.

"Gladion."

"Who the fuck are you and how did you get up here?" The man named Gladion looked archly up from his desk full of paperwork. He tried not to show it, but his heart was racing. It had been a long, long time since something had last gotten the jump on him, and it hadn't ended that well for him last time. He pretended to use one hand to massage his temple—best to keep them distracted, so they wouldn't notice that his right hand was reaching into the drawer beside his desk—and tried to study his assailant in the meantime, eagle-eyed for any sign that his actions were being noticed.

She looked like she was twelve.

Age started meaning a lot less these days; people didn't grow old, so they grew up. The kid still had freckles smattered across her face, but stress and hunger had already turned her cheeks lean and sharp, like the rest of them. Her hair was cut close to her ears, rough, like it had been done hastily and with clumsy hands. But beneath the shocks of dark hair, Gladion was drawn to the girl's eyes for two reasons: firstly, because they held a peculiar kind of fire in them, and secondly, because they were a vibrant, unnatural shade of purple, like the center of a nebula.

"Doesn't matter," she said curtly, striding toward him and keeping the gun in her hand pointed levelly at his forehead. "I heard that you worked for Aether Labs before you went balls-deep in Skull business. I want to talk about that. Hands on the table."

Gladion raised one eyebrow and slowly removed his empty hand from the desk. No need to escalate the situation yet. "This is hardly the venue for polite conversation." He made a point to stare, cross-eyed, at the muzzle in front of his face as if it scared him, but in reality he was studying her grip on the pistol. Her knuckles were white around the grip but her index finger floated off the trigger. Her fingers were bunched in the wrong way, and she held it in one hand, feet planted, head tilted off to one side so she could still stare at him with those strange, purple eyes.

Conclusion: she had no idea what it meant to use one of those.

"I just have to ask a few questions and then I'm—"

He whipped his right hand up and wrapped his fingers around her bony wrist, twisting more so than pushing her hand out of the way. Her arm wrenched sideways and he felt the crack of bone beneath his fingers as she screamed and dropped the gun. Gladion surged forward, sweeping the gun up in his free hand and pinning her arm to his desk. "Look, kid," he growled in her ear. "Calm down and I'll let you keep your other wrist intact."

"Power Gem," she croaked.

"Power what the fuck—"

Blasts of stone whizzed past his face, almost separating his nose from his mouth as they tore the words off of his lips. Gladion swore and took a step backward as a fucking feral floated up behind the girl. Demonic, pale eyes peered out from beneath a mottled shell that was twisted shut like an enormous walnut. It chirped at him indignantly, bluish energy trailing around it, and then it hurled another barrage of stone at his face that he barely managed to dodge. Slivers of stone quivered as they buried themselves one by one in the wall right behind his head.

"Stop or I shoot!" Gladion roared, raising his gun and aiming it at the girl. He wasn't really sure which one he was talking to—the girl or the monster—but at this point it didn't matter.

They froze, which was stupid of them, but they hadn't yet stood down, which was even stupider. "You broke my wrist!" the girl shouted back. Her eyes were alight with flame, the kind of righteous fury he'd only expected out of children.

"Keep trying to pull shit," Gladion said tightly, still aiming the gun with both hands at her chest, "and that'll be the least of your problems, I promise you." Maybe she wouldn't understand the body language, the way that his fingers hovered over the trigger; or how his gaze kept darting between her, the target, or the feral behind her, the threat. But he hoped that she could see the determination etched in every line on his face, burning there clearly enough that she'd at least think twice. He hadn't become the leader of an underground resistance syndicate purely by paperwork. "I don't want to shoot a kid, you look awfully young to be a murderer, and apparently I know something you want, so let's both just take a deep breath here."

A moment passed. "Maia." The girl's voice was curt. "Back off for now."

"Smart."

Her face contorted. "Drop the gun and we'll talk."

Gladion made a point to stare at the feral that floated behind her. "You're staying armed, so I am too." He sat down on the edge of his desk and took a moment to mull over his options. The thing was fast, faster than he could reasonably hope to react, and like any feral, it could probably kill him easily if it got the drop on him. It listened to her, though, and that was an interesting matter enough. Perhaps they both had something the other wanted. "Anyway, my name is Gladion, but I think you know that already."

"Fuck off and drop the gun."

"The polite response," Gladion responded testily, making a point to gesture a little with the gun to punctuate his words, "is to introduce yourself. Kids these days, I swear." He raised one eyebrow as her lips seethed with frustration. "You made the mistake of telling me that I've got something that you want, so no matter what you and your feral rock-monster think, things are going on my terms now."

She glowered back at him, and he wondered for a moment if he'd taken things too far with that last jab. "Vi," the girl said at last, pointing to herself, and then she jerked one finger toward the gnarled feral that orbited her head incessantly. "The minior is Maia."

Minior. He hadn't heard that one before. "Okay," Gladion said, smiling weakly. And then, even though the act made set every instinct he had screaming and on edge, he pointed the gun upward and then lowered it to the table. Within arm's reach, probably fast enough to grab before the feral launched itself at him, but he had a hunch that Vi wouldn't try anything. He'd seen her type before. Most kids were just as confused as the rest of them. "So you're twelve—"

"Fifteen, fuck you."

Ah, so she liked his humor. "And travelling the world with a creature that could kill us all in a heartbeat. That's quite a story, isn't it? Have a seat; I honestly won't bite."

You couldn't really blame kids like her, honestly. Gladion could remember a time before the world had ended, but the details were starting to get hazy. There were flashes of what life was before, but what he remembered the most of an abruptly-ended childhood was clutching his sister close to him, her blonde hair smeared against his chin as the beach around them erupted into monstrous, yawning caverns, spewing sand as castle walls rose up around them and threatened to devour them whole.

And now, years later, there was still that same hollow sense, the feeling that he was still just a kid up to his ankles in wet sand, trying to avoid being swallowed alive. He'd always wondered which of them had gotten out of it the worst—or if they'd all just crawled free, ghostly shells of their former selves, sandy grime all that concealed the ghastly void beneath.

And he at least had the times before to fall back on, memories of bunk beds and shared popsicles and riding in a red wagon with one rickety wheel—but kids like her?

"I don't need your sympathy. You studied alternate dimensions under Aether Labs, but you never published. Tell me what you figured out."

A world like hers didn't have time for bunk beds and popsicles, and at this rate, it never would. That thought alone had always been enough to make Gladion stop and reconsider.

"I stopped studying after—wait, no I never made that research common knowledge," Gladion said quietly. "Who have you been talking to?" Turner, piece of shit that he was, had probably squealed under pressure, but it was good to figure out who he could trust.

"Doesn't matter. How do I open a wormhole?"

"You don't," Gladion responded reflexively before he had a chance to even think about the ramifications of her question, and then the absurdity of this situation slowly sank back to him.

"Why not?"

Gladion sighed, taking a moment to furtively glance at her and the strange feral that seemed to listen to her. Watari would've cut off both hands for a specimen like that. "Do you know why there's a burn mark fifty miles long across the state of Oregon? Even if we had the power to open it, we'd have no way of controlling where it would lead, and we certainly couldn't fight what was on the other side."

There was no mistaking the way that they both tensed, the girl and the feral alike, as if he'd said something they didn't agree with. "Maia and I can handle ourselves."

In another time and place, Gladion would've been impressed with this edgy kid who'd managed to make it this far with a tame meteor, but he didn't have that luxury any more. There was something familiar about the grit in her eyes, though. "The last time a wormhole opened, the monster that landed over Portland devoured the electrical grid and killed over three hundred thousand people in the first hour alone. I don't think you can handle that."

"There are four more like that coming."

She said it with such nonchalance that it was hard to pick up on how easily she discussed the end of the human race. "How can you possibly know that?"

"They always come in the same order. There's, uh—" Vi got flustered for a moment, her brow creasing with uncharacteristic discomfort, and then she continued, "You've had the purple one with all the toxins, the red one with huge muscles that smashes things, the white one that runs super fast and isn't governed by momentum, and the electric one that zaps things."

"Purple one?" Gladion asked.

But she didn't seem to hear him. "The next one will burn your seas, and the one after that will cut your survivors to shreds," she said, and it was then that Gladion realized why he'd been so drawn to her eyes: they were decades older than the rest of her. "And, when the seventh one comes, it will devour anything left, and all life on this world will end."

Gladion laughed weakly. "A bit dire, aren't we?"

Her rock chirped her frustration for her as Vi said, "It's happened before. You need to stop them before the seventh comes."

Gladion did a quick mental count. They'd only seen three so far. The purple one wasn't one that he'd had record of, and given the trails of destruction that wormholes tended to cause, it wasn't exactly like its arrival could've been kept secret. There was a thud downstairs. Gladion paused and pretended not to notice, and then said carefully, "You've seen this before, haven't you?"

Her lip quivered. Vi nodded.

The sounds resolved themselves into screaming, muffled enough that it was probably coming from the lower floors. Gladion sighed pointedly and looked at Vi with one eyebrow raised. The message was clear enough. Now what.

"I didn't think she'd come looking here." Vi bit her lip and looked almost scared.

"She's looking? For you? Hitman or bodyguard?"

"Bodyguard, I guess."

Damn. A hitman at least wouldn't be upset that he broke the girl's wrist, but—

There was a bloodcurdling roar downstairs, one that sounded like every animal and no animal at all, and Gladion pulled up short. "Who's your bodyguard." His voice dropped two octaves. "They've got to be good if you managed to get you this far."

"That's not important," Vi said, also leaning forward. "Tell me what you know before they get here and we'll be fine."

The screech of shearing steel carried through the concrete floors. By the sound of it, something had just ripped the elevator doors open, and they were getting closer. "No, it really is."

"I—"

There wasn't time to apologize. Gladion grabbed the girl's thin frame in one hand and held her roughly in front of him, lining the muzzle of the pistol against her scalp. The fucking feral chirped at him indignantly, but he ignored it. "The safety is on and I have absolutely no intention of shooting you," he said in a low voice as the ungodly screeching got closer, "but her first instinct when she gets through those doors is going to be to kill me, and she tends to get what she wants. If you want me to leave this conversation with enough skin on my skull to tell you what I know, you'll be a good hostage and hold still, and you'll tell your demon-rock to do the same."

"You think holding a gun to my head—"

The door leapt off of its hinges and landed in a crumpled heap against the wall. Gladion swallowed as, six feet off the ground, yellow eyes glinted at him from the darkness before the chimera stepped forward. Look in the eyes and don't back down. The curved beak and talons were flecked with something vaguely blood-colored, and its forelegs tensed as it prepared to leap at him, but a gloved arm held it back. The other hand held a pistol and, even with the one-handed grip, looked like it new exactly what it was doing. "You have something that belongs to me."

"You were never one to share your toys, Wren," he responded with icy calm. "And if I recall correctly, you stole my chimera."

She didn't flinch or even act surprised to see him. "Let her go. Even if you shoot her, Dodger will flay you alive."

"You named him Dodger?" Gladion almost lost the tough act right there.

"Fuck off. Wasn't my idea."

"Boo wouldn't actually flay me alive, would he?" Gladion peered around Vi's head casually, trying to get a gauge on the silvady. The chimera had grown massively since they'd parted ways, but he seemed to deflate a little under Gladion's gaze. "Boo remembers his cheerio treats from Gladion, right?"

The silvady, who had been anxiously shifting his weight back and forth between his front paws in a movement Gladion could only describe as tippy-tapping, except from a giant, base-slaughtering scientific monstrosity, whined in dismay. Wren cut him off with a sharp hiss, and the silvady looked away guiltily. "Fat load of help you are," she muttered, and then fixed her gaze back to Gladion. "Let the kid go."

Vi hissed.

"Put the gun down or I shoot her," Gladion drawled, which shut them both up. "You'll lose out on whatever price was high enough to get you out of hiding."

"Gladion, I got five hundred bucks off of you last time we played poker. Your bluff hasn't improved since then. You value your own skin too much to pull the trigger."

"Speaking of valuing skin, I do hope you two didn't kill any of my people trying to get up here. You of all people should know how hard it is to find hired help these days."

Wren rolled her eyes. "Don't worry; your gang of kids is just as fearsome as everyone says. Scouts on the first floor fled the second they saw Dodger, and were kind enough to give me directions to you while they turned tail like kicked puppies."

Gladion sighed. That happened more frequently than he cared to admit. This was why you didn't recruit children in this game—no matter how fast they had to grow up, it was never fast enough. He'd always been a sucker for sob stories, and it wasn't hard to see his face on the eyes of every orphan on the streets. At least they'd run; he knew that the silvady was a living blender when confronted. "Thanks."

Pause.

"I promise I won't shoot you if you stop holding a gun to her head," Wren said at last, nodding her chin in Vi's direction.

"Noted," Gladion said, and let his arm fall. Vi took a step away from him, but she didn't run towards Wren, which told Gladion all he needed to know.

Wren broke the silence with the question that had probably been burning on her tongue for a while. "I'm sorry for leaving you to the police, but you didn't tell me that you were fleeing the scene of a bioterrorism attack when you asked for a ride."

Ah, yes. The elephant in the room. "It technically wasn't bioterrorism."

"Your mother opened a wormhole that dropped Denjumoku on top of the settlement in Portland."

Vi's eyes narrowed, and she looked back at Gladion. "Denjumoku. Is that the purple one?"

Wren answered before he had the chance. It seemed like this was a common practice for them. "Black and white, lotta arms, shoots electricity."

Vi nodded, apparently satisfied, and then said the utterly sassy remark that Gladion wouldn't have dared mention: "If it wasn't toxic, I don't think it counts as bioterr—"

"The Portland settlement contained four hundred thousand people."

All three of them fell silent. Wren's past tense told Vi the information that Gladion already knew.

When both of them looked at them, it was easy enough to see how they viewed him.

"I should've told you about the wormhole." Gladion shifted his weight uneasily. "I was trying to keep you safe by letting you know as little as possible. You would've done the same."

"You don't know that."

He raised one eyebrow.

Wren glowered. "You don't have to pretend to look out for me."

Gladion wondered if she saw the absurdity as readily as he did. Over the years, he'd come to understand that Wren had learned to see the world precisely how she personally needed to, and that skill had kept her alive. "We got out okay."

"Dodger ripped apart a military compound, and I'm pretty I'll be executed if I set foot in the state of Oregon ever again. Turner invited me to Seattle and I didn't quite have the heart to tell him why I had to say no."

"My mother got swallowed into an alternate dimension, my research was ruined forever, and I became the most senior surviving member of the only resistance group to the military police." Gladion honestly felt bad for people who tried to enter pity contests with him; even in this day and age, he tended to win.

"You hated her more than anyone, your research is very much ongoing, and you tuned that resistance group into an orphanage for every lost child you see on the street," Wren retorted dryly. For the first time in this conversation, her gaze slid over to Vi. "At least, your research is good enough to convince teenagers that you're the leading expert on wormholes."

Part of him hated how easily she was able to push his buttons. She'd learned far too much from Turner.

"You knew I was coming here?" Vi asked in a strangled voice.

"You weren't very hard to track," Wren snapped back. "And if you pull this shit again, I swear I will break your legs. Dodger can carry you the rest of the way."

The other part of him was trying not to remember that, for every homeless kid he gave a job to, there were a dozen more dead because he hadn't stopped Lusamine before—

"Is she yours?" Gladion said instead, changing the subject and motioning to Vi.

"A friend's."

"And the feral?" He wasn't even sure why he asked.

"Hers." Pause. "I can't tell you why it listens to her, either. Turner has no clue. That's why he's got me escorting her to Watari." He could almost taste the irritation in her voice—was it because she had to admit she didn't know something, or because she had to admit she was helping Turner?

Gladion settled for the more pressing stuff—her systematic prophecy that they were all going to die. "She's seen some crazy shit."

Of all things, that was what made Wren do a double-take. "She talks to you? I thought she was as mute as her rock."

"Fuck off," Vi said.

"Besides the sailor's mouth," Wren muttered. Dour as ever. "We get plenty of that."

Gladion sighed and let the gun drift downward again. "You're right," he said, not missing the way that Vi's eyes glinted with determination "I did open a wormhole. That's actually how Turner, Wren, and I parted ways. Your friends had very different approaches to saving the world than I did."

The silvady bristled on Wren's behalf, and Gladion took a step back. Best not to toe the line when it was etched on thin ice.

"So you want to open another wormhole," Gladion continued conversationally, and Wren glared daggers at him. "The short version. You can't."

Vi was bristling at him too, all over her tiny frame. "I can't?"

"No one can. Not just because it's dangerous and giant monsters lurk on the other side," Gladion added hastily, before she could call him a coward again. "You need energy of an enormous magnitude, the kind of stuff you only see on distant stars. It doesn't even make sense how much or what kind; we hadn't been able to generate anything like it before the accident and we haven't been able to replicate it since."

"Energy?" Vi asked at the same time that Wren asked, "Accident?"

He answered Wren first, for old times' sake. "Denjumoku was an accident. Or, well, the wormhole that summoned it was. We hadn't expected it to work. We weren't even running any of the equipment at the time. We'd just been gathering data when there was this brilliant streak of purple light appeared. And there was this cloud. This strange, weird, glowing cloud—"

Wren snorted. She wasn't even trying to hide her disbelief.

Gladion knew. No one had believed his story, but if Vi was the kind of kid who had tamed a feral and ran around with all of her headstrong stupidity, maybe, just maybe, he had a chance here. "It was like nothing we'd ever seen before on the sensors. It had two little blobs that orbited around this core full of unfathomable composition, and it was focused on my mother for a moment before it showed us a glimpse of this faraway world, and then it just—"

"You actually did it," Vi said quietly, her disbelief twisting into a blade that she used to cut through the conversation. "You summoned Cosmog."

He and Wren flinched simultaneously. "That name is heavily classified," Gladion said.

Vi glared back at him, eyebrows furrowed across her narrow forehead. "We know more than you fucks do about most of this, so if you could stop playing coy with the information, maybe we can all get out of this alive." And then, quieter, to the chunk of rock next to her, "At least they didn't give their weirdass names to everything they found here."

"Why do you want to open a wormhole?" Wren was talking to the girl for the first time since they'd all entered the room together.

But it was Gladion who answered her. One glance at Vi's stricken face told him enough about how the kid felt. He almost felt bad—Wren had spent so much time with her chimera that she'd forgotten what it meant to talk to real humans. But the signs were written all over Vi's face, the same kind of signs he'd seen on every kid in this hell, except—"Can't you tell, Wren? She wants to go home."

.