both eyes briefly, pausing over the dwarven one. "That's a good piece of work. Better than my toe."

"You have a dwarven toe?"

Jezera grunted. "You're fine. There's a little glass dust on your eyelid. Close your eyes."

"Are you watching the stairs? The guard is due any minute."

"We can't have you going blind," said Berangere.

When Chiyo had complied, Jezera spat on the hem of her sleeve, carefully laid it to the dust, and peeled it back carefully. "That's most of it. There's a fleck in the corner you'll have to get yourself. Ogre thumbs, you know. I might put your eye out, which wouldn't be seemly in a spy."

"I can't see it! Can I open my eyes?"

"Mmm. No."

"I'll get it," Berangere reached in with finger and thumb to pluck the shard. The glass fleck was brushed with blood from where it had pricked her eyelid. "That was close, Chiyo."

"Why didn't the Albatron show me this!"

"Don't be a whiner," groused Jezera.

"You wouldn't have brought us," said Berangere.

"Yes I would have!"

"You're brave, Chiyo, but with only one real eye, and no dwarves here to install another one, I think you might have thought twice about leading us here."

"You're saying it didn't trust me?"

"At least someone--something--is thinking ahead." As they snuck under the theater stairwell, Jezera's tone and step were lighter and happier. Reminded of her suspicions, Berangere glanced all around. "And luck is on our side. Don't fret, princess."

"I have no room for fear, as I feel too many other things. I wish I had stayed with Loren in the ruins of the Mansion."

"Then there might not have been a rescue. Things happen the way they do for a reason. Remember that."

"What do you mean?"

"Believe me when I say I have struggled to come up with an alternative, for my thinking is much more destructive than yours. Tasking my creativity pains me, princess."

"You're scaring me, Jezera."

"When I make my move, it will be up to you to find your little beast."

"What are you going to do?"

"You'll know."

"Do you hear that?" whispered Chiyo. Boot steps clapped in the hall above the stairs.

"Yes," Berangere whispered back.

"Now or never." Jezera stepped out of concealment and roared.

Hearing gunshots, Berangere and Chiyo clutched each other, and when the ogress's jaunty stomp shook the floor, they cringed harder against the wall.

"Chiyo," hissed Berangere. "The Alabtron! Where is Loren?"

"Loren? What about Jezera?"

"She's giving us a chance."

"I can't!"

"I saw you fight in Alsantia! This is nothing! Just look in the Albatron!"

"You do it!" Chiyo shoved the Alabtron on Berangere's lap, covered her ears, and curled into a ball, suddenly reminding Berangere of every summer storm weathered in the Mansion. During thunderstorms, Chiyo would curl up on her bed, pillow over her head. While the pop and crack of gunfire was nothing like thunder to Berangere, Chiyo felt them as the same.

But Chiyo had dared Ephremian cannon-fire on Teriana's battlefields. It made no sense--

as if having been recast for her character arc in Alsantia, she was now recalled to her role on Earth. Berangere relaxed her scowl and sighed. Was she making too much of Chiyo's changes? No. The look in her eye had changed. Eye of steel on Alsantia, eye of glass on Earth.

Berangere had an astonishing thought-was she doing the same as Chiyo? Selling herself short, when she was no longer a damsel in distress or part of the scenery, but a hero in her own right? Having faced down an ogress, hiked across an enchanted wilderness, walked under dangling bodies hung by a tyrant, and escaped a self-destructing world, consumed in Armageddon flames, she was cringing behind the kind of cracked, cement flowerpot, you only see in malls and movie theaters to provide fake greenery.

She grabbed Chiyo's hand. "This isn't you. It's a memory of who you used to be. Not real fear, but the ghost of fear haunting your brain. Cannons blazed at our backs when we charged the Alsantian armies, and you rode at our head, waving not a sword, but a flag."

"Our head? Our backs?" Chiyo snuffled back her sob of fear. "You were on the air galley."

"You're right! But not you! You rode a gazelle toward Alsantian infantry."

"It's like it was all a dream, Bear."

This time, Berangere didn't grind her teeth. Whether it was the forced camraderie of the moment, or the urgency of knowing Loren was hidden in this vast complex. Having watched Chiyo embarrass herself over Conrad, she might never be her best friend, but she needed her right now.

Flashing what she hoped was a warm smile--its lukewarm rise didn't even cracking her dimples--she pulled Chiyo to her feet. Holding her finger to her lips, Berangere crouched at the corner and watched the staircase.

When nothing stirred but the dust trickling from a bullet hole in ancient plaster, she tugged Chiyo behind her, feeling her sluggish resistance as oddly familiar, having had to put Loren to bed when she fell asleep watching TV. She was often parentalized by the other animalytes. While it wasn't much fun being the mature, thoughtful one, she took an obstinate satisfaction from it, knowing if they ever flipped roles, Loren would lead them deeper into any holes or pitfalls she could find, not just her portals. But holding Chiyo's hand irked her, for any Daikonese spy was likely more experienced and knowledgeable, and had more time to come to grips with the existence of many worlds. If Chiyo was a spy, she should be hand-holding Berangere through this rescue.

When they had crept halfway upstairs, and the top landing came in view, Berangere came out of her reverie, crouched, and squeezed Chiyo's hand to signal she ought to do the same. Sidling to the rail, they tiptoed another step, held a breathless pause, and lifted their heads an inch at a time until the dingy carpet came in view, shadowed grey from dust, which glinted in the open bathroom light. A flush and gurgle, then a sudden faucet blast, said they wouldn't be alone for long.

"Come on," hissed Chiyo. As she took the lead, she nearly dragged Berangere faster than she could run down the shadowed landing, despite her Ephremian armor, which clattered as the cuirass scales flexed and scraped against each other. When the faucet creaked off, Chiyo hissed "run faster!"

Berangere resisted her panicked urge to ask where they were going. Having this much certainty, Chiyo was either a traitorous spy leading her into captivity, or tracing steps laid out by the Albatron. In any case, Chiyo was unlikely to catch her breath to give her a straight answer.

"Hey!" The shout came just as Chiyo pushed through a door, which slammed shut so fast it scraped Berangere's good arm as she grazed past. When Chiyo put her shoulder to a giant, dusty crate,

Berangere squared her shoulder beside her, and together they shoved it until one corner wedged the door, just as it clapped again and again, the wood rattling, scratching, cracking, then snapping under the powerful onslaught of the guard, who burst through head and shoulder as the top corner snapped inward, flinging splinters toward Berangere and Chiyo, who stopped and stared, not only too stunned to move, but astonished and breathless.

It was Berangere who snapped out of it first, and as the guard reached for the crate, she swiveled so fast she missed Chiyo's hand, snagging her armor sleeve instead, the tiny rings scraping her fingers as she tugged Chiyo. Not knowing where she was going, Berangere clutched all the harder, until the looped rings pressed into the soft skin between forefinger and thumb. Passing into a corridor running left and right, Berangere sprinted down the longer corridor to the left, craving more running space. In the same split moment, her good judgment asserted itself, for the right side ran only ten feet before turning left, and would have taken them out of sight, but it was too late, for that double-minded instant had shattered with a bang, clatter, and the guard's stomping footfall.

Forced to commit to her choice, Berangere ran pell-mell, then picked up even more speed, as if she wasn't about to collide into the corridor wall. His stomp drummed so near, her hackles rose, and she pushed her pace even harder, the pins and needles at her neck a premonition of his reaching hand.

"Come on!" She bellowed, as her repressed fear and anxiety fizzed out like shaken Coke. She barreled through her own echoing yell as she turned right.

"Let go of me!" Chiyo screeched, then batted Berangere's hand, which only clawed in all the harder. "You're taking us the wrong way!"

"Too late," Berangere panted. "This is the right way now."

"You stupid kids!" shouted the chasing guard. "Stop! You don't know what you've done!"

As vague threats are never terribly persuasive to strong fear and a stretch of running space,

Berangere pushed harder, letting go of Chiyo's sleeve. The rings had so embedded in Berangere's hand that the links pinched back as she pulled it free.

No sooner had Berangere let go than Chiyo gave it all she could. Still clad in Ephremian armor, and her dwarven eye steely and expressionless, she looked more locomotive than girl as she pushed past Berangere. While Ephremian battle armor is nearly weightless, it is as bulky as normal armor,

and cannoning through the narrow halls without collision seemed the work of a machine.

Berangere clapped a hand to a stitch in her ribs, heart pounding and lungs tight as a drum.

The guard's booming steps drew to a sudden stop. When he muttered under his breath, Berangere's strung-taut senses overheard: "better you than me."

"Chiyo!" she panted. "Something's wrong. Wait!"

"You mean we won!" When Chiyo taunted the guard with a little victory dance, he turned on his heel and retreated the way they had come. "I can't believe it either."

"Trust your instincts. It's pretty unbelievable. Why not come this way, deeper in his own lair?

He's not only a uniformed minion, he's on the clock. What possible reason could he have for giving up the chase?"

"If he's seen chasing us, we'll be his fault."

"So by letting us go, he saves his own skin? Whoever's up here sounds pretty scary, Chiyo."

"It also means anyone we meet might shoot first and ask questions later."

"So, triggerhappy is an acceptable form of incompetence here?"

Faced with the prospect of a homicidal mad scientist and his triggerhappy minions, Berangere wished, for the first time, that she was back in Alsantia, where even in battle she knew the rules. On Earth, she had no idea what was going on, only that her best friend--herself a shadowy unknown--

was kidnapped for an unknown reason. What did this Suvani doppelganger want? Was Loren leverage, a test subject, or only an ingredient?

"Where to now?" Berangere panted, wiped her sweating brow, and smoothed the rag skirt that remained of her princess gown. It had blown and billowed as she ran, its ragged ends sticking out haphazardly, just as her stray hairs jutted every which way frowsily.

"It's just through that door." As her thrill in outracing the guard faded, her face paled, and her happy shout shriveled to a timid whisper. When Berangere darted for the door, Chiyo's latched on to her wrist. "Not yet. I'm not ready."

"But you've seen what's in there. You know what's ahead." As Berangere looked into her frightened eyes, a chill iced her heart. Why should Chiyo be so afraid, when she had already accepted the risk? What had she seen? "Is Loren in there? Why are you stopping?"

"You can't go in, Bear." Chiyo brimmed with tears. "You'll get shot."

"I won't make myself a target then. Neither of us will." Berangere shivered. How oddly specific Chiyo's claim was--she hadn't said they'll get shot, but you'll get shot. "Now you have to tell me what you saw."

"It's not so much of a what as a when."

Berangere's heart skipped a beat. "What do you mean when? That thing sees the future?"

"I don't know." As Chiyo rubbed her tears with her balled fist, her snuffling wet her upper lip. "It's not mine, is it? I might as well have stolen it. I'm sure that's what the Albatron thinks."

"It doesn't even talk. How would you know what it thinks?"

"It talks in the oldest language, Bear. Like hieroglyphs in pyramids, it uses imagery."

"You dodged my question, Chiyo. What did you see?"

"Everything that just happened to us."

While Berangere had no wish to repeat their flight from the muscular, uniformed, rent-a-Nazi,

it was oddly comforting that the chase had been foreseen, even if the only eye looking over them was a burnt-out magic mirror. Was it even a person? She supposed that depended on one's point of view. Being certainly not human, it was an inhuman person if you could call it a person at all. Perhaps its persistent sight was just as scripted as their flight from the guard? Everyone punching their clock and manning their post, like old sheepdog and Wile E Coyote cartoons, in a ridiculous series of oversight,

infinity more an omnipresent overlooking than an omnipotent onlooker. In being scanned and known by the Albatron, Berangere had never felt as much of a non-entity, a speck of dust glinting in a consciousness too absolute to be intelligent. It wasn't foresight at all, but a glimpse delegated by whatever eye overlooked the Albatron. Did the Stranger chuckle as the Albatron fed Chiyo scenes of the guard chasing the girls? As she caught her breath, she chewed on the consequences of this chain of reasoning until cold fear balled in her stomach. "Go on."

"You've already guessed it."

"I need to hear you say it. I like choose your own adventure as much as the next person, but I don't want to guess at a door with The End on the other side." The Mansion had vintage CYOA paperbacks on its shelves, which felt dated even though Berangere had never played a computer RPG,

not even a text adventure, not even a pencil and paper RPG. An abrupt The End not only made her squirm, it also made her feel like cheated of a story, so that she plunged back in immediately for another read. As she read them all, it was like poring over slices of lost time, like reading newspapers from the Wild West. She felt that strange dislocation now, like she shouldn't be here. Like she was not only out of place, but out of time. She had always felt out of place, whether in the Mansion, one of many orphaned from their past and estranged from the outside world, or on board the air galley, reaping entitlements from absentee parents on a world too buried in her infancy to have been forgotten, so that she felt alienated from her own life standing on her birth world. Whether in a desert of circumstances or an oasis of privilege, Berangere had always felt like an outsider, but that was nothing compared to feeling estranged from the timeline, to being extrinsic to one's own fate. If the wheels of time ground over her no matter what she did, then there was nothing she could do to avoid it, was there?

As Chiyo screwed up her face,holding back the bitter, unspeakable truth of their future,

Berangere realized she didn't want to know. "Stop being squeamish, I don't care."

"I'm not squeamish, it's just that it's a lot."

"How long have you known?"

"I saw flickers the first time I held the Albatron in Havala. While its focus was on you three in the Mansion's ruins, darker futures swirled in the smoky background."

"Do I die?"

"I thought you didn't want to know?"

"Do you know or don't you?"

Chiyo sighed. "When we open this door, you run left fast as you can, leaving me in your dust."

"Why?"

"I wish I knew. Maybe you hear something? There's no sound in the Albatron's glass. When I follow, the corridor leads to a footbridge, spanning a gigantic warehouse, housing vehicles of all kinds: a fleet of trucks, helicopters, and planes with folded-up wings, their jets slanted straight up."

"That's no warehouse. That's a hangar."

"As we cross the footbridge, the windows behind us shatter, and when those ahead are shot out,

we drop on all fours to scramble to the other side, where the corridor continues."

"So I don't die. I don't even get shot."

Chiyo shook her head. "Not yet. Then we're running even faster. If you think we were fast running from the guard, that was nothing compared to sprinting from breaking glass and bullets."

"Just get to the point."

"The corridor leads to a glinting dome, a planetarium open on a cloudless night spotted with stars. Having stepped onto a walkway circling the canopy, you grasp the rail and lean over so far I think you're going to fall, impaling yourself on the enormous telescope. While you don't fall, when you shout so hard your eyes bulge, Jezera and Suvani--only she's blonde, so I know now she's the doppelganger--

and a slew of uniformed guards look up. Strapped to a table connected by electrodes to the gigantic telescope is Loren--barely breathing, dull gray, fur and shadows erased. When false Suvani raises her finger, and her face contorts cruelly, a guard raises his rifle."

"And shoots me. Why not tell me before now?"

"I didn't trust Jezera. Judging by what I saw. she works for the enemy."

"Even so, she wouldn't want me dead." Berangere shrugged. "I'm too valuable to her."

"Hence why she was so rude to me. I'm nothing to her in any world."

"Chiyo, maybe this future's not set in stone."

"We can't risk it."

"If Conrad was beyond those doors, wouldn't you go?"

"No, no, a hundred times no!" After Chiyo snorted and laughed, the silence of the corridor seemed to shrink and chill, centering on them icily.

"Do you hear that?" asked Berangere.

"I don't hear anything."

"Exactly. Like the lull before the storm. Or that odd feeling when wou're being watched. How long have we huddled here?"

Chiyo's brow furrowed, tugging at her frown. "Why?"

"In your vision, how long did we stand here before we flung open the door?"

A light dawned in Chiyo's human eye, and as her dwarven eye widened, it glimmered in the fluorescent light. "I don't think we did." She raised the Albatron in a white-knuckled grip. "You're saying our inaction changed the future."

"We waited too long. Now they know we're here." While fear and indecision had frozen Berangere's hand to the door, as she felt herself dodge this future, this dark barrage of bullets and death, her shoulders slumped, and her forehead fell to the door. At least in falling into their clutches, she would be together with Loren, alive. As the power of choice returned to her, her courage swelled, and she felt the strength of her rising resolve. "Don't look in that thing anymore."

"But we have to know..."

"We already know a lot. Thanks to you and your hellish glimpse, we know what lies ahead. Thanks to our procrastination, we're no longer chained to that sequence of events." Bernagere sighed. While she wasn't about to tell Chiyo, whom she had finally persuaded to push ahead, Berangere by no means believed the mirror had the gift of prophecy. More likely, it was a good guesser, and had pieced together this possible future from its reconstruction of what it had seen from afar, making this dreamlike imagining not true foresight, but cobbled-together farsight.

Even if her death was certain, she would open the door.

"Let's just cut to the next scene, shall we?" The smooth, urbane voice was so smooth and chilling, his words clicked like ice in a glass. Even scarier, the voice came just behind her without warning, despite the corridor's overwhelming quiet. Berangere turned slowly. His tallness and thinness accentuated his iciness, like a glass of iced tea, the condensation just starting to drip down the side. He stepped so gracefully he seemed to slide, and as he goosestepped even nearer, Chiyo grabbed Berangere's arched, frozen shoulder and pulled her back, backpedaling in a jumble of their hasty feet.

The man's enormous fist had nearly swallowed the dull metal of his pistol. "Being shot isn't so bad, you know. Ask your friend. She's feeling fine."

"You shot her!" When Berangere came back to herself, and took a step forward, Chiyo's hand clapped to her shoulder, and she shuffled back instead.

"I only shot her a little."

"Monster!"

"Yes, that one. I shot your friend, the monster." He snickered. "Not that I used live ammunition. It was only a dart." He prowled another step nearer. "I regret shooting you twice the same day. It can be hard on your system. Drink plenty of fluids when you wake up."

Berangere could have kicked Chiyo. Of course they wouldn't shoot her with real bullets. Like Loren, they wanted her alive. In the other future, Other Berangere was getting shot with another tranquilizer dart, and about to get some answers. As he leveled the pistol, she felt dizzy. Maybe she would still get those answers, but first she got a flying needle in her slung arm. When her knees shook, and the top of her head seemed to drift away, her spotting vision darted to the needle, which had pinged on the metal splints added by the Ephremian nurse who changed the setting on her broken arm. In that split second, Berangere realized two things. First, her fainthearted swoon was only hunger pangs, having already burned up the falafel by nonstop running, and second, she had less than a second to act.

Trusting what was left of her gown's fluff and lace to cushion her fall, she slid to the ground and her forehead smacked floor anyway, adding verisimilitude to her sham unconsciousness, for while not completely knocked out, her head was so rattled she felt only half in her skin.

Chiyo collapsed beside her, eyes rolled back. While an ogre's back no longet lay between them,

there was still an incalculable horror, a monstrous unknown that widened as the slim guard stooped for Berangere, then strode down the corridor, leaving Chiyo sprawled on the floor.

If she cried out, he would shoot her again, or jab the needle in with his huge hand, and she would be unable to help Loren.

Or Chiyo, she told herself, and at least this way, he might bring her in reach of Loren.

At least this way, she might forgive herself for shrinking from her best friend, for not being captured together. Having shared the same room most of their lives, it killed Berangere not to share Loren's fate.

As they walked, his icy, clicking steps echoed, but as they went further, his boots were drowned out by an increasing clamor of biting screams, until Berangere couldn't help lighty clicking her eyelids shut to screen out the chattering walls. If her eyelids so much as fluttered, or squeezed in a flinching shudder against the horrific noise, Iced Tea Man might notice her faking and icily submerge her in true unconsciousness. Down the halls, some doors were thrown open, one showing an Ephremian dwarf with fraying braids and beard, choked by a white, vinyl collar tethered to the padded wall, while in another a glassy, shimmering figure was so translucent that it cast the faintest and grainiest of shadows.

Berangere first thought it a trick, a hologram, until the strange crystalline twist of its arm in a gesture Berangere did not understand. Having caught her furtive glance, it followed this subtle gesture with a shushing tap of its phantasmic finger to the flickering incandescence which served as a face. She shivered, terrified it might want to share the misery of its captivity, and call out to the thin man, who might have been the glassy man's twin, despite one being translucent to the point of transparency,

and the other being wholly opaque, a solidity enchanced by his black uniform, peppered with white buttons on his belt, breast, and pants pockets, making him more domino than man.

In other cells were bona fide humans; those not restrained by strait jackets and tethers either keened and moaned as they swayed back and forth or paced with vacant looks. The madness was so pervasive that it walked the halls, for those buttoned up in lab coats and smocks flashed even wilder eyes, which said they were not genuine doctors, bound by the Hippocratic oath, 'do no harm,' but mad doctors, following the demented, sparking coil of their twisted genius.

Berangere realized the truth in a flash of insight: the institute was no asylum, with pretensions of healing minds, but a menagerie of souls harvested from many worlds.

"Don't worry," murmured Iced Tea Man, "you're not meant for these witch doctors." Berangere's heart jumped a beat.

"Quacks and brutes, every one," he snorted. "I time my breaks and lunches so I never run into that crowd. When I do happen on them, my teeth set on edge, and I go up on my tiptoes. I've never been squeamish before coming here, but they do nauseate me so."

"You're joking."

"I've been prancing tippy-toe and speaking through gritted teeth for at least a minute."

"How did you know I wasn't unconscious?"

"Oh, please," he sniffed. "I've carried lots of tranquilized people, not only here, but in the field.

If you were really knocked out, your head would have hit my back a hundred times, but being awake and tense, you kept your head from smacking me." He spoke under breath, as if not Berangere's captor, who intended nothing good for her, but her co-conspirator, in on her secret plan. Berangere wished she had a secret plan. If only Jezera was as competent as this hired gun.

As he grumbled, Berangere subtly raised her head and squinted, taking everything in as surreptitiously as possible. While he knew she was awake, she saw no reason to let every mad doctor know she was wide awake and ready to be zapped and needled. Needled, she muttered to herself, scanning his white buttoned pockets for spare darts. Her eyes fell on his holster. She doubted she could unsnap the hard plastic holder and unholster the gun while draped over his shoulder. Not only was she at an uncomfortable angle, but leverage was not on her side.

"I hear your wheels spinning." While he stifled the laugh that would have given her away,

his derision surfaced in his smug, bubbly tone. "You don't have a chance. My gun is keyed to my palm print, and won't work for anyone else. Nothing personal, just a preventive security measure. While you had a small chance back where I captured you, with hundreds of mad doctors and flunkies standing between you and every door, it's good I caught you. You might have gotten shot had you opened that door."

"That's what Chiyo said."

"I heard. The boss will be mad I left your friend behind, but I was under orders to get you, specifically."

"Me? Why would anyone want me?"

"You're the bestie. The one the little monster wants, the unreasonable one who has been snarling and obstinate since she woke up. The big monster--the suspiciously cooperative one--said I should gather you up and bring you in if we want the little beast's help."

"The big monster? An ogre?"

He snickered. "I suppose that's just what she is. Although I've seen others bigger than she is, and it seems horribly offensive to call a lady an ogress just because she's large."

"It's not just because she's large. She's an honest to goodness ogress."

"Honest to badness you mean," he laughed. "You're a poor judge of character, based on your choice of friends."

Berangere didn't answer, but only let herself sway back and forth, her forehead smacking into his rawboned, musclebound back. She deserved it. He was right. What was she thinking, trusting Jezera? If Kiera had, she was also a trained warrior. And Loren was not only no longer herself, but more of her was slipping away daily. Berangere seized her hair and twisted. Her thinking was fragmenting who she was. She had always been Loren's Bear. "Put me down."

"Not yet."

"Put me down now!" Heads turned, and gurneys and carts rattled to a stop.

"You don't want this kind of attention," he hissed, then turned a smile on the encroaching labcoats. "She's off her meds. It's nothing, really. I've got it under control."

"I'm not familiar with this subject." In a bushy, ginger beard lurked thin lips twisted in a sneering smile. "Tell me her number."

"I don't know!" Iced Tea Man scoffed. "One two something. Call her Fido or Rover, for all I care. I don't get attached to your weirdies."

Ginger Man came closer. He looked like a malevolent shadow had tainted Van Gogh--not the artist, but his self-portrait, his complexion splotched angry red, rising quick as flames. His eyes seared Berangere as he crowded her, his chest jarring her slung shoulder as he seized her jaw, turning her head left and right. "A noble aspect."

"She's not a horse." The thin man sighed. "She can't pay me enough for this."

"You're on Ivanu's business?" The skeletal hand fell, leaving Berangere hot and cold where his fingertips had pinched,her cheekbones icy numb and the hot taste of blood and anger in her mouth.

As he fell back a step, Berangere's hands went to her eyes. The corners of her eyes stung as they watered.

"She signs my check same as you."

"You know what I mean, Emory."

"I mean mind your business. Find another subject." When the thin glass of iced tea--the name Emory suited such a man--set her on the floor, the backs of her thighs had fallen asleep from where he had clasped her, and she leaned on the wall. "Since you're awake, you can walk." She gathered his loud stage voice was less for her benefit than for the glowering doctors. "Run and I'll shoot you again."

Grasping her shoulder, he steered her through the staring nurses and doctors.

"You owe me." Emory scowled, clutched her forearm, and dragged her down the hallway.

"Owe you? You kidnapped my friend and drugged me!"

"It's a living." He shrugged. "Hardly an honest day's pay, but better than that guy. He wants to compare regions of your brain with the same spots on Earth brains."

"The joke would be on him. I spent most of my life on Earth."

Emory shook his head. "I feel it too. It isn't just that you don't talk like you belong here.

Otherness is all over you. You might as well have flown in on a saucer. And as for the punchline, it might have been when he punched a hole in your skull."

"Oh. Thank you, then."

"De nada. You might resent me again before the hour is up."

"You could let me go."

"In case you didn't notice, we have a bit of a subject shortage around here. While we have our share of bodies, they can't recuperate fast enough for our doctors."

"If you help me escape, they won't get their hooks in me."

"You? I was thinking of me. If I let you go, she may try to collect on my contract."

"Your contract?"

"My contract is not just for employment, but a bill of sale, which grants Ivanu the right to dispose of my corpse as she sees fit." At her aghast look, he arched an eye. "You can hardly blame me, as the money is so, so good. But had I known then what I know now, I would never have signed it."

Berangere recovered her composure. "So what? She's only human. She can't own you body and soul."

"Soul? Don't be ridiculous. It's not a supernatural document. It's not even a legal document, just a compact between criminals, so there's nothing to stop her collecting on my body aside from my continued competence. Hence why I won't let you go. But once my usefulness is up, I'll wind up on one table or another." A grim look clouded his face. "Better that table than fed to Ivanu's mongrels."

"What is this place?" Berangere said, incredulous. "Did I walk into a mad science version of the middle ages? Who feeds anyone to their dogs in the 21st century?"

"There are warlords and kingpins world wide. Even in Draden. And when did I say dogs? Ivanu's mongrels are something else entirely--monsters made patchwork from magic and science robbed from many worlds."

"You're kidding."

"Pray you never see them." Emory put his fingers to his lips. They had stopped before a door of tall, faded wood inset in a refinished frame, as if whoever refurbished this building's ancient wing was under orders to upgrade everything else but leave the door an antique. Graven top to bottom were what looked vaguely like abstract animals, but on leaning closer, she were these sigils and glyphs were ancient Alsantian.

"Follow my lead," he whispered, "and you might survive the day."

"That's comforting."

Emory straightened his jacket and smoothed his pants one-handed, all the while keeping a wiry grasp on Berangere's good arm. He breathed in deeply, flicked a bit of nothing off his shoulder and straightened the already flawless jacket line of his black uniform.

As he leaned into the door, it clicked then creaked open, venting air cooled near a refrigerator's vapor, but with the icy bite of a stale draft stirring dust from a past century. Then a blast of light darkened her vision, burning in a salty whine of dripping tears, her eyes lolling and moving on their own like dwarven eyes. The brightness was so obscene, she staggered into what might as well have been a pitch black room.

Her foggy eyes cleared before her smoky mind, but couldn't make sense of the chattering, laughing shadows crowding the vast, brightly-lit space until she saw that they were backlit to silhouettes by a towering wall of screens. Some were small, others middish like the mansion TV,

but one vast screen was tuned to a glinting darkness, an abyss that glimmered like a mirror. As she faced the gem-like sheen of this darkness, she shuddered, and her thoughts scurried away, leaving her like a fly on the wall, gaping at luminous pools that slid like snails. If these alien waters were not sentience, they were alive, for their nomadic patterns adpated to their environment.

On another screen, Berangere saw herself, translated to fuzzy sepia and grainy slate gray, and tottering a few feet behind Emory, the white hallway a few steps behind them, until the rickety door sealed them in the ancient room. While the room was constructed of antique wood and dusted, rust-streaked iron struts, why should Emory and Berangere also be sepia and silver gray unless the camera was an antique, or no camera at all? Berangere's heart jumped as she scanned the room.

Chiyo slumped in a chair, her face shivering in drugged unconsciousness. While her human eye was squeezed shut and in denial of the steampunk laboratory and the horrors casting shadows more terrifying than they were, her dwarven eye clicked, whirred, and scanned the room, tracking Berangere as she stumbled, slackjawed and staring, into the laboratory.

How had she never guessed it? Of course there had been a spy, and of course it was Chiyo.

Not that Chiyo ever knew of her betrayal, for the trairorous eye had broadcast everything that happened since the dwarven kingdom. While its transmissions may have once served some unknown purpose for the dwarven rebels, its signal had been hacked by Suvani's doppelganger.

For there was nothing else to call Ivanu. Spitting image and secret twin didn't do her justice,

for aside from her hair, Ivanu was a flawless copy of Suvani. It was like Suvani was in two places at once, and like twins that wanted to be told apart, made one of herself be a good sport and wear a cheap and gaudy wig. For Ivanu's blonde hair was coiffed by so much product as to seem plastic, like the unsnapped headdress of a Lego minifigure. Standing shoulder to shoulder, their likeness was even more jarring,seemingly defying physics in being two of the same thing side by side. When the paradoxical doppelgangers gazed at Berangere, then shifted their attention to Chiyo, their scornful faces haunted the sepia screen, so that their doubling spliced again, four impossible queens in such close proximity

that the world bifurcated fourfold around them, and Berangere was so dizzy in terror of that malevolent face that she rested her hand on Emory's forearm.

As goosebumps raised, her flesh pulled away from the icy bodyguard, but his own hand clapped to hers with surprising gentleness and grace as he escorted her to another sumptuous and pudgy chair, its sleek cover stretched over a filling so plump that as the sleeper who sat there stirred, the leathery surface rippled like a thing alive. When the chair back arched up and doubled, topped with a one-eyed reptilian glare trailing a wispy beard, Berangere did a double take, her head spinning as she realized the luxurious furnishings were unearthly monsters. Ivanu's mongrels.

On her saurian perch, the girl lolled, stretched, and yawned. When her eyes flicked open,

then fluttered shut, one hand rubbed her face, and the other grasped the shifting arm of her chair--

actually the shoulder of this otherworldly lizard.

"Bear!" Loren looked so like herself that Berangere's heart pitter-pattered with relief. But even as her exhausted feelings regrew towards her friend, bitter resignation set in. This was not really Loren, not as she really was. While her friend had shrank back to her false self--what was, in essence, only a childhood memory--the shadows still flexed around her, and Berangere thought she heard them growling. All beasts look innocent when sleeping.

As she looked on her friend, her hackles rose, and her teeth set on edge. Having crossed through a roomful of terrifying lizards and a gauntlet of people so terrifying they might be greater monsters than their beastly thrones, she realized she was beholden to the greatest monster in the room. She might be the only one to know it, and she might be in greater danger from the lesser monsters, but all Loren wanted was a wicked will to match her shadowy might, and she could sweep the room clean of its villainous riff-raff, then go on to cleanse a world or two.

Not only had Berangere faced off against Jezera in battle, she had been overshadowed by the Stranger on the Terianan battlefield. Standing over Loren was worse than standing in the shadow of either monster, for she now felt on the crumbling lip of a vast abyss, and far from catching her fall,

Loren would smile as she diminished in her shadow.

It took all of her nerve to reach out to Loren. "Loren. We finally found you. I'm so glad." While she was exhausted, shaking with fear, and barely able to stand, as she slumped in their embrace, she tensed.

As she cupped Berangerere's face in her hands, Loren's eyes narrowed. "So that's what lying smells like."

As Berangere's spine chilled, the sweat trickled down her back like beads of hot wax.

Clasping Berangere's cold hand in her colder hand, Loren pulled herself to her feet. "Not that you don't have the stink of worry all over you. I'm flattered your heartsick fears drove you all the way here, but don't say you're happy to see me."

Berangere couldn't help it. She was afraid, but also angry. No one had ever taken her apart like that with a glance. "If you can really peel me back and peek at what I'm feeling, Loren, you should take better care of my heart. All the way across the Sargan Vos and Havala, I was joined at the hip to a glass god. Unbelievably powerful, but oh so fragile."

"Enough of that." As if not an evil minion, but their prom chaperone, Emory took both girls by the hand and crossed the room toward the doppelgangers.

When Berangere's attention had been riveted to the screens, Chiyo, and the doppelganger queens, she had paid scarce attention to the other foul beings occupying the room, other than feeling their presence as unpleasant, threatening, and so odious that now that her skin crawled as she shied past the human monster.

There was no better way to describe them, for these human monsters looked her up and down like a commodity anatomized and priced by the piece, and, for all she knew, she very well might have already been parceled and sold. Like the haunting images of the doppelganger queens doubled and stained sepia in the screen fed by Chiyo's eye, their eyes seemed the appendages of the same snaky monster, as if they shred one medusa brain, and one stony thought to do evil surely and inexorably.

Not that they weren't different in fashion and style, for all that they shared the same wicked character; one was armored head to toe, the plates enameled such a dark red it first seemed black, and each scale minted with otherworldly sigils; another seemed wrapped in blindingly white furs, until Berangere looked timidly up into the towering woman's face, the fur thinning as it tapered up her neck, just as it stopped at her hands, where soft, lovely fingers were tipped by golden claws three inches long; and by no means the least of the monsters, however mundane and Earthly his evil, an absurdly paunchy man clad in a tailored black suit swayed on spindly legs, spider-like. While there were creatures more hideous, these were the faces that stood out from the dull metal and ancient timber of the anachronistic laboratory.

And one familiar face. Berangere's good arm went to her broken shoulder, and smoothed down the sleeve on her bundled arm, as if reassuring herself it was still there. As she had never been struck so hard, it had felt like that side of her had been blasted out of existence. Then that bristling, overzealous smile seemed to dice the rest of her to bits. The friendly face flashed that malicious grin now, an ear to ear smirk proud of its fangs. Not that her glinting teeth were white; far from it, they had yellowed to a bright gold. Hands on her hips, Jezera swaggered near with a taunt on her lips very like the day they met.

Of all the monsters sent to collect her, she preferred Emory, who was at least a refined, polished monster, although she wasn't so naive as to presume his manners made him less of a monster, that his graces made him good. Manners maketh man, but graces need not make good. No matter how deeply Emory thought or felt, his cares and deeds were shallow, and he would happily, without any self reproach, turn her over to his employer or her doppelganger.

Neither had yet deigned to notice her. While Berangere was tall for her age, she looked up at their cold shoulders, one draped in a luxurious black cloak embroidered with silver and gold flowers, so exquisitely rendered that they looked real--though surely hexagonal, six-petalled blossoms did not exist in nature--and the other dressed in a cream-colored pants-suit. What these pillars of light and darkness gazed at so ghoulishly were the series of screens, their tittering heads not only occasionally bobbing toward Chiyo's sepia monitor, but taking in the whole, sparing a few moments to mock the subject of each video, each one of the otherworldly beings captive in their cells: the slender glassy man, coruscating with a yellow shine bulging in his lithe limbs, as if he harbored an incandescent rage; a diaphanous winged man, whose vaporous body obscured a darker image, as if he wrestled his own damned soul; and a green woman, whose green fur, Berangere realized with a shock, was not animal hair, but vegetal growth, like moss or grass. Her flowering tresses had so wilted and grayed in the dim fluorescent lights that she seemed barely alive. Berangere thought her an actual plant, bonzaied to look like a woman, until her floral eyelashes trembled, leaking a light blue tear.

"She's quite lovely." Queen Suvani's compliment was voiced with a cruel tone, as if she had condemned the plant woman to be beautiful.

"I suppose you'd like to meet her?" Ivanu heaved a bored sigh that filled the cavernous laboratory, echoing off the antique rafters. "After so long, she may be indisposed to a tea party."

Suvani flinched as if slapped, her eyes narrowing and her smile darkening to a scornful growl.

"You did not just say that. I'm glad I'm not as cute as you are."

"Yes, yes. Who's the caricature, who made who, and so forth. We must push past our likeness to have a real meeting of minds."

"You said tea party," snarled Suvani.

"Well, there's always coffee," sniffed Ivanu. While she voiced her next words under breath, they carried like a stage whisper. "Undoubtedly the caricature. So melodramatic."

Suvani snorted, shrugged, and turned back to the screens. The central row honed in on a glowing sphere, which reflected a kind of double exposure, showing the laboratory's far wall superimposed on starlit mountains, but unlike a double exposure, in which one image is smoky and ethereal, each jarring scene had the solidity of reality, shattering any glance toward the sphere

into a fragmentary glimpse of both places.

Looking toward the far wall, Berangere saw the translucent blue sphere, and in layering yet another perspective on this shimmering globe, felt herself fragment, as if part of her stood on the moonscape conjoined to and eclipsed by the laboratory, and was nearly overwhelmed with dizziness. It was as if the three worlds she had stood on hammered home at once, estranging Berangere from her own body.

When Suvani's head bobbed to the sepia screen, in which Chiyo's fluttering perspective focused, foggily on Berangere, the Alsantian Queen smirked and turned.

Now flanked by two taunting faces, Berangere took a step back, smacking against Emory's jumpsuit. When he squrimed back, she recoiled as well, as if his oily grace came off on her, and she would have lurched into the blonde doppleganger, had not Chiyo's reptilian seat dumped her to the floor, snarled, and reared, looming so high it blacked out the lights. Just as its hairy underbelly lurched upon Berangere, and its slavering mouth, smelling like a dog had chewed a toilet to pieces like a milk bone, drooped a tendril of pink drool still bloody from whatever it had gnawed, Jezera lumbered between the girl and the monster, and clouted it on its hairy chin. As its head wavered on its sinuous neck, the ogress wound its wispy beard in her left fist, and clobbered it with her right, once, twice, three times, then dribbled its head like a speed bag five full seconds after it collapsed, its seeping drool now blood red, mingling with open welts on its face.

Jezera wiped her hands on its fur, then stood nonchalantly, as if she was the only one in the world.

"Explain yourself." Ivanu clasped her arms to her chest.

"I'm a professional."

"Oh, that explains it." When Ivanu guffawed, Suvani held out only a moment before breaking into convulsions of laughter.

"Why are we laughing?"

"Your moronic minion."

"Oh, I beg to differ," said Jezera. "I might be mercenary, but I'm not bound to you."

"And here I thought you were a professional."

"Oh, I am. But it was you who left me to rot in the Ephremian camp rather than firing me in the civilized way."

"Your plight was the furthest thing from my notice. Don't take it personally."

"I would never take anything you said personally...but I might take it professionally."

"Ogre, if you are a free agent, there's nothing work related about this transaction. We're no longer employer and employee, but two allies whose interests converge for mutual benefit."

"I never said I was a free agent." Jezera glowered. "Get your hearing checked. I said I was a mercenary, and no longer bound to you."

"Then you really indentured yourself to that child?" As Suvani said this, Berangere's blood iced,

for it was one thing to conjecture that Chiyo's eye had betrayed them, and it was another thing to hear Suvani had one eye on their adventures.

"That princess, you mean." Jezera's eyes glinted like a cat playing with its food. "She's only a few years younger than you, you know. All humans look like children to me. You're all so frail."

"What's she paying you with?"

"Right now?" Jezera snorted and cracked her fingers. "Proximity." She leered at Suvani meaningfully.

"She can't pay you what I can."

"You offend my work ethic. Now, work ethic is hardly the whole world, but revenge, that's a feast I can sink my teeth into."

"Look again, ogress." Ivanu's sweeping gesture encompassed the room. "You should--"

"I have a name, you know," Jezera blared.

Ivanu looked like she had swallowed fire and was about to spit it back up. "You dare interrupt--"

When Jezera swatted her aside, the dark corners trembled, boomed, then fell with a roar, the misshapen shadows pouncing down with a clacking of nails and claws and a gnashing of teeth. If those that served as couches were the presentable floor models, these monsters were the unholy mongrels,

mish-mashed not only from beasts but fears and nightmares.

"Look what you did," grumbled Jezera.

"Kill it!" screeched Ivanu, having raised herself to her hands and knees, blood dribbling down her chin.

"No matter how you look, it's not the same. That punch you took was meant for Suvani." Having stink-eyed Ivanu, as if she had really not just taken the punch but stolen it, Jezera grabbed Berangere in one hand and Loren in the other, then backpedaled, bowling into, then over, Emory, who just managed to roll clear of her feet.

"Wait!" Berangere hissed. "What about Chiyo?" But the ogress only continued her slow backwards roll to the door.

"Wait!" When Suvani raised her arms, an eldritch bolt passed from one hand to the other, drawing not only the attention of the villains and monsters, but the nightmare mongrels converging on Jezera. "You risked everything to punch me?"

"Unlike you, I'm civilized. I may be a hired killer, but I don't do it for laughs." She snickered. "Speaking of which, the look on her face." She pointed to Ivanu, who had swayed to her feet, glaring murderously at Jezera, who hooted so hard the shivering rafters showered dust.

"I hope it was worth it." Suvani raised her fist, which still brandished its scintillating filament of lightning. "And I'm happy to pay you in kind."

One moment, the ogress stiffened, every muscle flexed so hard that Berangere felt clutched by a claw of iron, not flesh and blood. The next moment, Jezera blasted through the crouching shadow-mongrels, tucking both girls under her arms. As Jezera's forearm took a mongrel in the throat, Berangere flailed forward, hollering at the twinge in her broken shoulder.

When Jezera leaped for the blue sphere, the laboratory crumbled into darkness, and they crunched hard into the starlit mountains.