"Are we safe?"

The skulking shapes slithering just beyond the reach of light paused their stride only long enough to answer.

"For now."

The fire they had cobbled together out of leaf mould and brushwood cast strange shadows, a pantheon of weird, midnight gods come to flail their many limbs in dance. It lent the lightened woods a sinister, crimson air. Recent rains meant that everything was slightly damp and they hadn't the expertise or light to discern what was and wasn't good firewood, so the dull red flames popped and spluttered around mouthfuls of sap. Historically, there had been been far better fires but, lacking Zach's expertise, Phil had decided this was good enough—certainly it wasn't going to improve. His eyes stung with the bitterness of a smoke he couldn't smell.

He sneezed a blood clot and swore as every nerve in his skull jangled. Though his nose had stopped bleeding, it had also rather stopped being a nose in all the useful ways a person anticipates: smelling, breathing, staying helpfully out of one's peripheral vision...

The minor concussion was likely not helping matters.

"Ow." Blindly and a little impudently, Phil reached out and snagged Viz's arm. Both flesh and coat were cold beneath his fingers. "Is my nose broken?"

With a sigh and very little gentleness, the alien reached out and tilted Phil's head about to peer at the swollen, blotchy blob plastered across his face, single eye squinting in the gloom. The dead glasses with all their glitchy augments remained held tightly in one hand—'no biometric scanners for me...'

"You'll live," he decided after a moment, which Phil gallantly extrapolated to mean 'yes, Phil, your nose is absolutely fine.'

Mollified, Phil moved to the next item on his itinerary for 'When We Escape', and seized ahold of Diz's arm. Startled, Diz returned the favour, clamping down on the bones of Phil's forearm with just enough force to suggest he could break them—Phil didn't even blink.

"That gun. You stole it."

"I did." The grip on his arm did not soften.

"That's Smiley's dead dad's gun."

"It doesn't matter to me whose gun it is. It was more useful here with us than under that girl's bed."

"Fuck you." It came out with less vehemence than he intended, his lungs still aching from the run. "Give it back."

Diz did so. In Phil's hand, the metal was unsettlingly tepid, the weight of it lighter than it had been. It reeked of oil and spent powder; feeling slightly ill, he clutched it tighter.

Disputes finally at rest, the four finally settled around the fire in a twisted facsimile of campers. With the looming shadows swaying in their obscure masquerades and their newborn fire already weak and world-weary, the quartet sat down, each taking one side of an invisible square. Viz and Quiz were opposite: the former turned his irreparably mangled glasses over in his hands, handling them as gently as one would a living thing; the latter had melted in on himself like a blob of candle wax.

Phil opposed Diz. In the dark, lit up in a warm red which left his skin dead and grey, the alien looked like a knife blade, perfectly still and rigidly straight. Phil would have liked to think he looked the same, limned flatteringly in copper, the centre of a corona of spectral trees; the drama of the situation, he felt, required some heroic appearance on his part.

(The reality of the matter was that he looked like an exhausted eighteen year old in an oversized hoodie, squinting streaming eyes against the sting of flames, face blotched with bruises the colour of aubergine. He looked precisely as he was, and reality was damning.)

There are certain people who it is only wise to trust once the barrel has been scraped right down to its hoops, and Diz was one of them. He was a last resort, a Hail Mary, fraying rope with which one could potentially haul oneself out of some icy gulch. He was dishonest, unreliable, and unalterably sly.

He was also the only one Phil could demand answers of.

'The less you're aware of the better, as far as I'm concerned...'

'Quiz! He doesn't even know the full story...'

Diz was the last person he wanted to ask, but they were coming to the end of the road and the world was growing dark; Phil had nowhere left to go.

"Alright. Talk." The alien slowly tilted his head in an unasked question so Phil elaborated, filled quite suddenly with a fervent restlessness. "I want to know everything—what's chasing you and why the hell did you come here? Why me? You owe me that much."

"Is that really what you want?" Diz asked in a rasp like a rattlesnake drawing itself defensively in a bow. Chills wracked the back of Phil's neck, even as the skin on his face ached pleasantly from the searing heat of the fire

Was this what he wanted?

Of course it was.

"The full story," he said, with a spirit of determination seven years old—a fine, heady vintage.

"Ahhh, the story." Diz ducked his head slightly, like someone who has been told a particularly good Bad Joke. His voice was a low, lyrical hiss. "And how do you want me to tell it? It's been so long, I'm not really sure. 'Once upon a time,' perhaps? Or is this to be some kind of confession? 'Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned...' Is that what you want to hear?"

What did he want to hear? Phil had no idea. Nothing and everything, he supposed; desire to know and understand was a shapeless one. It was the mechanics of the matter that had retained his fascination all those long years, the cause and effect of it all, the culmination of a hundred disparate details into one, crystalline moment—the nonsensical why. He had arrived late to a party where the microwave was on fire, four people were duck-taped together, and a small terrier wearing a tag reading 'DJ' was the only sign of life, happily sat on a still spinning vinyl of 'Cotton Eye Joe'—it was not mad to wonder how things had gotten to that state.

It was human nature, after all, to look at the stars and wonder what part—if any—one's life held in some Great Plan.

"Just tell me," he asked again, slightly softer now. "Please."

In an undefinable, unquantifiable way, Diz's eyes looked like black rock pools, full of trapped things that darted within confines that grew shallower and deeper based on the whims of something unaccountable to him. Those eyes stared at Phil through reams of smoke for minutes that felt like years, the rest of his face stern and absolutely inscrutable. Finally, with all the good humour of a condemned prisoner, he relented.

"I suppose," he began. "I ought to start at the very beginning, if we want you to understand at all. Our home planet is located in the Andromeda Galaxy and, for as long as anyone can recall, we have been at war with another planet in our solar system. Alphim. It has been... centuries. The conflict is older than anyone alive on either side of it.

"I don't remember how it started—history was never my strong suit. I think there was a quarrel about the ownership of one of our trans-orbital moons..."

He looked to Viz, as though waiting for confirmation, but his captain's attention was still fixed upon his glasses and he failed to even look up at the pause. Eventually, Diz continued, but there was a slight uneasiness about it, as though he had recognised he would be doing this unaided.

"Conscription has been in place so long that some kind of military service is demanded of everyone. Munitions is the biggest force in civilian employment by miles. Hatchlings are taken to training facilities to begin basics as soon as they're medically cleared to do so. From there, proficiency is determined in a particular field and we are sorted. Specialisation and segregation continues until we leave and are sent to our stations, be that active duty on one of the fronts or support work elsewhere.

"Quiz and I met during training. We... were friends. We shared a module in Navigation for several years until I was evaluated to be most suited to a role as a pilot. Quiz was kept on and was eventually taken in to The Enquiry."

Here, he paused again and took a breath, seeming to change subjects ever so slightly. His words were carefully placed, like the steps of someone edging past a large and dangerously reactive beast.

"I suppose I should explain The Enquiry."

"They started as a small branch of interrogators working for the military government—which replaced the regular government around the same time the rules for conscription were extended to hatcheries. It was The Enquirers jobs to know things... and, as the war progressed, their knowledge base grew. They quickly became the central force of Military Intelligence.

"These days... The Enquiry is the government. An infallible conglomerate responsible for every turning wheel in the war. They know everything."

"Thought history wasn't your strong suit?" Phil interjected. The alien's mouth sketched the outline of a laugh without bothering to add sound, no humour in his eyes.

"Oh, it's not," he murmured with a tired smile. "But everyone knows how The Enquiry stepped in to power and saved us from losing. I knew that story by heart before I could spell my own name."

At the very fringe of Phil's conscious memory some vestigial tatter still held on to vague impressions of a fat hand, under loving instruction, clumsily forming the shapes 'P-H-I-L', with the 'L' upside-down to make it neater. Those shapes meant him. They were the signifier that held his whole world. With a slightly wary sense of sympathy, he wondered what it was like to know political history before being able to fully appreciate one's own name.

Outside these thoughts, the story continued.

"Do you know what interstellar warfare is like?" Diz asked, in a conversational tone of voice that suggested he thought this a perfectly reasonable thing to ask an eighteen year old as they sat in the mud. Phil restrained himself, in the nick of time, from pinching the bridge of his nose.

"Obviously no, Diz."

"It's a mess." This was said with something that was almost a nostalgic smile. "Everything is moving constantly—planets, debris, stars. Navigating regular space already requires the use of specialised computers, but it's damn near impossible when everything is actively changing at the rate it does in war. Mobile mines, wandering missiles, patrolling fleets. Things can change in an instant and, with no centralised system of communication and information, one half of a battalion can be on fire while the other remains completely unaware.

"Enquiry Control Navigators were created to rectify that problem. Informed directly by spies and monitoring services, the Navigators would know which routes were safe, where fleets were being directed, what sections of space fell in to our territory—everything. Every ship was assigned to someone in the Enquiry, from the cargo ships to the fighter jets. In time, everything that could be monitored was put under them. The ship's themselves only had local navigational capabilities—the rudimentary systems critical for manoeuvres with very few long-range uses. For anything else, including information on the whereabouts of other ships, we were reliant on Control Navigators.

"Quiz was one of them. Weren't you, Quiz?"

Quiz didn't answer. Fire caught oddly about the scales of his face, making the skin pitted and shadowed. For some reason—perhaps his detached expression—he suddenly looked quite unlike Quiz. Once again, after an uncomfortable period of silence like a children's TV character waiting expectantly for audience participation to materialise from an empty room, Diz carried on.

"Due to a shortage of fighter pilots, I was shipped out soon after completing my course to our primary frontier, a series of asteroid belts and uninhabited planetoids.

"My commander there was Viz. He was captain of the dreadnought vessel Invincible. We fought on that front and a hundred others for fifteen years. When they weren't using us for direct, frontline attacks, we carried out transportation missions through pockets of our enemy's forces. There were nine of our sister ships in our sector."

Diz didn't blink. Firelight caught in the protruding orbs of his eyes where blurs of radiance moved through the black like lava-lamp fluid through an inky soulless sea.

""17-13-18-54. 1200 hours."

He spoke very, very quietly. Soft as the grey smoke that curled above the flames like a great, tame cat, whose thick pelt hid claws. Something snapped sharply within Diz's glassy eyes, the warm iridescence borrowed from the fire gone. His next words had an air of recital about them, metallic and very nearly toneless. It no longer felt as though he were dictating the history to Phil, and the deliberation in every letter was both impersonal and filled with memories.

"All ten ships were issued an Enquiry officiated order to run a reconnaissance mission over some territory on the western flank that we had allegedly regained in a recent push. Our Control Navigators supplied us with patrol coordinates, mapping simulations, weather data—the usual routine."

"We trusted them."

It seemed such a pointless, discordant thing to announce at that time; Phil got the feeling he had been handed a corner piece to the story and was suddenly very wary of the picture it would have a hand in forming.

"Our job was to check the perimeters and surveil the damage done to the land that was now ours. As was usual for missions where we would be out of the visual range of the other ships, we kept in internal communication through radio comms. We... we were told the area had been cleared out. None of us needed to be rigged for a fight."

A steadying breath. He was looking through Phil now—Phil, who had a thousand new questioned teeming at his very membranes and just enough sense and self-restraint to keep them at bay.

"We lost contact with the lead ship, Valiant." The whisper had the dull, empty resonance of a falling body.

"When we queried the situation with our Navigators they cited interference from a worsening dust storm, which was enough of a truth that we all kept calm. A desert planet recently home to major sites of conflict... it was hardly far-fetched—issues with radio communications in such circumstances were common. We trusted them.

"Nobody panicked when signals from Gladiator also went silent. Then Warrior. Then Imperial and Dauntless.

"It was only when they took Champion that we realised. Some idiot aboard Destroyer defied the order to make fast the ship and weather the storm, and went outside to smoke. They heard the crash as she went down and went back inside to send out an alert to the bridge crew, who sent the signal on to the rest of us. Destroyer informed us all of their position and went out to Champion's last recorded marker to offer assistance... and then she was gone too."

"It was Alphim. They were picking us off, ship by ship. They weren't gone at all. The Enquiry lied to us."

The rattlesnake was back in his voice and this time it was looking for something to sink its teeth in to, its venom seeping through lips that were still thinly smiling beneath eyes mad with hatred. Phil could feel cold, needle-point teeth in his muscle. It wasn't his usual rage, nor was it an emotion the human could have put a name or value to. It was a depth that fell beyond all oration or explanation, something utterly, wretchedly consuming. It was something deeper than anger.

Phil didn't like to think what it might be. Even the campfire seemed to be trying to get away from the alien now.

Sparks fluttered in to the night, heaved end over end by the breath of the flames like autumn leaves in a swirling breeze, all burnished bronze. In their almost dreamy lightness and variety of burning shades, Phil could envision the ten starships flying out in to the black in all their glory, streaks of gold in the vacuum, before their excellence turned cold, dead, and grey, and they vanished. For a few moments, the vessels and the lives within them were tangible to Phil—real and tiny—and then they faded and he realised that everyone he had imagined aboard those spark-ships had been dead for decades.

"By the time we realised, there was just three of us left—Invincible, Saviour, and Excellence. In the little time we had left, we attempted to find each other—we thought, perhaps, if we had three ships we could put up a little bit of a fight. Allegedly, the other two managed it, but we never saw. Alphim got to us first.

"We had offloaded must of our heavy artillery and munitions stock to make us lighter, in case we came across any salvage in recon... we didn't think there would be any need for them—we were supposed to be inside our own territory, after all. Half a fleet came after us. Twenty battleships, fully equipped. Invincible didn't stand a chance.

"We went down. I woke up in an Enquiry holding cell."

With a crackle of burnt-through branches, the structure at the heart of the campfire collapsed, taking its warmth and light with it. Having receded a great deal during the telling of the story, the pool of golden light shrunk its last few inches and fell off the faces of its congregation. Without the gleam reflecting off his eyes to prove he was something living, Diz's face resembled nothing so much as a skull scraped of its softness. The shadows pooled in the hollows of him.

Calmly, Diz took a handful of twigs from a pile they had scraped together earlier and, in an almost contemplative quiet, he set to coaxing the flames back to vigour. This took some effort, and it never reclaimed its golden lustre or previous warmth. There was something hesitant, now, about its weaving, something meek and watery. In the fresh light, Phil could see the green fingers quiver.

"Nobody would tell me anything," Diz resumed." Not for want of me asking—I practically begged them... I recognised where I was, you see—The Oubliette, a prison facility run by The Enquiry Eyes, a place for dissenters, political prisoners, radicals, and traitors. We grew up hearing stories of what happened to people thrown in there... Research and Development always need new subjects—weapons don't test themselves, after all. But I couldn't understand why I was there... I hadn't done anything...

"I met the other survivors when we were being transported... elsewhere. Never did find out where. We never arrived—there were about thirty of us, all told, enough for a breakout. Viz and I were the only surviving crew members from Invincible... several of the men were from Excellence, a few from Saviour... but none of ours... hardly anyone had made it out. And the escape killed more still.

"In the end, four of us got out alive; Viz and myself, one of the engine crew from Champion, and the commander of the Valiant. He... he died shortly after... two days into the fortnight we spent wandering..."

A moment of silence passed between them, in honour of those nameless, faceless crew members.

"Which is where Quiz comes back into the story." Diz looked again to the other alien, who seemed somehow further wilted but did look up at the invocation of his name. "He and I had stayed in touch during my deployment, so I knew his address. The Enquiry were unlikely to initiate a search on one of their own, at least not at first. So—"

"So you turned up on my doorstep at an absolutely horrid hour," Quiz interrupted, sounding both sad and fond. "Do you know, I thought you were all a bad dream for the first twenty minutes? Three, bloody soldiers raving in my living room about warships made of dust... quite the shock at 2200. I thought you were a ghost."

"—Quiz helped us," Diz continued, apparently unbothered by the interruption. "He let us stay. He also told us what had happened..."

This latest in a long and proud lineage of tense pauses was the worst yet—Diz's face was still dreadfully blank, but whatever emotion lay in his eyes had moved beyond bitterness, beyond wrath, beyond anything so simple as hate or grief. It was ugly and raw and Phil felt strangely captivated by the sheer mania of it. The whole, hideous hurricane of it was pulsatingly visible in a manner reminiscent of an exposed heart.

Phil could feel his nerves stirring beneath his skin, adrenaline starting up its snake charmer tune once more. Though his legs still ached and his blood had not fully recovered its breath, he felt like running again; he felt he might do anything if it got him away from that dark cleaning and the madman telling a story he no longer wanted to hear.

From those either side of him, there was no response, no movement: the only sign that Viz was paying attention at all was the fact that he had stopped playing with his broken glasses; stripes of wet painted Quiz's cheeks, and they glistened in the fire.

"The news outlets... were celebrating," Diz whispered tonelessly, voice carefully measured and smoothed table-cloth flat with the care of one who is undertaking minimal tasks to distract from something larger, something awful. "'A heroic sacrifice made by the ships of Sector Seventeen, who lured the forces of Alphim's western flank away from critical sites, allowing them to be raided freely by a squadron of the new Class M Cruisers.' We had been a distraction. A diversion. Fifteen years of service, and we wound up being the bit of feather on a piece of string to convince the cat's paw to swipe.

"Fifteen years—" The open wound of a smile made its return, jagged and empty. "—and that was the thanks we got."

If life were a film, or book, or play—some medium where the elements bend themselves to the contours of a narrative like vines about a trellis—it would, at that point, have started raining. But life is the ugly half-sibling of those lofty examples, and has none of their keen sensibility for the dramatic; the air remained dry and light, with all its winter spirits constrained to that autumnal bite, and the sky high above was dark but cloudless. There were no weeping clouds, no howling winds to scream through the heavens, no thunder leant the moment the immensity of its pathos.

Instead, the fire, even as it dwindled once more, crackled with the same dutiful cheer with which it lit grand halls and devoured forests. In the undergrowth, the midnight denizens of the forest began to rustle about their trade and, somewhere in the distance, an owl offered up a fluting call. It was ordinary; without context, it was close to pleasant.

During their second year of college, Smiley, a literature student at the time, had dragged Phil along to a performance of 'King Lear'. He hadn't understood the ornate, obsolete language (relying instead on the whispering, excitable encyclopaedia sitting next to him) but the story was simple enough: a once-great man reaches an inflection point and fucks up until he dies—the fundamental building blocks of all tragedies. He hadn't cared much for any of it, but the storm... something about it had stuck with him—the simulated sound of raindrops on corrugated steel, the sudden dampness of the air as fog machines sighed to life, the fake glisten of wet on the actors' clothes. Yelling at an unlistening God to strike you down because everything's gone wrong and you've been abandoned to the physical manifestation of your spiritual failures. It was moving stuff; it was what Phil thought of now.

'Where's the rain? There should be rain for dramatic scenes. How did that speech go again? I am more wronged than... wronging? Is that even a word? This feels like that, though—that's how you think, isn't it?

'Lear still fucked up badly enough that he had to die at the end, though. I remember that bit.'

"We had to do something." There was a dreadful agitation to that statement that set warning bells jangling in the back of Phil's mind. "They had pulled this trick before—there were so many times where we had been sent in to situations where our enemy was conveniently elsewhere. Other things too—ships that go missing and show up again without their crews; front lines that moved without battles being publicised; top secret information that wound up leaked only for us to snatch a pyrrhic victory from a pool of blood. There were so many others... we had to do something..."

"Couldn't you tell someone?" Phil asked cautiously.

"Who? The Enquiry?" Diz tilted his head in a faux innocent gesture, eyes haunted and dark with loathing. "And be discovered and terminated after we tried so hard to escape?"

"You said there must have been others." Feeling like the worst kind of gossip, Phil cast anxiously between Viz and Quiz, neither of whom would look a him. "Did none of them ever tell?"

"I imagine, if they did, they found themselves in the Oubliette like us. Dissent is dangerous—a threat to morale is a threat to the war effort itself. A story like that would be discredited by the papers before you could finish telling it."

In his ears, the pulse of his heart was like beaten velvet.

"So what did you do?"

"We all agreed," Diz said in a tone so absolutely reasonable Phil knew the conclusion he had reached was obligated to be completely insane. "Well, Viz, Quiz, and I all agreed—Champion's engineer decided against coming along. We agreed... The Enquiry is like a cancer, too widespread to remove and too powerful to kill, so we... we would have to wipe it all out. Everything. We—"

"You destroyed your own planet," Phil stated flatly.

It made sense—a few knocked dominos down the line from 'arguing about the moon' lay 'genocidal peace-keepers'. There was no doubt in Phil's mind at that point; the aliens were capable, they were well-trained. They had perfect motive for their maniac conviction that they could rid the world of malice through a campaign of murder.

Fifteen years and a hundred thousand lives had knit together it's articles of revenge. Here was retribution. Here was justice: three faintly maniacal terrorists hell-bent on destruction for the most arbitrary reasons sat around a miserable campfire. Was the tragedy contained within the deaths themselves or the uselessness of everything that followed? Would they have wanted this, those helpless dead? Perhaps. Perhaps they would have done the same.

Despite everything he'd heard, it was such an ugly thing to make sense. He was beginning to wish he'd never asked for the full story—half of it would have been fine.

"Not yet." Diz muttered, sounding a little abashed by the admission. "Our world has spent the last few millennia being fortified against whatever Alphim could throw at it. All our efforts would have hardly made a dent."

Phil blinked. He could hear his eyelids click together as they met.

"So what? You decided to go find somewhere else that sucked just as much and kill all of them? For what? Closure?"

"To secure our forces," Diz agreed quietly. "To test our weapons' capabilities. We can't go after The Enquiry until we're certain an attack will stick."

Unbidden, Phil imagined a clearing, much like the one in which they all sat. He imagined beaches like the ones he had grown up going to, the air tasting of salt and freedom. He remembered the feeling of sitting on Smiley's roof and looking out over the neighbourhood as he grew taller and it stayed the same. He imagined them and, in his mind, they burned.

Other worlds. Just another thing he'd never really thought about, another connection he'd never made.

"... How many?" He asked, watching planets form and burst into rosettes of black in the darkness where those cinder-ships had once been. He was too tired to feel horrified at the prospect, too worn-out for anything other than an abstract sense of resentment. "How many planets have you destroyed?"

"Well, as of right now, none." Not buying that for a second, Phil frowned at the alien until he continued. "I wasn't lying when I told you Earth was our first stop. The Enquiry kept us running well enough that we never stopped anywhere long enough to complete an evaluation."

The impersonal relief was not something Phil had anticipated, but it struck through his sternum like a fist knocking on a door, sending ripples through all the recriminatory things he had intended to say and leaving him wordless. Diz seemed to take this silence as a demand to explain further, and he did after some slight hesitation.

"We... underestimated how fervently The Enquiry would chase us, and the lengths they would go to to get us back." There was a note of indignation in that, which seemed madly out of place. "At first, we thought if we made it out of Empire Regulated Airspace we'd be safe, but they kept sending forces. So we left our own solar system and found a new one, but they chased us there too. Eventually we left our own galaxy altogether...

"We thought that had to be enough to stop them—even for The Enquiry, there are no maps drawn of space this far outside of our own galaxy. Cartography ships have very little interest in territory that will not be dominated by our empire. Of course, that meant we had no idea what we'd be flying in to either. There was no way for us to tell what, if anything, was really out this way; only the long-range scanners to keep us aware of objects in space and thermal sensors to tell us what sort of region we were passing through. Everything else was a guessing game. We made our own maps as we strayed further and further afield... until, eventually, our ship began to fail.

"No maintenance vessels, no wrecks to salvage, very little fuel, no other signs of life... we almost lost hope."

'Maybe you should have just quit. Maybe you should have just stopped.' There had been so many chances for everything to just Not Happen. A one in a million lottery that Earth had won.

"And then, at the very limits of our ship's capabilities, we found you. Humans."

Suddenly, it struck Phil, in a way it never had before, that the thing he was talking to wasn't human. It wasn't a difference whose vital components lay the obvious little differences like the green skin or translucent, blue bones filled with thickly pulsing veins; it was the analytical fascination in Diz's eyes as he looked at him now. It was in the way Phil felt, quite suddenly, small and foreign under the scrutiny of those black eyes. The gulf of the difference between them gaped open its maw and drank up the familiarity the closeness of the last few weeks had fostered. This was an alien and he didn't fully understand It.

(This was true for both of them.)

"And, with The Enquiry finally stuck far behind us, it was time to continue Project Vizion in the way we had originally intended.

"We had no particular design to take you specifically. As Viz said, you and the other children came in as part of one of our later plans. There was no conspiracy—you weren't observed, or specially selected, or someone we had our eye on. But you—" Witch-fingers slithered over Phil's spine. "—saw us. You left school early, wandered off, got yourself lost, and you saw us. And what's worse is, you tried to tell people you'd seen us."

'Ah, yes, that does sound like something I would do—which is to say it sounds like a perfectly reasonable reaction.'

"So we had to take you. From there, for the sake of restraining our influence to one area, we moved to watching your school. We took your three friends to prevent them causing a stir.

"The four of you were perfect for testing human instincts. A child isn't something fully socialised—it is raw and unrefined. What you decided to do when pushed to make hard decisions under stress would reveal the core of human behaviour as a whole.

"We used the dreamscape to train you in daring escapes, each increasing in difficulty, all culminating in you getting out of the prison ward on our mothership. The challenge was intended to destabilise your sense of security so that we would be seeing your most reactionary choices, but was not impossible or unfamiliar—you always knew you had a chance. If you simply saved yourself and not your friends, we would see humanity revealed as cowardly and self-serving, unworthy of sparing...

"But you didn't do that at all. You won. You saved your friends."

He said it so almost-softly, almost-fondly—like a man whose dumb pet had performed some sweet, simple trick. The way he looked at Phil was not without affection, a twinge of warmth; it was real, Phil knew, and it did nothing to ease the sinking in his chest.

"Your decision to blow up Viz's ship was unexpected and unappreciated, but perhaps not entirely undeserved. Despite it, we really were planning on leaving. If everything had gone according to our original plan, we would be long gone by now..."

Downy reams of shade clung like soot to the world and everything in it. A bat began an investigation of the silvered, lowest boughs, a strobing bit of cloth, quieter and more frantic than any bird; heavy things invisibly shrugged their bulk through the foliage, trailing their wakes of shivers and rustles like cloaks. In the clearing itself, nobody moved. Swallowed by the encroaching darkness until only their merest impressions were left upon the black, the aliens were stone-faced monoliths, broken statues; all that remained were the curves of naked scalps, the twitches of long, bony fingers, the points of crooked elbows. They looked like gargoyles—nightmares.

The fire curled up in its earthen cradle and went to sleep. Nobody moved to relight it.

There was blame in the situation, and it found a channel as a river finds a bed; slowly, Diz turned.

"But, of course, things didn't go that way... did they, Quiz?"

Almost as though he had been waiting for this, Quiz came alive again with a howl of something shrill and negatory. Viz said and did nothing, locked in a staring competition with his own broken emblem. Diz, against all reason, smiled.

Feeling something vital turn glossy gold and chill within his diaphragm, Phil stared in to the abyss and found that it had eyes as dark and plentiful as a spider; he turned his gaze upwards, from the campfire and its many miseries, and beheld a smoke streaked sky where the damp autumn breeze had blown out all the stars.