Birthright

by Em Dash

Pyramid's dream has ended, and Trip's hometown has a new name and purpose. But when things begin to go wrong with terrible calculation, Trip and Monkey realize that freeing Pyramid's enslaved might be more complicated than simply leading them home.

25. Collision

Interval: The Divide

---

Owen would have loved the view from Pyramid's upper levels, where the surrounding dunes shimmered and eddied in the heat like cresting waves. There weren't many people at Pyramid, maybe the whole world, who would have stopped to watch the desert shift back and forth as the day wore on, but Owen would have heard a dozen stories in it, and Rose felt his ghost flicker in the back of her mind.

Her husband had been a deeply serious man about the mysteries of the universe. He knew every ancient myth surrounding the constellations, when the rest of the world hadn't bothered to turn their faces to the sky in centuries. He was never far from a story, and most nights ended with the sound of his voice lulling their daughter to sleep.

Owen died when Heather was ten. There was no story in that; just a tragic accident, as they call them. Owen wasn't overly given to risk, but he was sure the path up to the top of the waterfall would offer the best view of the forest they were passing through that day. Heather had wanted to go with him, but Rose flatly forbid it. Heather was the gift she'd never expected, having arrived well after she and Owen had given up on having children. Everything in the world looked like danger to Rose after that, and Heather had waited with her while Owen climbed.

He lost his footing on the wet stones, halfway to the top. Rose saw his face, twisted and almost comical in surprise before he vanished into the misty rocks at the bottom.

It had taken both of them to pull him out of the churning water, and then there was nothing left to do except find a place to bury him.

Rose felt Owen's absence like a song that she lost more words to every day. The scent of him went first, then the shape of his smile. His voice was the last to go, and it was only when Rose couldn't remember his stories that she realized the last scrap of him had been scrubbed from the waking world.

Heather bridged that gap for a while, with her features a miniature version of Owen's and the same long fingers with practical, squared-off nails. Then she was gone, too, and Rose stopped feeling very much at all.

Rose crossed her arms and leaned toward the glass that never seemed to warm, despite the raging heat outside. The last few groups of people were being escorted in from the slaver ship, but they were too far away for Rose to make out their faces.

It wouldn't be long now. The journey was behind them and Pyramid was here, finally beneath her feet, and it was coming back to life. The dream was so close now that Rose felt the veil between the living and dead begin to flutter. Heather was here, somewhere, in a million little pieces that only had to be gathered together again.

Rose had missed the footsteps coming up the stairs, and Mark appeared next to her for the sole purpose of trampling every private moment.

"We'll be able to start the core systems up in a few hours," he said, without bothering with the courtesy of a greeting first.

Lord only knew what that was supposed to mean. "I see," Rose said.

Mark leaned against the railing that cordoned off the glass, his arms folded over his chest. He hadn't stopped grinning like a jackal since they arrived, as far as Rose could tell.

"Jason's going to be overseeing the initial dives," Mark said. "He's going to connect up the first group and see what we need to fine-tune once we have the initial data collected."

"Whatever he thinks is best."

Mark barked a laugh at her, and Rose turned her face away, back to the desert.

Far below, one of the women from Granville stumbled in the sand. The mech grabbed her roughly and her head cracked back, and Rose winced away from it before she had to see the result.

"If you're...free" – Mark gestured at all the nothing Rose seemed to be doing – "Jason's asked for some help down in the prep area."

Rose had barely seen Jason since they arrived. There were things she wanted to ask him, but he was still running like the wind itself was at his back, from one end of Pyramid to the other. She could hardly fault his industry, but it would have been nice if he'd found time to ask for her help directly. Still, there was no point in quibbling now.

The desert wind flung long strands of white sand into the sky, only to let it fall like rain. When it reached the ground again, the woman and the mech had vanished into Pyramid.

Rose smoothed down her skirt and turned to face Mark. "Where's the prep area?"

"Downstairs," Mark said. "Just follow the cables."

"And what does he need me to do?"

Mark shrugged. "Some of the wipes aren't going too well."

It took her a second to realize he was referring to the process Jason had mentioned before. She'd finally be allowed to forget the last year, and rewind time back to where she left it, when the world had stopped spinning.

"I'm not good with all this machinery," Rose said. "What would he like me to do?"

Mark's mouth flicked up into a snide smile she didn't feel she deserved. "Hold their hands? Fuck if I know. Just make it go smoother."

They stood in awkward silence for a moment. The wind screamed around Pyramid, trying in vain to cow it.

"What do you know about the wipes?" Rose asked him.

Mark shrugged again, like nothing in the world was his responsibility or his problem. "Just what Jason's told me. It'll remove any memories that weren't from Pyramid or formed here."

"What about –"

For an instant, Rose saw Owen palm a handful of water over Heather's head. She spluttered in surprise and slapped water back into his face, laughing. For the first time in months, that laugh rang like a bell in Rose's memory.

"What about things that happened before Pyramid?" Rose asked.

Mark grunted. "No. We don't want anything that wasn't here already. Why would you?"

Rose didn't answer, and after a while, Mark turned away.

She waited for him to take the hint from her icy silence, but he lingered, gazing out over the desert. When it didn't look like Mark was going anywhere, Rose turned her glare on him. She knew that it could wither weaker things without much effort, but Mark barely seemed to notice.

"Don't you have somewhere else you need to be?" she finally asked.

Mark considered her for a long time before leaning in closer than he had any right to. "We're here, you know? You can't lose your nerve now."

"Of course not," she snapped, and he backed away before she had to tell him to do it. "I'm tired and my feet hurt, but that doesn't change the fact that this is what we should have done all along. Leaving was a mistake, and we couldn't really count on her to fix it."

Mark would normally have risen to Trip's defense like his own honor had been wounded. This time, he just pretended he hadn't heard her.

After a few seconds of waiting for him to do more than stand there, Rose gave up and headed back down the stairs. Thankfully, Mark didn't follow.

The stairs let out too close to the main door, and Rose waited for the mechs to pass through before following. She still didn't feel comfortable around them, even if they were technically on her side now. But they were designed for killing, and there had been screams at Granville before the end. Rose found herself unconsciously looking for the woman she'd seen outside, but forced herself to stop.

There was no point in dwelling on things she couldn't change. She only had to deal with the mechs for a little longer before they didn't matter, either.

Rose headed for the lower levels, avoiding the mechs as best she could manage. And after a while, she stopped meeting the eyes of the people they marched through, too.

---

Chapter Twenty-Five: Collision

---

Trip had been right that he wouldn't like the plan. Monkey still didn't like it, but it sounded like it might actually work, and he didn't have a better plan in reserve. That was how it usually went with Trip. She kept her brilliant ideas to herself until the last possible minute, and he couldn't come up with something smarter fast enough.

His part of the plan involved just one mech, and the first drop of the huge amount of luck they were going to need.

Monkey and Dallas waited under the shell of the Leviathan, watching the hot air waver over the desert. The sands hadn't managed to swallow the flying fortress just yet, but only its skeleton was left now, which curved overhead and blocked out the sun.

Monkey's memories of the battle a year ago felt gutted, too. The entire thing was a blur of motion and noise and pushing back pain to keep moving.

By contrast, this desert was strangely silent and waiting, and the only mechs they'd seen marched in a circular patrol in the distance.

Monkey felt a layer under his skin start to twitch. He never did know what to do with himself when the world was calm.

Dallas must have felt the same way. "I was expecting a war zone," she commented. "Based on how it went last time."

Monkey watched a single mech trudge by, barely an ant at this distance. "Yeah, well, we didn't sneak up on Pyramid back then. We made a bit more noise."

Dallas looked up and through the gaping holes of the Leviathan. "I guess we should expect the real trouble to start once we start making noise, then."

"Not if Trip's plan works," Monkey said.

Dallas shifted her weight in the feathery sand and didn't answer.

Monkey went back to watching the mechs. There were enough of them to pass by every few seconds, even this far from Pyramid. Jason must have assumed he'd be followed to bother setting up a perimeter in the middle of nowhere. And he must have a huge number of mechs at his disposal if he could afford a foot patrol. None of it made Monkey feel particularly good about what Trip was scheming.

Monkey had been preparing for a monster the size of the scorpions, or worse. But it didn't look like those had risen from the dead. Instead, there were hundreds or thousands of the standard variety mechs. In small groups they weren't too bad, but an army of them wasn't going to end well for whatever was on the other side.

Monkey peered over his shoulder. Trip and Ben hung farther back in the Leviathan's shadows, waiting for their part of the plan.

Instinctively, Monkey gauged the distance between himself and Trip, and the energy he'd need to fight against the sand to get to her, and how far they could run if the mechs descended as an army. He could get Trip to safety, but not all of them, and he hoped it wouldn't come to that.

At his side, Dallas settled onto her belly and scooped a finger into the sand to make a cradle for the rifle. She'd barely said a word about the new plan other than asking a few practical questions. For all Monkey knew, she was perfectly fine with any plan so long as she had the opportunity to shoot at something until it died.

The trick would be to draw enough attention that the next mech would come this way to investigate, but not be so obviously hostile that they'd launch an attack. If Trip's plan worked, they could be done in minutes without bloodshed. Monkey trusted her, but he didn't trust anything else, and he hadn't set the staff down once.

"I've got the timing down," Monkey said. "Just tell me when you're ready."

Dallas flexed her finger, testing the trigger weight and letting go again. The rifle made a tiny clicking noise each time, and Monkey thought of the chittering sound made by animals with sharp teeth.

"So which one of us gets him?" Dallas asked.

"What?"

Dallas rolled her shoulders in their sockets. "This asshole who brought everyone back here. I'm not the only person who wants him dead."

"Doesn't matter to me," Monkey said.

It wasn't true. He wanted the moment for himself, and he knew exactly what he planned to do with it. He just hoped Trip wouldn't be there when he did.

Dallas didn't seem to believe him, anyway. "Sure."

Monkey shrugged, mostly for his own benefit.

Dallas made some other minute adjustments to herself. "Ready when you are."

Her voice was strung tight, and Monkey had seen enough fights to recognize where it was coming from. There was always a healthy dose of fear before starting a fight that hadn't brought itself to you. Her hands were steady, though, and that was what mattered.

Monkey lifted the trinket Trip had made and let it spin slowly. Enough of Ben's surgical kit had survived to create a small mobile of reflective metal. It didn't look like much in the Leviathan's semi-dark, but it should be enough to pull the mechs' attention, according to Trip.

He gripped it lightly in one hand and climbed the inside of the Leviathan.

Monkey found a good spot about twenty feet up, where a whorl of metal curved away and let sunlight through. Monkey looped the mobile over a strip of shredded metal. It spun in the breeze, and a million shards of sparkling fire darted across the Leviathan's walls.

Monkey watched it for a second before dropping back into the sand at Dallas's side.

They both watched as the closest mech continued its route around Pyramid. From the Leviathan, it barely looked like the mech was moving at all, and Monkey began to think it had stopped and his eyes were just playing tricks on him. The only thing that reassured him was the steady tracking of Dallas's rifle.

He'd already started looking into the distance, searching for the next mech in the chain, when Dallas's rifle froze.

The mech had turned toward them curiously and taken a few steps in their direction. Then it stopped again.

"Come on," Dallas muttered.

Monkey glanced back to where Trip and Ben were, but they'd retreated out of sight.

Dallas breathed, so soft that Monkey couldn't tell if it went in or out, and her finger tightened on the trigger.

"Easy," Monkey murmured. "Any gunfire and they're all going to come running."

"I know that," Dallas snapped, but her finger only backed off a fraction of an inch, and he could still see the muscles straining.

The mech had made up its mind and began a slow march toward them. It wasn't running and nothing followed it, which Monkey took to be a good sign. It kept coming, until it was a hundred feet away, then fifty, then twenty.

When he could see the gears moving behind the mech's metal plates, Monkey rushed out to meet it.

The staff was already flying in his hand as the mech's arms started to reach out. He dodged them and swung at its legs, and the mech toppled.

Monkey leapt over the mech's twitching blades and threw himself at its back. The mech twisted violently, trying to follow, but Monkey grabbed the mech's head in both hands and held on.

It took him a second to find the small metal panel Trip told him to look for. He stripped it clean off its screws and slapped his gauntlet over the exposed circuitry.

For a few heartbeats, nothing happened. Monkey held on as the mech jerked, trying to reach him.

Then the mech went limp. It collapsed into the sand and its sensor lights winked off.

"Thank fuck for that," Monkey muttered. He'd only half expected it to work. Trip had explained the mechanics, and how the mech eagle had given her the idea, but it still seemed like a ridiculously light touch when he usually just dismantled them.

Monkey grabbed the mech by a leg and hauled it back to the Leviathan where Trip was waiting.

The doc's databand glowed radioactive in the shadows. "Drop it there," Trip said. "We've got four minutes before it reconnects to the network."

Monkey dumped the mech in front of her. "Is that enough time?"

Trip's eyes had gone hard and focused, her gaze fixed on the screen, and Monkey's question hung in the air until Ben answered it.

"Hopefully," Ben said. "If Trip can intercept its boot process, we can use Pyramid's key to transmit instructions back to the rest of the network the mechs use."

"Without a radio tower?" Dallas asked doubtfully.

"The mechs communicate between themselves wirelessly. I don't know all the technology – Trip could explain it better – but, yes."

Trip trapped her lower lip between her teeth and her fingers fluttered across the controls, her features set in marble.

Monkey watched her for a few seconds before realizing there wouldn't be much to see until she was done, and he climbed the Leviathan again to pull the lure down.

Another mech was already coming by, along the same route, but it didn't seem to have noticed the mobile. Monkey yanked it down a bit too hard and the glittering pieces fell into his palm. He hoped Trip wouldn't need another mech.

Monkey hesitated, looking out over the dunes. He could just make out the dark shape of the slaver ship on the far side of Pyramid. They'd had plenty of time to get everyone off the ship and start whatever Jason was planning. The place had been a wreck the last time he and Trip had left it, and Monkey could still remember the tensile strength in the cabling as he tore it free. But there were hands and ambition here, and they'd had hours. He only hoped that the kids were last in line.

Trip was still working when he climbed back down, but the others were getting antsy. Dallas had pulled the knife from its sheath and left it in the sand, within grabbing distance. Ben's face was calm, but he kept reaching for his sidearm and letting go again, his fingers worrying at the air.

When Trip swore, it tore through them all like electricity.

"What is it?" Monkey asked.

She typed for a few more seconds before answering. "I got in, but... it's refusing Pyramid's key."

"Okay," Monkey said slowly. "What does that mean?"

"It means she can't take control of them," Ben said.

Trip lifted her hand from the databand and watched the screens spit more data out. The crease between her eyebrows deepened.

"Trip?"

"It's..." Trip's eyes darted back and forth over the new information. "Crap."

She looked directly at Monkey, like she owed him some kind of explanation. "They rotated keys. And this one's been flagged by the intrusion detection."

"What does that mean?" Dallas snapped.

"It means someone was waiting for me to use it," Trip said quietly.

Monkey ran back to the mouth of the Leviathan. The mechs hadn't changed their pattern, and there was no army descending on them. "If we walked into a trap, it hasn't sprung yet," he said. "But–"

Somewhere buried under the sand, the mech's speaker spluttered.

Monkey had Trip up off her feet and a dozen steps back before either of them realized what was happening.

He spun in the sand back toward the mech and rotated the staff in his grip. Trip urgently held a finger to her lips, and the staff froze a few inches from the mech's neck.

The mech pushed itself upward, until sand dripped from the fine mesh of its speaker. It spun in a slow half-circle, searching. "Trip?" it asked, impossibly.

Monkey nearly dropped his staff.

The mech's speaker crackled violently, choked with sand. Half the words got lost in the noise, but Trip's name came through again, garbled but clear enough to recognize.

Trip's throat bobbed as she swallowed. "I'm here."

The mech laughed. Actually, something human laughed through the mech, but the sound of it made them all feel the world tilt slightly. For a second, Monkey thought all the bones south of his head had dropped clear out of him.

"Holy shit, Trip!" the mech said. "I can't believe it!"

"Who is this?" she asked, way calmer than Monkey could have managed.

The next few words were totally lost in static. "–you inside," it finished. "Don't worry about the guards. Just follow the mech."

There wasn't enough quality in the signal for any of them to recognize the voice. Ben and Monkey shrugged at Trip when she looked at them.

"I can't," she said. "This mech is...damaged."

The mech's gears ground as the operator tried to get it moving without success. "Weird. Okay. I'll set them to watch out for you. Just walk up to Pyramid."

"Fucking what," Monkey said under his breath.

"Okay," Trip said, ignoring him. "I'll be right there."

She looked to Monkey and made a rotating motion with her finger.

She didn't have to tell him twice. Monkey flipped the staff, and the mech's skull caved in with a loud pop and the signal went dead.

They all stared at it in silence.

Dallas sat back hard. "What the everloving hell?"

Trip gazed at the dead mech, her face thoughtful. "We have someone on the inside. And he thinks I'm here alone."

Everyone started talking at the same time.

"There is no way we can trust anything this–"

"Who would have that kind of access except–"

"Did he say walk right up to Pyramid?"

Trip let her gaze rest on Monkey. "Yeah, he did."

"No," he said. "No. Someone else can go."

"It has to be me," Trip said. "I'm the only person who can get into Pyramid's systems."

"Then I'm going with you."

Trip shook her head. "There's no way to get there without being seen by the patrols. The offer was just for me."

"Just so I understand," Monkey said, trying not to lose every word in the red haze, "the plan is for you to walk out into the open and...let them take you?"

Trip didn't bat an eye. "Yes. If he was telling the truth, they'll just escort me inside."

"And if he wasn't?" That question came from Dallas.

"I have to believe he was," Trip said.

Monkey briefly imagined Trip walking out into the waiting mech blades. The sight of gut blood spilled all over the sand came before he could stop it.

Trip turned off the doc's databand and spoke quickly to Ben. He almost argued, and Monkey saw his body rock forward with the effort, but he eventually nodded and hugged her briefly.

Trip motioned to Monkey and walked toward the side of the Leviathan that faced Pyramid.

"I'm going," she said, when he caught up to her. "It has to be me, and I have to go alone. If this person wanted me dead, he would have already sent more mechs this way. He wants to talk. And if I can get inside, I can hack into Pyramid directly."

Monkey could only say the one thing that kept circling through his head. "This is nuts."

"So are the three hundred mechs I've already scanned in the area, and I'm sure there are more. We don't have a choice."

Monkey quickly considered three hundred mechs, all at once, and the odds they had of getting out alive.

And Monkey did know, down in some awful, calculating way that it made the most sense for Trip to go. He just wished it didn't feel like something with claws had come in through his belly and was working its way into his chest.

Trip was waiting for whatever he had to say next, whether or not he agreed.

"Is there any other way to do this?" he asked finally.

"I don't think so."

Her eyes sparked green-gold in the reflected sand, and Monkey couldn't find a trace of fear in them. If she was going to be this brave, the least he could do was be useful while she did it.

"Fine," he said. "We'll hold out here. How will we know if you've taken over Pyramid?"

"I'll send a mech, if I can. Or just wait for the patrols to stop."

The wind that flowed over the desert flitted through the wisps of red hair near her ears, and it took all of Monkey's self-control not to reach out and touch her. If he did, and his fingertips so much as grazed the feel of her skin, he wasn't going to let go again.

"Okay," Monkey said. "But if I hear anything that sounds like gunfire, I'm headed in."

She smiled at him. "I'm counting on it. And if you don't hear anything in an hour, it...probably didn't go well. I'll do my best, though."

Trip sounded unsure for only half a second, and Monkey almost leapt on it. But he summoned every scrap of courage he had and didn't.

"If anyone can do it, it's you," he said instead. "Everyone's waiting."

Trip's gaze flickered up at him. "Yeah."

They stood for a moment in precious silence. Ben and Dallas held some murmured conversation behind them.

"Keep them safe?" Trip asked.

Monkey understood. Ben was better at putting things together than tearing them apart, and Dallas already had one foot firmly in death's door. "Yeah."

There wasn't any time left. Monkey watched as Trip inhaled so deep that it stretched the seams of her. When she let it go, it only pulsed the tiniest bit, and Monkey wouldn't have heard it if he hadn't been listening so close.

"An hour," he reminded her. "Whatever happens, we'll come find you then."

Trip smiled again, just for him that time. "Thank you," she said, and stepped out into the sun.

She walked across the desert toward Pyramid with her back straight. She might have been walking the length of Liberty's perimeter, or along the route to the canyon, or anywhere else that wasn't where all of this was going to end.

Monkey knew that if he held onto the staff any tighter it was going to splinter, but he didn't dare let go.

After a few minutes, Trip was far enough in the distance for the next patrolling mech to take an interest. A few seconds later, it changed course to meet her.

Monkey gripped the staff until it creaked, and waited without breathing.

---

Trip had remembered Pyramid as the deep, sparkling black of the winter night sky. Every time she closed her eyes, there was an empty heaviness where it sat, like the glow of the desert would eventually fall away into its center.

It was a shock now to see that the panels were actually a warm reflective surface that echoed the golden sand. Trip hadn't remembered the spiraling designs in the glass, either, and she wondered how much else of Pyramid had changed between reality and her nightmares.

The slaver ship had landed on the northern side of Pyramid. From what she could tell, the enslaved had already been unloaded and the ship was quiet again, as much a part of the scenery as it had been outside of Granville. Trip couldn't tell from this distance what shape it was in, and whether it was capable of carrying everyone right back the way they'd come.

Trip stumbled and had to start paying closer attention to the shifting ground. In the last twenty feet, her legs had turned into loose elastic, but she kept walking. She'd held herself together long enough to get past Monkey, but the second she stepped out from under the Leviathan's cradling shade, her feet started slipping in the sand, trying to draw her backward.

She shoved the look on his face out of her thoughts and kept moving across the sand.

A year ago, the smoke had still hung thick in the air from the battle, and she didn't remember the walk up to Pyramid or how brilliant it was in the angled sun. The monument of it was lost on her then, and she hadn't really looked at it until they were leaving it behind, when it was already growing smaller in the distance.

It was beautiful, in a terrible, unfeeling way, and she wondered how she would have felt if she hadn't known there were bleached bones under the sea of sand.

Ahead of her, a patrolling mech had finally caught her on its sensors. The mech paused, scanned over some internal instructions, and headed in her direction.

She couldn't afford to panic. If she ran, or reached for her databand, or did anything other than what the voice had suggested, nothing beyond that would matter.

Trip was forced to stop when the mech drew up in front of her.

The fear that followed was a deep-rooted, animalistic feeling. She didn't dare look at the shinier places in the mech's armor in case she saw any part of her reflection there. She could only pretend to be brave if she didn't have to see herself while she did it.

Sweat pilled at her hairline and crept down her forehead, leaving trails over her face that felt like tears, but she didn't risk the movement of lifting a hand to wipe it away.

The mech scanned her once, from head to toe, and then merely stared at her for unending seconds.

It was taking way too long. The mech should have already realized it was supposed to let her through. Trip's fingers twitched toward the databand.

Then, the mech made a sort of beckoning motion and turned around.

It began walking toward Pyramid without checking to make sure she was following. Trip knew better than to look back at the Leviathan.

Trip's feet slid in every direction as she struggled to navigate the loose sand. Every now and then, the mech paused and let her catch up before leading on again. Trip waited for whoever was driving it to say something else to her, but nothing came, and they walked up to Pyramid in silence.

They passed more mechs as they got closer to the entrance, though none of them seemed to care about their strange little procession.

Without the mechs to maintain it, Pyramid had begun to sink into the endless desert. The sand had nearly buried the main door, though enough had been cleared away to let people through. Now the door gaped like a dark mouth, with curves of sand on either side.

Trip went into the main hall blinking away sudden blindness, and waited for her vision to clear. For a second, the hall looked crowded again, with a sea of bodies on either side of the walkway. She saw the man-machine at the end, the outline of him spreading in her vision like spilled oil, until she blinked and the shapes shifted away. The old man was still dead and gone, and no one had taken his place, at least not here. The main hall was empty and silent, and the mech moved through it without interest.

Trip hurried to catch up as it walked through a doorway on the side of the room, and down a flight of metal stairs.

The last time she'd been here, she'd discovered that there was just as much to Pyramid below the earth as there was above, if not more. She'd only seen parts of it last time, enough to know what needed to be destroyed and how much they could take with them for the trip home. The mech led her past some of the consoles they'd ruined, torn to debris under Monkey's hands. They were both naive to think that would have been enough.

Trip could hear the sounds of activity deeper into Pyramid. Footsteps echoed up the stairs down the halls, until they were just a faint rhythm in the air. She could practically feel the power coursing through the walls, and heavy cables ran from one end of the floor to the next.

Trip paused to investigate the cabling. It was a rush job, some of them overlapping and most exactly where someone would trip over them. None of this had been here before Pyramid, who'd had a thousand years to refine his process. Whatever Jason was building was rudimentary in comparison.

Trip knelt and was shocked to feel the heat in the cabling. She wanted to follow them to see how far they lead, but the mech blocked her way.

It waited for her to move away from the cable before continuing ahead. She was meant to be somewhere, and she wasn't going to have a second of freedom until she reached whoever was calling.

She didn't think it would be Jason, based on the excitement in his voice, but she wasn't coming up with any other ideas. Whoever it was, she only needed a few seconds to hack into a terminal and broadcast a shutdown message to the mechs. If she was clever about it, she could prevent them from being hostile without changing their other parameters. It would buy her a bit more time to poke around before Jason realized anything was wrong. If she was extremely lucky, she might even be able to recruit some help.

The mech stopped outside a room that practically glowed with console lights. The width of it blocked the rest of the hall, and there was nowhere to go but where the mech wanted.

Trip took Lee's databand out of its standby mode and stepped inside.

---

"How good are you with a gun, exactly?" Dallas asked Ben.

Ben crouched at her side, fretting over the bandages that were already caked with sand. "Decent," he said. "But I'm better with a wrench. Or a scalpel."

Dallas made a disapproving click with her tongue, but didn't have anything to really complain about. "How long have you been a doctor?"

"About fifteen years."

Monkey wasn't sure if he wanted them to shut the hell up, or to keep shoveling noise into the air so he didn't have to listen to his heartbeat in his own ears. He hadn't been able to release a single muscle since he watched the mech march away with Trip in tow, and he felt every inch of his chest move like bellows as he waited.

"What about the enslaved?" Dallas asked Ben. "Any experience dealing with that?"

Ben considered the sight of Pyramid in the distance. "Yeah, mostly in the last year. It was a trial by fire. But most of them had already been disconnected for a long time before they got to us."

Dallas caught the distinction. "You won't be able to help anyone here?"

"I didn't say that." Ben pointlessly brushed the sand from his pants before settling down next to her. "It depends on what Jason's already done. If you're asking if I can reverse the memory wipes...I have no idea. Definitely not right away. Maybe not ever."

Dallas didn't respond to that.

"But basic medical help, yes," Ben continued. "We'll get the bands off, stitch up any wounds..." He sighed. "And help whoever wants help."

Monkey wanted to close his eyes against the fine sand that the wind threw in his face, but he couldn't stand keeping them shut, either. Not this close to Pyramid. The minutes ticked by in long eons.

"Whoever wants help," Dallas repeated slowly.

"Not all of them did the first time," Ben said. "You know that, though."

"Better than you do," Dallas muttered. "There will always be people in the world who look a lie straight in the face and decide they still like it better than the truth."

"Oh, I know that extremely goddamn well," Ben said.

Monkey let his attention tick away from the distant sand for just a second, toward the sound of hot iron in Ben's voice. But Ben didn't continue, and Dallas merely shook off the sand that had already accumulated between her shoulder blades.

When he looked back, something about the mechs caught his attention.

"Well," Dallas said, "maybe someday–"

When Monkey shifted his weight forward to get a closer look, Dallas and Ben fell silent and followed his lead.

"What is it?" Ben asked.

Monkey wasn't sure yet. The patrol was still moving, but the spacing seemed a little different. "I don't know. Do you see anything?"

Dallas peered back through the scope. "Not– wait." Dallas hissed in a breath, and Monkey didn't like how fast she did it. "Something's changed. There are more mechs, and they're moving differently."

"Coming this way?"

"I don't think so. Not yet, anyway."

Either Trip had failed, or they'd been noticed some other way. Monkey desperately hoped it was the latter.

Dallas said a few words Monkey didn't know, but instinctively recognized as curses. "They know something's out here. They're fanning out."

Even without a scope, Monkey could see the new formation taking shape. The mechs spread out across the desert in a widening net.

His nerves jostled each other uneasily.

"Get down!" Ben hissed.

They plunged into the sand as the rapid snick of wings whispered by overhead. Monkey watched in astonishment as a dragonfly traced an arc around the Leviathan, its lens catching the light.

"Trip?" Monkey wondered.

Ben looked doubtful. "She didn't have one." His finger traced the arc the dragonfly took. "And that one's scouting. Trip knows exactly where we are."

The dragonfly banked and weaved overhead, and Monkey had a distinct sensation he'd been here before. The bad feeling in his gut solidified. "We're being hunted," he said. "Someone knows we're here."

Ben loaded a round into the handgun's chamber.

The dragonfly wasn't giving up. It dove in and out of the Leviathan's overhead areas, searching each room and gradually working its way toward them.

"Can you hit it?" Monkey hissed at Dallas.

She watched the dragonfly dart through the air. It never stayed in one place for more than an instant. "I don't think so."

Monkey wouldn't have to be as precise, if he managed to corner it. He snapped the staff into place at his belt and started climbing.

He followed the dragonfly through the heart of the Leviathan, where the walls had been peeled inward. Some of the handholds he wanted to use turned out to be razor-sharp, and he had to work his way up the debris slowly.

The whole time, the dragonfly zipped overhead, scanning each corner they could possibly be hiding in. It fluttered down a long hallway that cracked in the middle and let in a sliver of light.

Monkey crouched low and started after it. If he was right, the dragonfly would have to come back this way, and if his reflexes were up to snuff, it wouldn't see him before he crushed it.

He didn't have enough room for the staff here, so he set it aside and popped all the knuckles he could reach under his gauntlets.

The fact that there was a dragonfly at all was unsettling. Dragonflies still felt like a uniquely Trip thing. It hadn't mattered that everyone at Liberty used dragonflies for sending messages, and that dozens of them arrived every week with news from every corner of the waste. To him, dragonflies always led to Trip, and anything else was a betrayal on their part.

The Leviathan's chambers distorted the dragonfly's buzzing into an overlapping echo, and Monkey almost missed the dragonfly coming back out into the hall.

It hovered at the door for a moment before zipping through, and Monkey snatched it out of the air, thankfully trapping its wings to its sides on the first swipe.

The dragonfly's lens was pointed away from him. He couldn't be sure that it hadn't managed to see him, but it was as good as he was going to get.

While the dragonfly struggled to free itself, Monkey took a second to look at it. He wasn't an expert on these things by any means, and most dragonflies looked exactly the same to him. But he'd gotten dozens from Trip over the last year, and she preferred a certain kind, with a body casing that joined a little different than the others. Every single dragonfly that had found him at the canyon looked like this one.

The dragonfly jackknifed wildly until Monkey twisted his hands and its body crumpled.

"I do not have a good feeling about this," he muttered to himself.

---

Security got tighter the farther Rachel followed the cables. Mechs went by more often, half-dragging people who'd fought them and couldn't anymore, and there were foot-blurred trails of blood on the floor.

Whenever they had to choose a split in the hallway, where cables led in both directions, Rachel chose the route with more blood. If Geoff or Wren caught on to her pattern, they didn't say anything.

The lights kept flickering overhead until they all felt a bit unsteady on their feet. It was like being trapped in a vid playing on a damaged screen. They were even starting to see things, and Rachel kept rushing them into hiding from shadows that only looked like mechs.

After an hour, Rachel wasn't even sure they were making progress. The hallways had turned into an endless maze that felt like the guts of a beehive. There were signs on the walls that might have been directions, but none of them made any sense now, a thousand years after they meant anything.

"Who built this fucking place?" Rachel fumed. "Even Granville made more sense than this."

"We've been this way," Wren said quietly.

Rachel and Geoff looked down at her. "What?" Geoff asked. "How do you know?"

Wren shrugged. "I just do."

Rachel gathered all the tiny scraps of her patience before she answered. "Which way haven't we been yet?"

Wren pointed back down the way they'd come and to the left. "There."

Geoff crept back to the last forked hallway and peered down it. "I think she's right. Let's try it."

"How can you even–?" Rachel spluttered, then gave up. "Fine."

The hallway looked like all the others at first. But there was more traffic this way, and they didn't have to wait long to hear the scrape of mechs moving toward them.

Geoff grabbed Rachel by the shoulders and jerked her back into a shallow utility recess. Wren fitted herself between them, taking up what little space was left, and Rachel was abruptly caged by other people's elbows and knees and the sound of their breathing.

It was an absurd hiding spot. If the mechs so much as glanced to the side, they'd see them. Rachel shut her eyes and felt for the gun at her back, though her fingers slipped from the grip a few times.

The mechs brought another collection of people down the hallway. It was a subdued group this time, with no crying or shouting or begging. Rachel actually felt the breath that Geoff took and held. She did the same thing, and they all waited for the ghosts to pass in silence.

Rachel risked a glance over her shoulder. No one bothered to look at anything but the floor under them, and the mechs were single-minded and stupid. The group passed the shadows of the hiding spot without so much as a sideways glance, and then they were gone.

The lights flickered overhead and Rachel imagined a dozen minds gone, just like Piper's, and she tasted iron in the back of her throat.

Geoff pulled the gun from his waistband, but he kept his face turned from her and Rachel could only make out the sliver of white in his eyes.

Her hand was clammy on her own gun, and she didn't complain when Geoff took it from her without asking, checked it over, and handed it back. He seemed calm, but his fingertips were shaking slightly when they grazed her hand.

Geoff caught her staring and glanced meaningfully back at Wren. She seemed calm enough, but she looked around too often, with short little bursts of movement.

Rachel tried not to think about just how far in over their heads they were. There wasn't any point, now that there was only one direction to go.

Geoff went back into the hall and beckoned for them to follow. Wren flitted after him, melting effortlessly into his shadow.

Rachel followed a bit behind, the gun slowly warming in her hand.

The smell hit her first. It was somewhere between warm metal and singed hair, and she coughed as soon as it filled her lungs. Rachel pulled the collar of her shirt up over her nose, though it didn't help. Geoff suppressed a cough until his eyes started to water.

"What is that?" Rachel asked out loud, and instantly regretted it. Whatever smelled like burnt hair usually was.

They'd followed the last group to a long, narrow hallway with only one door at the far end. There were no other detours to take and no other place the smell could be coming from.

There were no hiding places here. Once they made this turn, they'd have to be lucky or fast, or both.

When Geoff caught her eye, she nodded, and they headed down the hallway.

Halfway there, Wren tripped and the sound of her palms slapping the floor cut the air like a gunshot. The three of them froze, convinced mechs would be on them in a second, but Rachel counted to ten with nothing to show for it, and Wren got back up nervously.

The door was a thick block of metal with a single window partway up. Geoff and Rachel could just reach it, with Rachel on tiptoe. Wren was a head too short and had to stand guard instead.

Compared to the dim hallway, the room was so bright it took a few seconds to make sense of all the light. The room was full of cables and computer equipment that scrolled endless graphs and lines of data across the screen. The cables drew together and swam across the room to the far side, where all the action was.

Rachel gasped. The chair didn't look anything like the one she'd seen before, but its purpose was still pretty clear. They'd found a boring wooden chair somewhere in the building and dragged it here. A tangled forest of wires flickered over it, and a slaver band dangled at the end. Wisps of multicolored hair swayed from the band as the air moved through the room.

A mech stood on either side of the chair, waiting.

There was a third mech at the door on the far side of the room, and a fourth near the consoles were the cabling started. There was no way of getting in or out without being seen.

Closer to the chair, small clumps of people huddled together. There may have been a line at one time, but everyone was scared and wanted nothing to do with the mechs' instructions, and they all wanted to be last.

"Shit," Geoff whispered tightly. "Is that what it was like at Granville?"

Rachel nodded, her mouth dry.

"What is it?" Wren asked, trying to push herself high enough to see.

"Stay down," Rachel whispered. "There are mechs."

Geoff stretched himself out dangerously tall and took a good look around the room, his nose practically smearing the glass. "I don't see Jason."

Rachel wanted to run. Cowardice had crept up on her when she wasn't looking, and the smell of burnt hair and the urine-stained floor wound through all the pockets of her lungs until they closed off like popped bubbles.

The only thing to do with cowardice was to stare it in the face, and she tried. Her chest felt like a million rubber bands were drawing it closed, but she stayed.

The consoles were working so hard that she could hear them humming through the door. She wished she knew more about computers. There had to be a million ways to turn off Pyramid right from here, or at least stop them from wiping any more people.

"They're taking someone," Geoff whispered.

Rachel couldn't not look. The mechs guided a girl about their age to the chair and shoved her into it without ceremony. The slaver band clamped shut over her head.

The whole process took maybe ten seconds, but it felt so much longer, and the girl screamed the entire time at a pitch that twisted Rachel's stomach. The maze of wires lit like blue fire and an electric crackle filled the room. Even the tiny hairs on Rachel's arms lifted.

The girl's scream kept going until she ran out of air. By time she took another breath, it was all over.

One of the mechs unclipped the band from her and stepped back. The girl slumped forward for a moment, then stood unsteadily. She blinked up at the mechs with a vacant, disinterested stare. The mech at the door moved aside to let her pass, and she left the room quietly.

At the back of the group, a woman crossed herself urgently, though Rachel really doubted anyone was listening.

The mechs moved on to the next person. The man took one step toward the chair, like he was going to go willingly. Then he bolted.

Rachel gasped out loud as the man dodged past the first mech that reached for him. He must have been a hunter or soldier or something, and he got past that mech and the next, and was headed for the door.

He might actually make it, if he could get past the last one.

The man had one hand on the door when the last mech guard reacted.

Rachel felt more time in that instant than there really was, and she wanted to shout at the man to get out of the way. She had so much time to do it in, to do something in the second that had stretched and slowed, but her voice did nothing.

The mech's arm slashed out, and a dark line of red erupted down the man's shirt. He dropped like a stone, the shape of him going loose and hitting the floor with a crack. An arc of blood splashed up the wall and onto the ceiling over him.

Even from this distance, Rachel could see the pale bones of the man's spine.

The mech shifted back into its place at the door like nothing had happened.

"Holy shit," Geoff said shakily. His heartbeat pulsed in the lines of his throat. "They just... Holy shit."

Rachel couldn't think of anything to say, and they watched the mechs guide the next person toward the chair.

---

The first thing Trip noticed was the sheer number of vidscreens. Every inch of wall seemed to have one, and freestanding consoles peppered the room. It was impossible to look in any direction without seeing a screen of some kind. It felt a bit like the war room back home. There was a faint buzzing nearby that Trip knew but couldn't quite put her finger on.

She was so focused on the room itself that she didn't see the man until he stepped out from behind the central console, his face shimmering briefly behind the vidscreen.

"Trip," Mark said. "I can't believe you came."

Trip reflexively took a step back. Mark still had a bruise from where she'd hit him the last time they were in the same room. It had begun to fade into a pebbled yellow-green that made him look ill.

Mark came toward her smiling, though. "How did you even get here? I saw this...flying thing?...on the radar, but the signal was so ancient I thought it was a bug of some kind. Was that you?" His gaze flickered toward another screen. "Hang on a sec."

Trip felt the shifting plates of the earth move under her as Mark strode around the room, moving from one console to the next with relentless energy. He wasn't the same man back at Liberty, where all the weight of the world pressed him into something smaller. Here, he'd expanded into the vacuum Pyramid left behind.

Mark finished whatever he was doing and turned back to her. "Sorry. What were you saying?"

He kept smiling, like his face was frozen that way. Trip wasn't sure she'd ever seen so many of his teeth before.

Trip swallowed against the roughness in her throat. "I...came in an airplane. Granville had one."

"An airplane? No shit," Mark said. He thought about that for a second, then laughed. "You are out of your mind."

Motion flickered on the right side of the room, and Trip finally realized that the buzzing sound she'd been hearing was the dragonflies perched on makeshift docks at the consoles. A crate of them sat at her feet, humming to themselves.

"What are you doing here?" she asked. There was no one else in the room, and Mark lorded over consoles that looked like they reached into every distant corner of Pyramid. "Where's everyone else?"

Mark put a hand on the console possessively. "Depends. Some of us are busy with repairs."

If Mark knew what was happening to the people who weren't helping, the smile on his face didn't give it away.

"Where's Wren?" she asked instead.

Mark shrugged. "I don't know. She ran away but there's nowhere to go, really. We'll find her."

He didn't sound concerned about it either way, and Trip knew he was right. There was no escape into the desert, especially not for a child.

There wasn't time for all this. Monkey was only going to give her an hour, and she couldn't tell how much of it was already gone.

"Look," Mark said, before she could speak up again. "I have something to show you."

Trip asked the only possible question. "Don't you even want to know why I'm here?"

Mark turned a screen away from her and flipped through a few controls before meeting her eyes. "I know why you're here. It just doesn't matter."

"It doesn't–" Trip repeated, grappling with that. "Mark, you can't help Jason with this."

She realized too late what his reaction had been the last time she used that name, but he didn't show a flicker of recognition now.

"Listen," she tried again, "I–"

Mark held up a hand, stopping her.

He let the moment hover for a few seconds, then cast a series of feeds across the screens that Trip could see.

She couldn't help but follow them. Few of the screens were static. The majority were a constant refresh of information, scrolling lines of text or tables of data that updated every few seconds. There was a mech on nearly every screen, or some other piece of enormous machinery. It was a tour of Pyramid's forces, all in one place.

"I know you don't give a shit about the dream," Mark said. "I know you came here to stop it. But the technology behind it...it's incredible. It's decades beyond what we had at Liberty. Centuries, maybe."

There was a sharpness to his eyes Trip didn't like, but she didn't look away when he met her gaze again.

"And it's ours now," he said. "We control it. Not some ancient mech god. Can you even imagine what the world will be like from now on?"

Against her better instincts, Trip almost could. Commanding the mechs, instead of hiding from them behind bridges and barriers. Running the sanctuary for a thousand minds or more, and watching the whole world from this sea of screens that throbbed with energy.

The lights flickered, and Trip felt the power surge elsewhere in the building.

"It's not worth the cost," she said quietly, and Mark's smile faltered. "Where's Jason?"

The dragonflies buzzed harder, full of daylight energy and nowhere to take it, and Mark kicked the box.

"Busy," he said shortly.

"Do you know what he's going to do?" Trip asked. "I mean, exactly?"

Mark shrugged. "Turns out we all have parts of Pyramid in our brains. We just have to plug everyone in to put it back together." He paused, considering. "It's actually kind of genius."

"It won't be like that for everyone," Trip said carefully. "He probably didn't tell you. Some people will keep their memories, but a lot of them are just getting wiped. Sometimes it's fatal."

Mark waited, outwardly patient, but his hand twitched faintly. "Okay?"

"And you have to know that some people didn't ask for any of this. Wren's just a kid, you know?"

Mark flicked through a few screens on the console she couldn't see, avoiding the question.

Nothing had been fair to Mark for a very long time, she knew that. He hadn't asked to be rescued. Whoever he was before all this might still be in there, somewhere, and Trip at least owed him the good faith of trying to save him from Jason before his turn came.

"He said we won't remember the last year," Mark said abruptly. The smile was back, but something in his voice had gone hard and dangerous, like a sliver of stone. "Which honestly sounds great to me."

Trip turned on Lee's databand and flipped through the databand's menus while Mark watched. "It's not just that. People died for this technology. I bet he didn't tell you that part. I bet he didn't tell you about all the failures that happened first. And the fact that the people who were never enslaved will just be wiped. They won't just forget the last year, they'll forget everything."

"You don't underst–"

"I came to stop him," Trip said. "He's not some savior, Mark. He doesn't care about anyone but himself, and he'll do whatever he has to to get what he wants. Please."

"You have no idea what he's built here," Mark said. "I don't know why I keep having to tell you, Jason didn't murder anyone. He's not evil."

Trip found the video file she wanted and put it in front of him. "I need you to see something."

---

Halfway back down to the ground, Monkey heard Ben's voice calling. He ran the rest of the way, and made the last leap way sooner than he normally would have, and sank a good half-foot into the sand when he landed at Ben's side.

"They're coming," Ben said flatly.

In the few minutes he'd been gone, the mechs had formed their army between Pyramid and the Leviathan. There were three or four rows deep of sharp metal, all marching toward the downed fortress.

Monkey tossed the mangled dragonfly onto the sand, where it threw tiny dying sparks into the dark.

"They really don't like visitors, do they?" Dallas said dryly. She'd laid out her supplies next to her, including more ammo than Monkey even remembered seeing in the plane, spread out at her side in a half-circle.

"Ben, can you get back to the building by yourself?" Monkey asked.

"I'm staying."

Dallas peered over her shoulder. "You're going to die."

"I told you I can handle a gun," he said.

"That's not what I said." Dallas tossed her dagger at his feet. "If you can aim between the plates, you might be able to disable one."

Ben nodded and slid the knife through his belt.

The advancing mechs split into three groups. One came straight at them, and the others were making a slow sweep around to either side of the Leviathan. Monkey had never seen them do anything like that before. Strategy was not something that he'd ever had to expect from the mechs. It was a hell of a time for them to suddenly be getting new ideas.

"They're flanking us," Dallas snarled. "Who reprogrammed these things to be smart?"

Monkey did not like the suspicion that was starting to curdle in his gut. "Someone with a grudge. How many can you pick off before they get too close?"

"Twenty, maybe, but not in all directions. How many can you handle at close range?"

"Depends on the day." Monkey knelt in the sand next to her, just behind the bright line that marked the Leviathan's shadow. "We have to stop them before they get here."

The muscles up Dallas's back rippled, cat-like. "That would be ideal."

Monkey lost count of the mechs. Their metal plating shimmered and merged in the desert sun until it might as well have been a wall of light that was marching toward them.

He finally stood and flipped the staff on, and braced his feet against the sand.

Dallas chambered a fresh round. "I'll cover you."

"And I'll watch both your backs," Ben said.

Monkey wanted to say something, but found that he couldn't, and the mechs were too close, anyway. He nodded to each of them and charged out into the open.

Laser fire shrieked past his shoulder and into the distance, and Monkey threw himself into the first cluster of mechs that got in his way.

He knocked down four of them before one of the mechs caught him a glancing blow to the back of the head and he stumbled forward. The sand blistered his hands as he hit it and rolled, and the mech dove after him.

It missed him by inches. Monkey thrust himself up out of the sand and squared off against the mech again. It recovered sooner than he expected and was already coming at him for another blow, its blades out.

The mech was mid-swing when its head exploded. It stood dumbly for a moment, then toppled.

In the distance, a sniper's lens flashed in the desert sun as Dallas reloaded.

"Maybe a little sooner next time!" Monkey shouted in her direction.

Even with Dallas's help, he was stuck in the middle of the first wave. The mechs were branching out to surround the Leviathan, and it wouldn't take them much longer to figure out where the occasional bullet was coming from. Dallas could only help pick them off for so long before she got swarmed.

Monkey took out three more in rapid succession, springboarding from one mech to the next. They were still coming, and out of the corner of his eye Monkey saw more of them approaching the Leviathan.

Another bullet whizzed past, daringly close to Monkey's ear, and plunged through a mech's central plating. It fell like a stone.

Dallas hadn't fallen back yet, if she meant to, which meant that Ben hadn't, either.

Monkey sliced the staff up through a mech's midline and it crumpled to the ground, still steaming.

The mechs didn't care about the heat, but it blistered over Monkey's skin. If the fight dragged out too much longer, the mechs were going to win. They didn't care about the sun or the aggressive heat, and they definitely never got tired.

And there were more, so many more, and no sign that Trip was making progress in gaining control over them. Every mech he took down was immediately replaced with another, in an endless stream of clones. If he so much as blinked, he missed the changeover, and it was easy to think he wasn't knocking any down at all. If he hadn't felt the blows ringing in his hands every time he connected a swing, he would have started to second-guess himself.

Monkey heard a different kind of shot echo in the Leviathan, something that wasn't the rifle.

Before he could think about that, another mech launched itself at him. Its blade divided the hot air between them and Monkey just barely threw himself sideways to avoid it. The staff sang through the air and Monkey lopped that one's head off. Dallas picked off another mech at its side.

There were more gunshots now, and Monkey finally recognized them as Ben's handgun. Ben kept firing, with shorter and shorter pauses between shots until it was a frantic rush of noise.

Monkey swore and sliced another mech into pieces and took off running back to the Leviathan.

---

Mark watched the whole video in silence, his mouth a straight line. When Trip closed the vid, he leaned back. "That doesn't prove anything."

His ability to look right past the obvious was infuriating. Trip jabbed her finger at the freeze-frame image of Jason's back. "Mark, he's right there. He killed Neil. The mechs killed people at Granville, and you know as well as I do that they didn't have to, and the people who don't want to be here will get wiped and some of them will get lobotomized and–"

Mark pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers. "For... Ugh, why are you still going on about that? Jason didn't kill Neil. Jason didn't sabotage all that stuff at Liberty, either. He's not some evil mastermind you need to rescue us from. Why don't you get that?"

Trip tried to stay calm. Mark was between her and the console now, and she didn't see a chance to force her way around him. She didn't know how much of her hour she'd wasted already, but she must be getting close.

"I know. Look, I know what he's offering. But he's willing to kill people over it, and it's not worth that!"

Mark tried to bring his anger to heel. "You're still talking about Neil? He was a waste of goddamn skin, Trip. You should have wanted him dead yourself. You found the bolt cutters, didn't you? Holy shit, how much more proof do you need before you realize he was the one behind all of it?"

"Behind all of what?"

Mark waved his hand expansively. "All those disasters at Liberty. You know he had a secret to hide, and you know he hated the enslaved. You are a lot of goddamn things, but you aren't stupid!"

Trip turned Lee's databand back off and tried to move away from him.

Mark followed her. "Look, if you came all this way to save us again, we don't need it. We don't want it."

Trip backed away until she was up against the consoles on the side of the room. The dragonflies buzzed at the intrusion.

"Trip," he said, trying her name in is mouth a gentler way, and she didn't like it. "I know. I know it sucks. You didn't know what you were doing when you came here the first time. A lot of people...actually really resented you for it. But you can fix it – we can fix it all. Hell, it'll be better than Pyramid ever built, and we'll be in control of it. It'll be our world this time."

Mark reached out and took her arms in his hands, a bit too tightly. "I know it's hard for you to see it. You're stubborn. I mean, you've always been stubborn, because you're convinced you're always the smartest person in the room. You're kind of a pain in the ass, actually." He smiled into her face. "But you're allowed to be wrong sometimes."

Trip was wrong about some things, sometimes. But not nearly as much as she needed to be to believe this, and the sound of the dragonflies chattering at her back was starting to crack the wall between what she knew and what she remembered.

Trip tried to pull out of his grasp, and Mark frowned.

"I never told you about the bolt cutters," she said.

Mark blinked and laughed awkwardly. "What?"

Trip knew. She knew with absolute certainty, the realization arriving fully formed in her mind. Neil had turned away from the man in the video recording because it wasn't Jason. Neil had been scared of Jason, and he'd fled the infirmary to get back to his lab. He'd turned his back on the man who killed him because he knew who it was, and he wasn't worried about giving him his back.

"How much of it was you?" Trip asked, finally, into Mark's terrifying calm. "How fucking much of it was you?"

---

The mechs had taken the man's body away. Blood sloshed across the floor as they dragged him off, and few people in the room had the stomach to watch him go. They were more subdued now, and the group was quickly dwindling.

Rachel pressed her fingertips against her eyelids until the bubbling lights erased the vision of the man falling to the ground.

"What on earth are you doing here?"

Rachel whipped around to find a woman standing behind them. She looked out of place in her weirdly clean dress, like she'd stepped into Pyramid by mistake. The woman stared back at Rachel with a proper stiffness in her spine that made Rachel's mouth curl.

"What are you doing here?" Geoff demanded.

The woman's expression got trapped between impatience and uncertainty before it went perfectly empty. "Get inside," she snapped.

"Just who do you–" Rachel started, but the woman grabbed Wren by the wrist and hauled her into the room. Geoff charged after them, and Rachel had to follow.

The woman halted just inside the door. She stood transfixed by the spray of blood the man had left behind, more than the mechs that surrounded them. Her grip on Wren's arm tightened until Wren yelped.

"Who are you?" Rachel repeated. "Let go of Wren!"

"Rose," Geoff said furiously. "She's from Liberty. And she's working with Jason."

The woman started at the sound of her name, like she'd just remembered where she was.

Wren tore her arm free and dove behind Geoff. Rose let her go.

The mechs weren't especially interested. A few looked up at the motion, but nothing in their programming seemed to care about extra people in the room, so long as the line was still moving.

Rose gingerly picked her way between the drops of blood and went to the consoles.

"What are you doing here?" Geoff demanded. "Did Jason send you?"

"I don't see how that's any of your business," Rose answered primly. She tapped through the controls one at a time, searching through every button before picking anything.

"Geoff," Wren whispered urgently, but he shushed her.

The mechs were still loading people into the chair. It was even worse on this side of the door, and all the tiny hairs along Rachel's skin went stiff as each of them went through.

Rose watched just one get wiped, and she kept her attention on the consoles for the rest of them.

Geoff pulled Wren to him and whispered something in her ear. Her eyes darted to the mechs and she shook her head, terrified.

"Don't get any ideas," Rose said over her shoulder. "All the mechs want is for you to sit down. They won't hurt you if you do."

"They've hurt plenty of people so far," Geoff growled. "What do you call this?"

He swept him arm out toward the room, following the darkening stripes of blood.

Rose refused to even look. "That didn't need to happen. All you have to do is sit down."

"Like hell we are. You're not fucking frying us," Rachel said.

Rose's shoulder blades twitched in distaste. "Watch your language, please. There's no need for that."

"My–?" An incredulous laugh choked up out of her. "Oh, really?" Rachel asked. "You're willing to murder people so long as no one swears while it happens? Really? Fuck you squared, then."

Rose wouldn't even look her in the eye. "We are not murdering people," she said quietly.

"Are you blind?" Rachel demanded.

Rachel wanted to slap the smugness off this woman. She'd known so many people like Rose, who thought they knew better than absolutely everyone else. It made her sick to her stomach.

She was about to tell her as much when Geoff stepped between them.

He'd pulled the gun while Rachel wasn't looking, and he held it at chest-height, squared in the center of Rose's back.

"Shut them down," he said. "Now."

All the mechs turned along with Rose to face him.

"Now, Rose."

Rose looked faintly like she couldn't believe what was happening. "I can't."

"Do you think we're stupid?" Rachel asked. "We know you're working with Jason. Shut them down."

Geoff squared both hands on the grip and took a few steps closer. "Do it, Rose."

"I can't," she repeated, weaker.

Wren whimpered quietly. Two of the mechs were closing in on Geoff, their sensors flashing.

"Rose!" he barked.

"I can't!" she finally shouted. "I don't control anything here!"

She gestured wildly at the meaningless controls behind her, and Rachel realized she was telling the truth.

The mechs were just a few feet away, but Geoff didn't seem to notice them.

"Geoff–"

Suddenly, one of the mechs smashed Geoff to the floor. The gun went off as he fell, and Rose screamed as one of the consoles shattered.

Geoff hit the ground so hard that he practically bounced and the gun clattered across the room.

"Geoff!" Wren shouted.

The mechs hovered overhead as Geoff pushed himself upright. Blood spilled out his nose and down his chin.

"You're as bad as he is!" he shouted at Rose. "Jason doesn't care if everyone else dies and neither do you, so long as you get what you want!"

"We're doing this for everyone!"

The mech hauled Geoff to his feet. He struggled to free his arm but the mech just clamped down harder and Geoff's face went white.

"Let go of him!" Wren shouted. No one paid any attention.

The mech began moving to the chair with Geoff in tow. Rachel fumbled for her own gun but it jumped in her hands and she couldn't get a firm grip on it.

"I said let go of him!"

A dozen tiny metal pieces bounced off the mech's plating and scattered across the floor like hail. The mech paused and turned away from the chair.

"No!" Geoff shouted. "Wren, run!"

Wren lobbed a second handful of metal scraps at the mech that held Geoff dangling from its pincers. The debris rained against it harmlessly, but Geoff dropped to the ground as the mech released him and reached for her.

"Wren!"

Wren leapt back, gauging the mech's reach. She darted past its first swipe but missed the next, and the mech scooped her up off the ground and dumped her into the chair.

Rachel forgot the gun. She threw herself at the mech and tried to knock it down empty-handed.

The mech barely moved. Rachel didn't even realize it had thrown her until she was suddenly weightless, and she slammed into the wall on the opposite side of the room.

Upside-down, she saw Geoff launch himself at Wren, his hand out to grab her.

The band came down and snapped around Wren's head, and the nest of wires began to flicker.

---

Trip knew it on some subconscious level, but she never really gave it any thought. None of them did. Every dragonfly that reached Liberty went through the watch towers. Every one was scanned for a destination and delivered, sometimes by hand, sometimes hours or days after it arrived, depending on who was on duty. Mark manned the towers more than most people, and had the outermost post at the bridges half the time. Most dragonflies passed through his hands, and no one ever bothered to encrypt them.

"You read everything," Trip said. "You knew exactly what Jason was doing."

Mark had turned into a statue of himself, his features flat.

"You knew what he had Neil do. You knew everything that was happening and–" Trip swallowed hard. "You tried to kill Monkey, and then you killed Neil so you could blame it on him."

"For fuck's sake," Mark spat. He let go of her, leaving brands where his palms had been. "For someone brilliant, you are unbelievably stupid sometimes."

Mark glanced behind him at something on the vidscreen, then casually backhanded Trip before she even saw his arm move.

Trip fell and hit the floor, and the world went dim.

The dragonflies battered their dividers in the crate next to her, echoing through her eardrums. The floor tilted under her as her head spun, and Trip waited for it to stabilize before pulling herself up on the crate.

"I didn't kill Neil to plant a pair of goddamn bolt cutters on him," Mark practically shouted, somewhere in the fog. "I could have just left them with any of those idiots and that would have been the same fucking thing."

Trip's hand slipped into the crate and a dragonfly sliced the tip of her finger with its wings. The pain was clear and precise and it brought her halfway back to herself. She slipped her hand around the dragonfly and tipped it into her palm before she looked up at Mark again.

"So why?" she asked. "Why did you have to–"

The pieces jumbled in her head and fell into place. She pushed herself up, fighting to control the dragonfly that strained against her grip.

"Because you knew," she said. "You knew that Neil figured out who Jason was. He knew Jason was taking those kids, too."

Mark's expression didn't flicker.

"And if – if he realized it was Jason..." She reeled. It was never about Pyramid, or protecting Jason's grand plan. Like with everything else, the end goal was much, much smaller.

"You never gave a shit about Jason, did you?" she asked. "You didn't kill Neil to protect Jason...you just knew that if Jason was the one taking those kids, it couldn't be Monkey."

The room tilted dangerously around her, but Mark still hadn't moved.

"Is that what this whole thing is about?" Trip asked. "Is it just about Monkey and me?"

Mark's face had darkened and twisted until it looked like something mangled.

"I waited for a fucking year for you," he said, his voice dead. "I waited for you to see me, and how much I was doing for you."

"For me? You never did–"

Mark rushed a few keystrokes at the console, and the mech outside moved into the doorway, blocking her exit.

"For me?" Mark repeated, nasty and mocking. "Didn't I? How many times did I stand up for you, or hide the mistakes you'd made? How many meetings did I tell you you were about to miss because you were off daydreaming somewhere?"

The dragonfly started to fight her harder, bruising her fingers, but Trip held it to her chest. "I didn't ask you to do any of that. And it doesn't mean I owe you anything."

Mark moved toward her again, his face furious as thunder, and Trip started to raise her hands to ward off another blow. Instead, he snatched up a handful of hair at the crown of her head and pulled down, forcing her head back until she saw stars.

"Don't you?" he asked.

---

Ben and Dallas had been forced to the back of an inner wall of the Leviathan. The mechs couldn't use their lasers in a giant metal shell, and they were having trouble crowding into the narrow space all at once. It gave Ben and Dallas a chance to pick more of them off, but it was only a matter of time before the ammo ran out.

Monkey sliced through three mechs on the way and slid to a stop in front of them. "You okay?" he shouted.

He had to take out two more before they had a chance to answer.

"Fucking great," Dallas shouted. She sounded winded but not beaten yet. "How many more are out there?"

"Lost count!" Monkey grabbed a mech by the shoulder and smashed it into the Leviathan's unyielding walls. "Ben?"

"Alive!" he shouted.

The mechs were starting to figure out that Monkey was easier to get to, and they began piling onto him so fast that his staff almost never stopped moving in a blur of arced light.

Dallas calmly fired into the fray, picking off the mechs on either side of Monkey. "She's really taking her time, huh?"

Monkey was breathing too hard, too fast. "She'll get it done."

"I sure hope so," Dallas shouted. She reloaded while Ben covered her.

The mechs kept coming. Monkey risked a glance upward and saw that the mechs had climbed the shell and were converging from all directions now. Gunfire would be raining down on him in a matter of seconds.

Monkey's hands were speckled with blood and sand, and the staff lit the inside of the Leviathan as it swung through the air. The mechs fell all around them into piles of metal that more of them just climbed over.

Monkey was running on adrenaline now. There was nothing underneath it, and if he stopped moving for even a second, he wouldn't be able to start again.

"Come on, dragonfly," he muttered. "You can do it."

Behind him, Dallas took in a mouthful of sand and coughed hard.

"You okay?"

"Yeah. But it'd be nice if Trip–"

At her side, Ben made a horrible choking noise and fell.

Time froze for a split-second, and in it Monkey heard the noise of Dallas shouting but not whatever she was trying to say. Ben lay on the sand in a crumpled heap. Monkey couldn't tell from here if he was still alive.

Monkey lashed out at the half-dozen mechs that had surrounded him in that second and started tearing them to pieces. His hands moved on their own, eviscerating mech guts from anything that came too close.

There was no end to them, but Ben was on the ground, dead or dying in the sand, and Monkey was going to kill absolutely everything in front of him.

Dallas knelt over Ben to shield him, emptying her gun into the pulsing wave of mechs.

"Don't stop!" she shouted, when Monkey looked back at her.

He didn't think he could, even if he wanted to. The blood roared in his head like a dam that had burst, and everything was speed and motion and the shock wave of force in his hands.

The mechs fell, and sprang back to their feet, or went under the blades of their replacements. Over and over and over until Monkey's reflexes started to fray and his vision went pale and loose.

---

Trip couldn't breathe. Mark's grip was so tight in her hair that her windpipe started to close off and hot tears filled her eyes.

Mark jerked her head to the side, forcing her face toward one of the consoles. The feed had changed, and the video was a chaotic jumble of shapes that flickered across the screen. It took her a few frames to realize that it was a mech's view of the desert, and it was Monkey's staff that she kept seeing fly past. He was fending the mechs off, just barely, but there were dozens around him and he wasn't moving fast enough.

Trip struggled against Mark's grip, but he held on tighter.

"You thought I didn't see you all the second you landed?" he hissed. "You have always – always – underestimated me. I was going to enjoy watching them die while my mech walked you here, but now you can watch with me."

Trip could barely see the feed anymore. Tears spilled down her face as the dragonfly battered at her palm in outrage, and she suddenly knew what to do with it.

Trip kicked at Mark's kneecap and he grunted and released her. Before he could right himself, she shoved the dragonfly's scissoring wings into his eye.

She held on even when he started screaming and his knees buckled. Trip pushed him down hard and smashed his face into the bank of consoles on the way down. Blood went everywhere, on the keys and the screens and the waiting dragonflies, and Mark was still screaming.

She left him there, tearing at the dragonfly on his face, and ran to the console in the center of the room.

Mark hadn't locked the consoles behind him. Every channel into Pyramid was laid bare, and Trip could see everything.

There were waves upon waves of mechs still marching on the Leviathan. There were at least two dozen in the Leviathan now, and there wasn't any time to do this gracefully. She didn't have a choice but to cut it all off at the main, and give away the fact that she was here.

Trip flushed the list of commands that were already queued and started resetting systems one by one. The overhead lights blinked out for a second that felt much longer.

Trip sent all the commands through and broadcast as wide as Pyramid would let her.

The mech in the doorway clattered across the threshold into the room.

The broadcast took a few seconds longer to reach the desert, and the mechs at the Leviathan began to fall, one after the other, and all their feeds turned to views of the sand or sky.

None of the screens showed Monkey, and she couldn't tell if she'd managed to stop the mechs in time. She raced through the first hundred feeds without seeing him or his body.

Then, finally, one of the mech's feeds was pointed in the right direction, and she saw Monkey move past. She couldn't tell much more than that, but he was alive.

Trip sped through the rest of the controls to make sure all the mechs were offline, but there was nothing left to do. Whatever was left of Pyramid's army was dead.

By the time she looked up, Mark was gone.

---

The last mech had brought Monkey too far into the pack of them. He managed to move at the last second and the flat side of the mech's blade drove into his side. The force of it was still enough to crush him to the sand and all the air went out of him.

Monkey tasted iron and spat blood into the sand. He tried to get his hands under him, but the haze had turned suffocating and nothing was working right.

Monkey rolled onto his side and managed to find gravity again. He was up then, off-kilter but moving at least, and threw himself forward.

Monkey crashed into the mech, his gauntlets out but wild, and toppled to the ground with it.

The mech should have lashed up and through the mirrored sides of his ribs, but the killing blow never came.

Monkey pulled his arm back for the next strike but the mech didn't react, and he realized that it had gone dark.

All around him, the lights shifted in scattered bursts, and the mechs collapsed one by one.

Trip had done it, and that fast, the fight was over.

Monkey exhaled and rolled off the mech. He hit the sand like a dead thing.

He didn't think he fell asleep, but when he heard Dallas shouting his name, he suspected it wasn't for the first time. Monkey rolled over and dragged himself toward them.

"Is Ben alive?" he asked, when he got close enough.

Dallas was crouched at Ben's side, her rifle propped up against her knee. "Yes."

Monkey crawled under the overhang. Ben was the color of a storm-sick cloud, a band of darkened skin running across his throat and down toward his chest. Ben made a low wheezing noise that only stopped when they got him upright.

"What happened?" Monkey asked. He didn't see any blood, but that didn't mean much when laser fire cauterized flesh.

Ben shook his head and started coughing so hard that Dallas had to brace him against her shoulder.

"Ben?" Monkey asked.

"I'll live," he said. "A mech got through and I tried to dodge. Didn't quite make it." He made a sweeping motion across his throat and down. "It was supposed to be a blade. It broke a few ribs but I'll live."

"You're lucky that's all it was," Monkey said. He looked over both of them. It was hard to tell who was in worse shape now. "Can you walk? I have to get to Trip."

She had managed to overtake Pyramid, but just barely, and God only knew what else was waiting for them there.

Ben took his time getting up, but he managed it. "Don't worry about me. I can make it. Dallas?"

"I'm fine," she said, eyeing him intently. "You sure you're okay?"

Ben found the knife in the sand and slid it back through his belt. "Yeah. Just let me find my supplies."

"Make it quick," Monkey said, watching the sun hit Pyramid like a knife point against the sky.

---

Rachel was telling every muscle in her body to do something, anything, but none of her limbs were working. Everything was trapped under a landslide, and Geoff was running toward the chair in slow motion.

The wires swept past Wren's hair and the first crackle of electricity hit the air, and the room went completely black.

Rachel blinked into the darkness stupidly and flinched as a surge of power went through the consoles. The screens flickered, flashing through a dozen colors and back, before a heavy rush of power shorted it completely and they shut off.

Rachel struggled to get up. The power surge might have saved Wren, if they could just get to her in time.

The lights came back on just as she got to her feet.

Geoff stumbled toward the chair. "Wren!"

Wren jerked her head out of the slaver band and pushed it away. The mech next to her didn't do anything.

All around the room, the mechs compressed, their joints popping as they collapsed to the floor.

Geoff pushed the mech aside and it floundered against gravity for a second before toppling. Wren flopped into his hands as Geoff yanked her from the chair.

"You okay?" he demanded. "Wren?"

She nodded wordlessly.

Rachel limped toward them. Everything on her left side that wasn't numb was an acre of fire, and she knew more was coming.

"What happened?" she asked in shock.

Every mech in the room was dead. They didn't care when the rest of the people made a break for it, pushing their way past the mess and out the doors.

All of a sudden there was only the sound of the air moving in and out of Rachel's lungs and Geoff fussing over Wren and pressure escaping from the limp mechs.

The mech closest to Rachel had landed face-up, its sensors pointed at the ceiling. Rachel pushed at it with the toe of her shoe but it didn't react, and she suddenly wanted to see it in pieces.

She kept kicking until the metal started to cave and her foot went numb. She was trying to get her balance on her other foot to keep going when she finally realized Geoff was trying to flag her down.

"What?" she shouted.

"It's dead," he said. "You okay?"

Now that she'd stopped kicking it for a second, her foot felt like she'd broken something. It made her feel slightly better, somehow.

"Yeah, mostly," she said. "You? Wren?"

Geoff glanced at Wren. "Yeah, somehow."

Wren's hair was singed at the ends and her eyes were red, but she still seemed like herself. She wiped her nose in her shirt and grimaced afterward.

Rachel's insides unsnarled, just a bit. "What happened? Why are all the mechs off?"

Geoff's shoulders twitched uneasily. "I have no idea." He dragged the back of his hand across his lip and smeared blood across his cheek. He looked like a dog that had torn something open with its teeth.

"You look like hell," Rachel said. "Is your nose busted?"

"I don't know." He glanced around the room, seemingly lost. "Holy shit."

They spun as something moved on the opposite side of the room. Rose emerged from behind the consoles, her fists clutched in the pleats of her dress.

"What did you do?" she whispered.

It took Rachel a second to realize that Rose meant all the dead mechs. "Us?" she asked. "You think we did this?"

"You must have," Rose said. "How else... Who...?"

Geoff ignored her. He picked up the gun and gave it a once-over before shoving it back into his waistband.

Rose muttered something that Rachel only caught every other word of.

"What?" Rachel asked, not really caring what the answer was.

Strands of hair had come loose and draped over Rose's face, and for the first time, she looked unkempt. "Everyone would have been happier," she said.

Geoff went completely still. "What?" he asked.

Rose stared at them through snarled locks of hair. "The dream. You don't understand. Everything we've lost is in there. Heather would–" She trailed off. "You don't understand."

"I don't want to understand," Rachel told her. "My sister – she's gone, for..." She looked around the room, at the drying blood and the fallen mechs, and the ancient technology and the chair that crackled with uncontrolled energy.

"For this," Geoff continued for her. His voice was shaking. "Piper's only a goddamn kid, and she doesn't know who she is anymore for this. And you would have done the same thing to Wren."

"It's not..." Rose faltered. "This isn't it. You don't understand because you were never enslaved and you haven't seen the dream. You don't–"

"Stop telling us we don't understand!" Geoff shouted. His voice burned like frostbite. "There is nothing to understand. You're just – you just hate everything and you want everyone else to be as miserable as you are!"

The edges of his control very nearly splintered. Rachel caught his eye and he pulled back, just slightly.

"You–" he started, faltering. "You hated me and Wren from the moment we arrived. We never did anything to you. Nothing. And you would have wiped who Wren was for some dream."

"And Piper's already gone," Rachel added. "Why? What's all this for?"

That was the part that bothered her the most. There was no paradise here and no power-hungry demon mech. There was this woman in her ugly dress and her sad eyes and Piper was gone for nothing.

"Why did..." Geoff asked, and took a second finishing. "Why did people have to die for this, Rose?"

Rose squeezed her eyes shut, like the answer was going to hurt. "Heather would have been there."

"That's not..." Geoff stared at her in disbelief. "Fuck, Rose, that's not worth killing people over! She's not coming back! You know that!"

"It wasn't supposed to be like this!" Rose wailed. "None of this was supposed to happen!"

Before Geoff or Rachel could think of anything to say, Rose's face crumpled into ugliness and she sat down and cried like a wounded thing in the middle of the lifeless mechs.

Rachel hadn't traveled across the country surrounded by terror and death to scream at an old woman until she cried. She wanted to feel some kind of satisfaction from it, but her chest just ached like it was too small for her.

"It's not real," Rachel said. Her own voice sounded far away, and she just wanted it all to be over. "It's just a dream. The dead are gone. And Piper is gone. And there's nothing we can do to get them back."

Rose shook her head, but Rachel couldn't tell which thing she didn't want to believe.

"Don't bother," Geoff said wearily. "There's no point in telling her anything. She's just as evil as Jason is."

"Yeah, you're probably right."

Rachel hated this place. She hated these selfish, terrible people, and all she wanted was to be a million miles from Pyramid. Everything here made her think of dying things, she didn't want to stay long enough to get used to it.

Geoff read her mind. "Let's go," he said. "I can't breathe down here."

"Yeah," Rachel said. There was nothing she wanted more than to put Pyramid far behind them, but they weren't done yet. "We have to find Jason, though."

Geoff looked around the room, his eyes heavy and sad, and nodded. "Yeah."

Behind them, the door swung inward.

Geoff scrambled to push Wren behind him. The all expected a mech, but it was a man that lurched inside, one hand over his eye.

Fresh blood streamed between his fingers and ran down his arm. There was a metal pipe in his other hand that he used to prop himself up.

"Mark?" Geoff gasped. "What happened to you?"

Mark stumbled into the room. He dragged the pipe behind him, ignoring the sound it made. His working eye looked past the three of them in disinterest.

He considered Rose sobbing behind them, the dark consoles, and the slaver band that crackled over the chair. He watched the mechs the longest, but they didn't move.

He still hadn't said anything, and Rachel sensed Wren move behind her.

"Seriously, what happened?" Geoff asked. The concern in his voice was genuine. "Who did that to you?"

Mark lifted the pipe from the floor and twisted his arm back. The pipe whistled through the air and smashed into Geoff's legs at the knee, and Geoff went down.

For a second, no one moved. Rachel was frozen solid with the brutality of it. She had heard Geoff's kneecaps go, and the low groan that started to rumble in his throat vibrated through her bones.

Wren took several steps back.

"What...?" Rachel couldn't even string two words together.

Geoff tried to push himself onto his side. Mark reached down and took the gun from him, then casually kicked Geoff over onto his stomach.

Geoff started to scream.

All the blood in the world roared into Rachel's ears as Mark stepped on Geoff's leg, leaning his entire weight into it, and the scream escalated wildly.

"I am so fucking tired of you brats," Mark said into the noise.