'So this is how it ends for me—stuck on a crappy space shuttle with a moron with delusions of grandeur, trying to stop the backstabbing Second in Command of an intergalactic band of terrorists. At least it's not a maths class? Very realistically, it could have been maths class. In fact, it almost was maths class.'

In a extremely short period of time (about thirty hours, all told) it had been revealed to mankind that they did not stand isolated in the infinite cosmos, that other beings did indeed lurk behind the light of the endless stars, who were themselves watching in enduring amusement. These revelations were the stuff of antique stories, superstitions rooted at the heart of human culture—spaceships, and aliens, and foreign worlds beyond description. Mankind stared into the uncanny vastness of the abyss and was at last granted the jarring revelation that it was not merely a void but a pupil.

All of this sounds considerably less impressive if one takes in to account that 'mankind' in this particular circumstance really means 'four deeply confused children', and the aliens they discovered were just three different breeds of untenable git who all proceeded to pick fights with said children.

Fights they lost. All three of them. To children.

Or rather, to a single child. (This is not better.)

Phil Eggtree—saviour of Earth, puzzle extraordinaire, all round wise-guy, and C-grade student—was understandably irritated by the fresh hell of terrible circumstances being draped ceremonially about his head. The adulation of a heroes' welcome was being pushed incrementally further away from him, a cosmic cat paw edging his victory ever nearer to the edge of the table.

For the last half-hour, Phil had been asking the all important questions of 'what the hell happened to my life?' and 'where did I go wrong?', and for the life of him he couldn't put his finger on it. He kept running through the sequence of events, as though, at any moment, some key detail would fall out and make the whole thing make sense.

First, he had escaped school—a stunning move to make on an egregiously slow Thursday with only the results of a failed spelling test to look forwards to. Then... well, he did it again, a couple more times after that. Several times. Perhaps even a lot. Perhaps he escaped so many schools so many times it felt like the reason he was alive at all.

Ultimately, he escaped school so brilliantly, he ended up aboard a spaceship, where an evil telepath dictator had, for reasons unknown, decided dealing with disobedient children was a productive use of his time—not a normal punishment for truancy, but he'd dealt with it admirably if he did say so himself. What had happened after that? He'd saved his friends. He'd killed a man. He escaped again.

Then, because things apparently just weren't weird enough, they were all captured by budget Men In Black and locked up in a cryptozoologist's wet dream. He escaped again. And, after all that struggle, all that strife, where did he end up? In fucking school. With a second evil alien, presumably to ensure he wasn't getting bored.

Quiz had been far less stressful to defeat that Viz had been, which was something of a relief to Phil, who had spent the hours wandering familiar corridors taunted by the half-remembered, philosophical image of a snake eating its own tail. None if it made sense—none of it should have happened at all. He had no idea how to make it stop happening.

Case in point: Now.

Phil glared across the divide at his latest tribulation; a third evil alien. The endless cavalcade of silly buggers was becoming... wearing. In an ideal world, this would not have happened. In an even incrementally kind world, it would at least be over quickly and easily.

Alas, the world is not kind at all. In came Quiz, with absolutely shocking timing and a spoonful of terrible news:

"What do you mean we don't have weapons?" Phil demanded. This, he thought, was the sort of thing that should have been discussed before coming all this way to challenge the a homicidal alien he suspected was likely at least a little unstable.

Certainly, a lack of firearms was something Quiz should have considered before placing them right in front of an actual death ray. They were hovering right in front of the massive Vizion ship, a prime target for the frigid plasma a mere button press away from discharging; Diz wouldn't even need to aim.

Made slightly indistinct by two layers of space-proof glass, the mutinous pilot stood in his place at the helm and frowned at them, his distant incredulity palpable. Phil gave him a half-hearted wave, feeling a need to impress to Diz that this was not his idea; he wasn't a fan of senseless audacity either, but Quiz didn't seem to have any other plan...

... Perhaps, before coming up here, he should have made sure Quiz had a plan.

Undeterred by the obvious perils of their situation, Quiz tapped something into a control panel. Not being someone with a great deal of knowledge on the inner machinations of spaceships, Phil could only say that the efficient bleeps sounded professional enough, and that seemed to be the best Quiz could manage.

"This ship was built to transport the components for the death ray," Quiz explained. "We have three battle ships: that one about to vaporise us is Diz's; you, um... well you blew Viz's up; and the last one is still aboard the mothership where you and your friends woke up. It's also not mine."

When he stopped without reaching a useful conclusion, Phil gave in to temptation and let his eyebrow achieve its dreams of climbing high enough up his forehead to touch his nonexistent hairline. Oblivious, the alien continued tapping at the controls with an air of great determination; the lights behind the buttons were growing... paler, dimmer in the harsh face of the death ray's violent effulgence. It was getting brighter outside, frost creeping across the viewport window. Slight concern and not so slight exasperation morphed to a begrudging sense of anxiety in Phil's more-than-slightly unsettled blood.

"Soooo... I hate to press you Quiz but this is kind of an important question: what are we gonna do?"

Opening communication comms...

"We're going to talk to him."

Begrudging anxiety suffered a stroke and was replaced with mild panic. Maybe he would have been better off in maths class.

"Close communication comms. Close, Alphimn rot you! Quiz, what's the meaning of this?" Diz's already-nasal voice was tinny and distant over the transmitter, like a horde of irritable wasps that had somehow learnt the alphabet, a staticky buzz blurring the consonants. Phil would never claim to be an expert (Phil was eleven years old) but he had a general impression that radio transmitters were probably supposed to be more... functional. The mechanical mangling of Diz's voice was the sort of sound that gave nails-down-a-blackboard and squeaky-wet-rubber-gloves a run for their money.

"We need to talk Diz." Very suddenly and far too late, Quiz seemed to have realised how horrible his plan was. He had gone rather pale, all sixteen fingers quivering at the console. "I've temporarily overridden your controls."

"Why?"

"... Because... we need to... talk? You seem..." Quiz swallowed, eyeing the distant figure apprehensively and discarding some illustrative adjectives. "Upset."

Diz's eye twitched.

"You're in my way. Move."

"... I thought we all agreed we wouldn't destroy Earth..." Quiz was doing his utmost to be a voice of reason in a situation that stridently Did Not Want One. It was admirable, if you admire pointless heroics.

"Plans change Quiz! I've changed the plan. Learn when to stop meddling, please, before I get it in to my head to teach you myself!" From the way Quiz flinched, Phil could guess that lessons with Diz would be of the unpleasant and permanent variety.

Seeing as there didn't seem to be much he could add to the argument, Phil cast somewhat dismally about the cramped shuttle for something else to occupy himself with in the increasingly scant minutes that would surely precede his demise. There weren't many options, which, when considering one's last acts, is a shame. With all the attentiveness of his high-school-self doodling in class, he began to fiddle with some buttons he hoped did nothing important. Elsewhere, the argument continued; dispassionately, Phil noted that Diz and Quiz quarrelled in the overlapping, unproductive manner of people who do so often, so familiar with the motions of fighting each other they have no interest in what the other is actually saying. Oh well—he wasn't their therapist; he was here for buttons.

Alas, like everything else that day, the buttons betrayed him. The red ones looked inexplicably like Viz (not an aspirational visage by any means) and the green ones were far too reminiscent of Diz, who was trying to kill everyone. The blue button had the potential to elevate the situation but fell tragically in to the crater sized pitfall that was having any sort of relation to Quiz, Patron Saint of Useless Things. There were no other colours.

Phil let his shoulders slump. 'Third evil alien. Deadly orbital laser. No plan. No weapons. Disappointing buttons... this plan has it all...'

Meanwhile, Quiz was pleading fruitlessly with Diz, leaning over the speaker as though hoping to glimpse his old comrade somewhere amid the harsh words and harsher static.

"This is ridiculous!" He cried, puncturing Phil's inattentive bubble. "Why change the plan? What changed?!"

"We were wrong; there's nothing here worth sparing." Diz's voice was toneless and sour as bottled lemon juice. "That planet declared its intentions clearly enough when it attempted to capture me. They ensnared me in some military base like a common experiment."

Beside him, Phil saw Quiz flinch guiltily and reached up to pinch the bridge of his nose; why couldn't Quiz's dumbass takeover have been constrained to a measly elementary school? Why did he have to get Diz involved? Next it was gonna come out that Quiz had pissed off Viz's ghost too.

"Surely it wasn't that bad?" The blue alien tried, his wavering little voice deeply unconvincing; Diz's only comment on the matter was a raspy hissing sound like a cat being trodden on. "I don't see why Earth has to die just because... someone hurt you."

"This is precisely your problem, Quiz—you're never ready when things start to head in a direction you don't like. Anyway, you should know by now that it's never just one evil act. If it smells of rot, it's rotten; that's just the way it is. Stop being difficult. I'm going to talk to Viz and you know he'll see things my way, eventually."

Quiz did seem to know this; he looked out into the divide between him and his old friend the way a man who knows nothing about chess looks at the game responsible for his life. Disdain crawled its way across the vacuum from the other ship, the crackling silence over the comm tasting of emptiness, of well-aged scorn. When Diz spoke again, his voice had softened almost imperceptibly, something weary creeping in to the unsettling mania. It wasn't the softness of affection or acceptance, just gently exasperated dismissal, the tone of someone recognising that being angry at their dog for eating their shoes will not miraculously un-eat the shoe.

"Just... just go back to the main ship, Quiz. Put the child back on Earth and go back to where I told you to stay while I finish this. I won't mention your insubordination to Viz. Everything can go back to normal and we'll vanish. Just like we planned."

Tempting offer though it was (and it was written clearly on the alien's face that this was a tempting offer) Quiz was given no time to consider it before Phil launched in.

"Viz is alive?" Somehow that hadn't registered the first time (then again, Diz seeing ghosts would only be the second most insane thing he'd done that afternoon.) Phil could feel the satisfaction of victory drip, drip, dripping away with caustic glee and a middle-finger salute.

Diz snorted. Even with the distance, Phil could see the slightly cruel shape of his mouth turning towards a patronising smile; he was torn between indignation and the sensation of dead fingers counting the bones in his spine.

"You really thought you'd won, didn't you?" Diz murmured, eerily gentle, almost pitying but not at all kind. "Well you didn't. Last transmission from the remains of Viz's ship has it that he's on a nearby asteroid. His remote is intact. He will contact me again when he manages to return to the mothership. This whole sequence of events would have played out much more smoothly if someone—" Cue a pointed look at a shuffling Quiz "—Had done the one thing I asked of them, but no matter. Face it Phil, you didn't defeat V.I. . You barely scratched us. Everything Quiz had no hand in has gone according to plan."

To understand how Phil felt at that moment, a person would be best advised to envision that feeling of a seemingly solid floor suddenly dropping from beneath them—no warning, no transition phase between 'floor' and 'not floor', only heart-pounding absence. With that same jarring sense of whiplash disillusionment, Phil saw every instance of victory he had scraped thrown into a perspective that rendered it less than worthless. That made it amusing. Something similar to despair took him over, the desire to find someone responsible and shake them until answers fell out.

"Why Diz? Why are you doing this?"

There was no pause between question and answer, and it was that immediacy which stirred unease in Phil's blood, the sense that the alien didn't have to pause and consider the why of destroying a planet. The sense that this answer, this endeavour, was older than him. Beside him, Quiz's eyes unfocused slightly, looking at something beyond the material world of metal, and glass, and luminous dust. He had heard this before; Phil wondered if he'd once asked Diz the same question.

"Because it needs to be done! Because I have seen, time and time again, that evil refuses to recognise itself, refuses to end what it starts, refuses to learn from its mistakes. This universe is imbalanced, Phil, and the only way to save the good is to destroy the impure. I will have peace. I don't care how long it takes or what I have to do to get it."

There was nothing insane about the way he spoke, nothing unreasonable about the voice saying such horrible things. Phil felt a small shock of fear creep its icy way down his spine. Diz was reminiscent of the extremists and madmen he had seen on television at dream-college.

"You know who you sound like, right now? This weirdo I saw on TV a few years ago—he wanted to get rid of bits of countries to make them all perfectly circular. Said it would make the world look neater. Guy was a cult leader—it's not a great look."

Suddenly and briefly horrifically deranged, Diz slammed his fist against the dashboard, the impact audible through the transmitter.

"I am a cult leader, Eggtree! I am leader of Project Vizion! I will make things right, and there is nothing you can do to stop me!"

Incoming transmission...

"I think you'll find that untrue, Diz." Phil sighed and debated the merits of a dramatic exit via the airlock. The whole gang of quasi-terrorists was back together. Wonderful; frying pan, meet fire.

Viz's grating voice crackled grimly through two sets of transmitters, somehow just as irritated, self-satisfied, and cynical as it had been in person. Quiz was looking less like a confident martyr and more like a child caught in the act of doing something very stupid by the second. Had this whole situation not been Kind Of, Sort Of, Entirely his fault, Phil might have felt sorry for him.

"Beam me on board. We've wasted enough time."

"Yes sir." Moving from his position at the helm, Diz leaned away to input something into a control module to the right. In a low voice clearly meant for Quiz's ears only:

"Last chance Quiz; come back to the ship and we can pretend none of this ever happened." Diz sounded different now, furtively pleading, as though Quiz being out of place had become dangerous. It was a strange, near pitiful contrast to the mad dictator of before, and Phil struggled to reconcile the two sides in his mind. Beside him, Quiz gave a sigh of such unending weariness that it seemed to deflate him; as though the tribulations and stress of these past few days were all that was keeping him together, and without them, he'd simply wither away.

"I'm not moving until you turn the CryoBeam off." It was the first thing he'd sounded certain about. "This isn't something worth killing millions over. Innocent millions... you saw that before."

Before Diz could offer any response, there was a bright, static snap over the comms and a searing flash of blue-white light from the opposing ship. Behind Diz a shadow unfurled. With the same sneering arrogance he had displayed during their first meeting, Viz stalked up to the viewport and smirked down at the Transport Ship with all the disdain of someone watching a worm crawl into their dropped sandwich. Phil wondered if Quiz was familiar with the phrase 'sweating bullets'.

"So this is what you've decided is more important than doing your job, is it Quiz? Playing with the other children? Pathetic. And you—" He turned to Diz. "—I expected better. I told you to take four children to Earth, not disappear entirely."

"I didn't—"

"Enough. I didn't ask for insipid excuses—I asked you to keep things running smoothly and perform one exquisitely simple task. I expect disappoint from Quiz, not you. This day has been such a waste."

Buttons were pretty great; Phil stared in to them and pretended he didn't feel like he was stuck in a friend's house while their parents argued.

"And why is Zone 5.1 complaining about a security breach? We've not used that facility in years. Nothing important could have gotten out, but every five minutes they message me complaining that 'Project Vizion Data Retrieval' has been critically compromised. I never ordered a data retrieval, which means either those jelly-brained fools finally got a clue or one of you did something stupid. Well? Diz?" Viz trailed off. He was looking at Diz; everyone, Phil realised, was looking at Diz, who had gone very, very still.

Or rather, almost everyone was looking at Diz; Diz himself was staring directly at Quiz.

There's a moment in every detective film worth its salt where the intrepid investigator, having gathered their clues and followed their leads, stands before the ensemble and reveals the criminal among their number in a lengthy monologue. Never before had Phil considered how it might feel to be the villain in that moment, surrounded by cogs falling in to place, just waiting for the one that would smash your skull. The vastness of space, reduced to a few meters, was not distant enough; he could see the realisation dawn in Diz's eyes, the shock, the slow smoulder of rage.

"You," he said, almost too quietly to hear.

Quiz, ever stalwart, held up under the pressure like a wet piece of bread under an anvil.

"Diz, look, I c-can explain, I-I swear—I d-didn't mean—"

"You." Whatever softness had been in Diz's voice, whatever humanity it had had, was gone. Utterly gone. There was a considering note in it that sounded the way a snake looks when it moves.

"L-look—I didn't th-think it through that w-well I kn-know but—"

"You kidnapped me." Diz's black eyes seemed to burn through the vacuum of space separating them.

"Diz please just—"

"You used that machine to churn my mind to bits." His hands were white knuckled on the ship's wheel. Well, pale green, but the sentiment was both present and terrifying.

"Listen to me! I—"

"You tried to kill us both!" The last was delivered in a harsh scream, effectively silencing Quiz's verbal scrabbling. Phil was looking determinedly at the dashboard, certain that looking up at the enraged alien would provoke some apocalyptic form of judgement.

The silence that fell between them was a deadly, fragile thing made of fractious glass, fraught with the ragged sounds of both Diz and Quiz breathing. The atmosphere closed around them all like damp swaddling; the seething gush of static from the comms, the asthmatic wheeze and groan of systems freezing, the creaking of the vessels as some indeterminate cosmic force started to exert itself against the hulls.

"There had better be a good reason for all this screaming." It wasn't quite a threat; Viz didn't sound quite so sure of himself now.

"I told him!" Diz howled, rounding on his commander, "I said 'stay with the ship, Quiz, I'll go to Earth. Viz will establish contact soon and you need to be here to activate a teleportation device' and what does the imbecile do? Galavants off to Earth, leaving everything up here unguarded! He even took Nitwit, though only Eyes know why, that lumbering fool was never good for much.

"I was taking the subjects back to Earth when our descent was interrupted by a force I couldn't identify. We were taken hostage, held in a facility. They hooked me in to an early variant of our mind reading technology... I didn't know how they'd gotten ahold of it or who they were. For a minute I was certain we'd been caught... but it was you."

The mixture of horror and hatred in his voice was nauseating.

"You tricked us! You trapped us!" Even from that distance, Phil could see that Diz was shaking. "You were going to betray us, weren't you Quiz? You were going to take our projects and run like the coward you truly are."

Quiz was quiet now, breaths not even a whisper, such a contrast to the laboured gasps of before that Phil had to look closely to convince himself that the alien was still alive. One of his blue-skinned hands had drawn into a tight fist, blackish blood leaking from between the fingers. When he lifted his head to meet the accusing stares of his old friends, his eyes were wet. His once quavering voice had darkened and hardened into something bitter and twisted, like a blackened blade digging into stone.

"I was going let you out eventually," Quiz bleated in a tone that wasn't so much defensive as it was churlish. For all his accusations, for all the force of his rage, Diz reeled back as though he'd been struck. "You and Viz have been calling the shots ever since we started this mad campaign—is it really so wrong that I wanted a chance? You never tell me anything! You never let me do anything—I hardly ever even get to leave the ship! Every single time we set out to do something, I'm left in the dark looking stupid and I hate it. It's not my fault you're too paranoid to tell me anything. It's not my fault the only way to get any information out of you is to rip it out—"

"Enough." Surprisingly, it was Viz's anger strained voice which cut Quiz's ramblings short this time (though, looking at Diz, it may have simply been because rage had pushed the lieutenant past the point of speaking.)

"But I—" Quiz's tottering helplessness returned in record time, dust in the spotlight of Viz's commands.

"Diz, bring them both on board."

The transmitter cut off with a hard choke, and no amount of button pressing would convince it to turn back on. Slowly, the transport craft was brought broadside to the battleship.

Surrounded by the inescapable green light of the tractor beam, with the creaking of metal growing ever louder as they were drawn forcefully towards the other ship, Phil gave a cynical huff that he hoped was sufficient to cover up his mounting worry. Wasn't there a saying about this? Frying pans and fire? No. Both an understatement and already used. Fire, meet the utterly broiling hell that is the molten core of the Earth. That was better. That about summed it up. Why did Quiz have to chose now to develop a spine?

Aside from his hitched breathing, Quiz was unresponsive once more, staring helplessly down in to the depths of his shoes. This seemed to be new record for him in terms of letting people down; allies, enemies, strangers who had no idea he existed, all in one fell swoop... despite himself, Phil felt a twinge of pity.

Opening cargo bay doors...

With a deep, metallic groan, the ship was admitted in to the belly of the larger vessel, where the occupants were confronted with a set of metal doors. With a wretched sound of labour, they heaved themselves apart. The scene beyond was taken straight from a thousand sci-fi movies, which gave everything the sense of surreal unreality usually enjoyed by those still awake in the middle of nowhere at five in the morning.

Viz was standing central, arms—all four of them—folded behind him in a coldly stately fashion. Diz had abandoned the helm and stood instead slightly behind Viz, merciless attention fixed on Quiz. Both wore calculating looks, expressions that openly considered your imminent demise and dared you to challenge that authority; Viz wore his with cold, supercilious amusement, but Diz had the empty-eyed stare of something cornered and half-savage. Subtly (or, rather, 'in a manner Quiz likely interpreted as subtle) the alien moved to stand between Phil and his coworkers.

"Now then," purred Viz in a voice like churning gravel. "What should be done with you two?"

This was never decided and, all things considered, that is likely for the best.

When the Battle Ship lurched badly enough to set them all stumbling, Phil initially dismissed it as a quirk owed to the fact that the ship was a pieced-together mess, a bedraggled collection of past shipwrecks hammered in to a single entity. He was no starship connoisseur, and this Frankenstein's-monster of a craft could have subjected him to far worse before it registered as reason to panic.

It was the other three reactions which ticked him off, sent the first stirring of nausea to prickle the base of his spine; the agitation of the aliens was immediate, their quarrel silenced.

"What was that?" More irritated by the interruption than unnerved at first, Viz's triumphant expression was marred by a frown as he spun to glare at his lieutenant.

Reluctantly Diz returned to the helm and tapped at something on the dashboard, where a screen of glowing letters and numbers was fluctuating wildly between three different displays. By the gleeful, neon light, the way the alien paled was almost sickening.

"Oh no..." With the frantic speed of someone arriving far too late to fix something, Diz began pressing buttons in what seemed to be a particular sequence, incurring a negatory noise from the machines every time. He did this again, and again, and again, hands a little shakier each time. "We've gotten too close to Earth." Somewhere from within the ship, a siren began to wail, a dreadful banshee sound unheard of outside wars and nightmares. "We're entering its gravitational field."

Mild panic called it a day, tagged in blind terror, and left for a farm in the countryside.

"Well get us out!" It was the closest Phil ever heard Viz come to fright and it was that more than the siren that convinced him the danger was real. Horrifically, it was starting to seem like they might have been safer when the only problem they faced was being directly in front of an unstable death ray helmed by a maniac.

"I can't."

"Put up the shielding then."

"I can't. The mechanics are beginning to freeze because of the CryoBeam."

"Well turn the damn thing off!" More buttons—treacherous buttons that did nothing helpful—and the quaking was joined by an icy, sweet-voiced drone, a winter noise which crept into the nerves behind one's teeth. Another flipped lever and the ship lurched as though trying to throw them off. Quiz, never surefooted, staggered and Viz reached out to steady him, his ire entirely forgotten. "Diz what's happening?"

"The CryoBeam is taking up the majority of power in the ship's electrical systems." In another of his eerie reversals, Diz sounded calm once more, with just a faint quiver in the background of his words revealing how little control he actually had. "I... I am unable to discharge the weapon and I'm also unable to stop the energy build up. Attempting to power up anything more, say re-entry fields or back-up thrusters, will push the battery into critical condition. The same will happen if I push the reactors any harder."

Again, Phil couldn't help the sense of detachment that swept over him, as though he was watching this unfold on television or in the theatre. That this nightmare could happen to ordinary, well meaning people was fundamentally inconceivable. That things like this could happen to Phil Eggtree, specifically, was slightly more believable, but still enough to disorientate him to the point that, when he finally spoke up, it took a second for him to recognise his own voice.

"Is there anything you can do?"

Diz bit his lip, hand hovering anxiously over the keys.

"I can hold us here. We have, estimated, ten minutes before our position becomes too unstable to hold and we plummet to Earth."

Slowly, Viz nodded. Discerning his precise expression was never easy, but he seemed to be thinking hard.

"If we reroute all nonessential power to one of those time-stop mines, we may be able to buy ourselves enough time to drain the power from Quiz's vessel to this one. Could we could put up re-entry fields after that?"

"Are you sure that would work?"

"Have you got a better idea?" The lieutenant and commander stared at each other, mutually belligerent and searching.

All around them, the struggle between the ship and the surrounding atmosphere was becoming more evident; the metal walls were shuddering under unseen pressure, errant clatters and innocent dropped-penny sounds of things coming loose sounding from all around them. There wasn't a better plan—there wasn't time to think of a better plan.

"Quiz get over here and help with this."

Partially ignoring Viz's order, Quiz looked between Phil and the distant orb of Earth. Every thought that crossed his mind was written starkly across his face—including the startlement of Phil suddenly seizing his wrist.

"You don't have to stay with them."

Quiz gave a smile that was as fond as it was bitterly cynical.

"Yeah I do."

"Why?"

"Well, first off, that escape pod is meant to carry one person only." Quiz began to usher Phil towards the now-familiar escape capsule. "Secondly, Viz and Diz are my friends Phil. You wouldn't leave your friends stuck here, would you?"

Phil opened his mouth to argue that point before realising it was pointless, that he had wandered around two separate facilities with his life in an ambiguous amount of danger, refusing to leave until he found all his friends. Any argument he could make was kneecapped before he could even begin.

In worried silence, he let Quiz input Earth's coordinates. Looking somehow smaller and more vulnerable than before, the alien patted Phil's shoulder, uncomfortably aware of how final the gesture felt.

"We'll, ah, continue this conversation later?"

"How much later we talking Quiz?"

A second siren started screaming. Both boy and alien made an effort to Not Look.

"I don't know. But we'll be back."

Phil studied the alien's face, each squamous, dull scale, the slightly uneven nasal slits, the liquid, black eyes. Behind Quiz, he could see the alarm's strobing light reflect off Viz's angular glasses, hear Diz calling out a nonsensical jumble of orders and figures with near-military efficiency. Reaching up, Phil squeezed the stubby-fingered hand.

"... I'll count on it, Quiz."

The last thing Phil saw as he was jettisoned from the Transport Vessel was Quiz hurrying over to assist Viz with a nondescript box that he could only assume was to be the craft's salvation. Then everything was lost to fire as he hurtled back to the real world.