Doug never taught me how to fight, for very understandable reasons. He even showed me a movie called Gandhi, about a peaceful revolutionary in India.

As inspiring as that film had been, I doubted that passive nonviolent resistance would be the ideal solution to my current problem. Not when children's lives were at stake.

Not when you fought an enemy with no apparent conscience.

I had no fighting skills, only instinct and my claws, but it would have to do.

A fist connected with the face area of my dome. Turn the other cheek, a part of me said, but the other part cried, `Sarah! Rebecca!'

I balled my fist, slamming it into Kiarsshkoy's jaw.

We traded blows, Kiarsshkoy clawing me, reopening my clotting wounds, me clawing back.

The girls retreated into the ventilation system.

Good, I thought. Get as far away from here as you can!

Kiarsshkoy took advantage of my distraction by striking me and driving her claws into one of my brain holes.

My vision blurred, and everything looked like a scene from the Beatles' Yellow Submarine.

I hit my Blue Meanie in the face plate, then, when her claws reached for my brain again, I drove a leg into her midsection, clamping my claws around her throat.

Pushing off with my tail, I rolled over, slammed her dome into a silo.

The giant cufflinked hands with pointing fingers stopped zooming around on rainbow jet streams. I landed punch after punch, but Kiarsshkoy launched a glob of saliva into my face, once again distorting my vision.

I clawed blindly at Kiarsshkoy's blurry shape, but then her second mouth snapped into the nose part of my face plate.

In a rage, I grabbed the shaft of that biting mouth thing, breaking it off.

Kiarsshkoy gurgled and shrieked so horribly that I at once felt remorse. "I'm sorry. I wish there was some other way."

Of course, Kiarsshkoy agreed quite strongly, for next she threw me on my back, once more driving claws into my brain.

Everything turned black and white like an old detective movie, and every few seconds, events in my life flashed by, like the time when mom and I sat on the roof of the compound, gazing at stars.

I bit down on Kiarsshkoy's wrist, struck her again. She knocked me to the floor.

I caught a glimpse of a weighty cylindrical shape, something with a squeeze handle.

When the color returned to my vision, and the object turned fire engine red, an idea crystallized in my brain.

Near the end of my adventure in Rosedale Square, Gretchen Goose showed me an extinguisher just like that.

A green Yeti fireman had been cooking on a wok near us in the firehouse. His bottle of cooking oil and a can of Crisco `just happened' to be leaning against it when a huge flame surged in the pan.

"Grease fires should never be put out with water," Gretchen had told me as she picked up the extinguisher. "This device contains chemicals that smother fires like this a lot more effectively." She yanked a ring out of a device resembling a metal bird head.

She aimed the hose, squeezed the chrome bird beak. A cloud of foam extinguished the flames.

A punch to the face interrupted my daydream.

I tried to fight back, but Kiarsshkoy hit me again and again until I cried.

It hurt so bad that I not only wept like a Ss'sik'chtokiwij, I boo-hooed like a human, that sour laughing type sound they do in times of sadness or pain.

Kiarsshkoy recoiled in horror, reminding me of Kurt's reaction to my expressions of grief.

"That's right, I'm sick. The Xulrubdan. And if you keep touching me, you'll get it too, just like Sbeezahle and Wothfuzhoc." Those two had been short lived test subjects that caught disease and died right in front of my sisters.

I wept like a human for added emphasis.

Kiarsshkoy voiced her upset with a loud gurgling hiss, backing away like a frightened dog.

Pug Face, unable to understand Kiarsshkoy's gurgling tongueless warnings, attempted to continue the battle in her place, but the moment she tackled me, I sobbed right in her face plate. "I'm Xulrubdan. See what I did to Kiarsshkoy? She touched me and her whole suaakudsi fell out."

"No. I saw you break it off."

"Did I? In that case, why do you think it was so easy for me to do?"

My infrared showed Sydjea's eyes nearly growing to the size of dinner plates. "It was already loose!"

"Exactly."

Sydjea shrieked in terror, backing off.

I chose that moment to pretend to stagger to the fire extinguisher to die. The others stared at me warily, convinced I was a plague carrying pariah.

Hissandra and Ahxalybij didn't buy it. The other ones who hadn't watched as closely muttered to each other in fear.

I fake sneezed on the bolts holding the extinguisher in place, then sobbed again as I slowly dragged the heavy object to my silo, as if I intended to choose that as my new dying place. My possession of the fire extinguisher must have seemed to them like proof that the disease had eaten away the logical part of my brain.

Hissandra, however, seemed annoyed, like she knew something.

I didn't intend to hang out and try to convince them further. The moment I set the fire extinguisher in the silo, I slammed the door shut and punched in the locking code.

Why my silo? Why the one with the ruined quilt and air that smelled of Ss'sik'chtokiwij urine? It had Sarah's card in the door, and we'd need it to get out.

I dashed to the ladder, shouting in the hole. "Girls! Sarah! Rebecca! Come to me! I've got a plan!"

No response. One of my sisters banged on the door and shrieked.

"Sarah?"

Half sobbing, she shouted, "We don't know where you are!"

"Follow the sound of my voice!" I called.

She made a noise of assent.

To fill up the silence, I sang a song from The Sound of Music. "Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens..."

If there had been any time to think about your favorite things instead of circumstances, it was then.

My relations pounded on my cell and the vents, just about everywhere on the ventilation system.

I heard screams, banging, and something metallic being punctured, but I couldn't tell what happened until my heat sensors picked up the red blobs crawling toward me.

"Sarah! Rebecca! Over here! Hurry!"

I didn't need to tell them twice. They crawled to me as fast as they could, bolting through the hole riddled connector just seconds before a claw stabbed through the aluminum.

I examined their injuries. Sarah had a scabbing cut running down her arm, and a scar across her face, but Rebecca only bore a few minor cuts and scrapes. "I'd hug both of you, but I'd probably give you third degree burns."

Rebecca wrinkled her nose. "Your room smells funny."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to make a mess."

"What's your plan," Sarah asked with her bottom lip trembling.

"Do you still have your phone?"

Sarah nodded, digging it out of her dirty jumpsuit. "I think the charge is low."

She plugged it in the door panel, poking the buttons. "I was playing a game for a long time last night and I forgot to plug it in." An expression of shame washed across her face. Tears would soon be flowing. "I know, it's stupid."

I attempted to cheer her up. "What game was it?"

Sarah sighed, but looked a little less dismal. "It's called Gardenialand. You take these animal people on a trip in a mobile home and they fight monsters. Like I said, it's dumb."

I wished I could pat her on the back without burning something. "When this is all over, I'd like to see it."

The screen flickered on, giving a low battery message before flickering off again.

"This is going to take forever!" Sarah moaned.

"It's okay. We're safe in here."

A loud banging in the vents contradicted me.

"Wait," Rebecca blurted. "The photo frame!"

"What about it?"

Sarah grinned. "She's right! We can use that instead!"

She plugged the USB cable into my digital picture frame, connecting it to the door. With a few button presses and menu selections, Sarah changed a picture from a koala eating eucalyptus to a blueprint of the lab.

I still had hopes of the girls merely popping up the right vent and crawling their way to safety, but Sarah showed me the dead ends..

"It's no good. We can't go through the vents. There's air equipment blocking us in."

"I feared as much," I sighed. "That means we'll have to do something risky."

She frowned. "Like what?"

I gritted my teeth. "When we go out that door, I want you to do what I say. When I say run, you run. As fast as you can."

A huge black face suddenly appeared at the window, one that didn't need to stand on tiptoes to look in.

Familiar. Adult.

The same one that brought me into this world, and occasionally gave me little puppet shows with skulls.

"Mom?" I cried, scarcely believing what I saw.

She didn't reply, but I recognized the subtle line of dimples running up her dome, the distinctive sound of her heavy breathing.

"Mom!"

"Sh'kassk'dwuissueblik! What's this I hear about you hurting Kiarsshkoy and not sharing your food with your sisters? I raised you better than that!"

The door hissed open all on its own.

The girls screamed.