Unaware that Phil had gone, the aliens continued their fight. Or, more accurately, Diz fought, Quiz protested, and Viz sat staring at his broken glasses like they were the only things left in the world.

Of the aliens, Viz was the only one still seated; Diz and Quiz were stood nose to nose, melded by the dark into a singular entity at war with itself. One combatant was a stealthy, sneaking, squeezing thing; the other was small and scrabbled like a rat, filled with the viciousness inherent to the trapped, digging claws into flesh and tearing with a hapless compulsion to get away.

One was Diz and one was Quiz—you can work out the rest for yourself.

Neither would cede any ground to the other, and so the subject of argument at hand tumbled about like a ball of fighting cats, every personal grievance, petty trifle, and damning indictment of character built up over decades of companionship dragged out and screamed into the forest. The opportunity for things to be resolved quietly was long gone, and the chance for resolution in general was slipping slowly off into the dark, leaving the two combatants locked with their jaws about each other's throats in a stalemate that would only end when one was broken.

Diz was determined, even in these inconsequential circumstances, that it wouldn't be him. He wouldn't break—he refused to. Breaking got you killed and Diz was far too spiteful to die.

Quiz, on the other hand, was as mortal and breakable as they came, fortified by none of his opponent's vicious will and phlegmatic bile.

"They found us very quickly, don't you think Quiz? Considering I couldn't find any sign of them just a few days ago." The green alien looked black in the dark, a knife-slash body with glaring, gleaming eyes, panting for breath between words. "How do you think they managed it?"

"What are you implying, Diz? " Quiz bridled back.

There was very little doubt in Quiz's soft-shell mind about what he was being accused over; he asked the redundant question not because he really wondered what conclusion his once-friend, once-crewmate had drawn, but because he was offering him a chance to say something else—anything else. 'Just once Diz, please, take it back just once...'

Diz did not.

He never did. He'd learnt the hard way what yielding earned you.

(Had Quiz not been distraught, he might have noticed something wrong with Diz—which is to say, more wrong than usual. A different thing that had gone wrong within the lieutenant, as opposed to the vast multitude of things which were usually wrong with the git. Despite his volume and savage words, there was none of the mania that usually ate him up in those times where rage claimed him, none of the senseless, rabid enthusiasm. He was poised, calculated, precise, deftly chipping away at Quiz's defences; the assault was deliberate and considered, a filleting knife as opposed to a cudgel. That was important but Quiz, consumed with being yelled at, missed it completely.)

"What did they promise you?" Diz asked, lowering his voice and softening it into something saccharine and poisoned. "Your old position? Did they say they would acquit you if you turned us in? You—"

Like rubber stretched past its limit, Quiz finally snapped.

"You're insane! They probably used a long-range cloaking device to hide their radio presence, you can't blame me—"

"Why should I trust you?" Diz asked, satisfaction glimmering blackly in his eyes. "Last I recall, you were the one holding me prisoner."

"Oh please," Quiz snapped. "If you'd given me anything to do in our plans these last few years, that wouldn't have happened! I want to be part of things, why would I ever hand you over to Enquiry?"

"You want to be useful. How far would you go to feel that way again, Quiz? Hm?" Diz tilted his head, having gotten precisely what he wanted. "Admit it; you would do anything. It's why you joined us in the first place— you were going to lose everything so you threw your lot in with us, but we were always going to be second best. Now, you could hand the Enquiry their two Most Wanted on a platter. Wouldn't that be useful? Wouldn't that get you back everything you left behind? All it would take is a knife in our backs—and you've just proven to be very good at that."

A long silence with the weight of amber followed, the moment in which things broke held, and suspended, and preserved in all its ugly, spider-leg-fracture glory.

For the first time in years Quiz looked at Diz—actually looked at him; through his eyes and into the twisted, fire blacked heart of his old friend. Whatever love still lay there was a mechanical thing full of biting gears, armoured in charcoal and bleeding oil; trust and loyalty smoked bitterly in their ruined castles; hope was a burned, white flag and ashes on the wind. He was not unrecognisable, and perhaps that was worse.

Shakily, Quiz did the inevitable and stepped down, feeling alone, unloved, and enraged. More than anything, he wished there was some damning refutation he could offer in defence of his character that would make the accusations go away; there weren't any, but the emptiness on his tongue, the inability to lay claim to morals better than a weasel's, wasn't the worst of it.

'You're supposed to know me better. I'm not supposed to have to defend myself to you. You're supposed to love me enough to not say those things.'

Diz was his oldest friend. He had been there every day since the beginning, since the earliest days of academy training. Diz was the one who had told Viz he could stay, who vouched for him whenever their captain's paranoia raised its ugly head. And after all of it, he still thought Quiz was a monster.

"I... I'm going to find Phil." Quiz didn't look at either of his former companions. His eyes remained fixed on his shoes as they carried him in retreat towards the shadows of the tree line. It seemed a conscious effort to stop them before he vanished entirely; on the edge of the night, Quiz paused, fists clenched tight. His voice wobbled as he spoke. "I came with you because you were my friend and I was worried you would do something stupid. Remember that Diz? Remember being friends? Sure, we've changed since then... but I'm still here. I'm not your enemy."

Face set chill and hard as stone, Diz defiantly raised his head. His lips were pressed into a thin, hard line.

"We never asked you to be here. Nobody asked you to come."

Quiz stiffened, not as though he had been struck but as though he'd suddenly stopped existing in a living capacity. Then he was gone, and only two were left around the fire. Diz deflated, his proudly set shoulders dropping an inch, and returned to his place by the dead fire, dropping heavily to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut. Viz's glasses looked up at him and solemnly asked 'what now?'

'I don't know,' he told them. 'I don't know.' That, of course, was a lie, but some things are better left as such.

Because he knew Diz better than anyone else in the universe, and he had, as always, been the only one to pick up on the thing Quiz had missed. Quiz had heard the unbottling of a lifetime's worth of hatred; Viz had heard the perfect calculations coming together to form a combination of insults that would send their weakest crew member running away to lick his wounds.

Cruel and callous though he was, Diz wouldn't lure Quiz out as some sort of sacrificial decoy, and that meant he'd been sent away to spare him something. Whatever happened tonight would be happening here. It would be happening to them and them alone.

He had a feeling he knew what it was, but he wasn't quite ready to face it yet. And so he sat, staring into his own disembodied eyes, their omnipresent gaze finally blind.

"Did you mean any of that?"

"Do I ever?" When Viz had no answer for that, Diz just sighed and stared off into the empty spaces between the trees. "Of course he didn't betray us—he was always an awful communications operator, I would have noticed the second he tried."

"So none of that mess was necessary?"

"It got him to leave."

"Will he be back?"

Very slowly, Diz's eyes dragged themselves away from the woods.

"Eventually."

We'll be gone by then; neither of them said it, but the sentiment was smoke-thick on the air. Viz cast leadenly about for something else.

"You actually told the boy."

"Of course I did. He might as well know why all this happened—it doesn't actually change anything."

Of course it wouldn't—nothing could change their lot at this stage—but there was something unnerving about having their shared history laid out in full, like walking across a beach and, just before being cut off by the tide, looking back across the beach to observe one's own footsteps. It was hearing their record being recounted before sentencing.

'On the charges of desertion, abduction, multiple counts of piracy...'

Viz returned his attention to his glasses; Diz stared blankly off into the woods. Neither looked up from their individual fascinations. If they had, they might have seen, mirrored, their own knowledge that trite reassurances, something so foolish as optimism, was a pretty lie and no better, and neither could have stood for that. In the end, they both knew that their best hope—their only hope—was that whatever happened did so swiftly, but that was just another thing that couldn't be said.

"You worked out how they found us," Viz said instead. It was a question, but he didn't feel the need to phrase it as one. Perhaps 'question' is an inaccurate term; it was a request for information he already knew Diz had.

"Yes." Diz blinked back into his body, straightening his posture back to its usual, upright rigidity. "They must have reconstructed some of the equipment they've taken from us over the years enough to observe our radiation wavelengths. They're not at all similar to anything else on Earth, so The Enquiry would have been led straight to the ship. It wouldn't have worked in space but... well, we aren't in space."

"Hm." With one finger, Viz traced the splintered, shattered edge of his glasses, pressing hard enough that the shard sliced his finger. "Everything we use operates using the same system, doesn't it?"

For a long moment, Diz was silent, as though unwilling to answer. When he spoke, his voice was deathly quiet, a doctor's apology.

"It does."

Numbness prickled out from behind Viz's sternum and crept down his arms and through his belly like moss on a statue on a grave. Space unspooled above him in an infinite, star-studded ream, the distant mouth of a well he was stuck at the bottom of, with the moon swimming placidly in ice-cold waters that would drown him before they let him escape. Instinctively, he searched for the red-tinted star that meant home, but the cosmic multitudes and his own half-blindness conspired against him to turn the sky into soup; he looked until the spinning made him sick, and he looked in vain. His blood-smeared glasses needled at his fingers.

Viz sighed. The accusing eyes of polyglass were slipped back into his pocket where they couldn't look at him anymore. He wouldn't be needing them again.

"Well," he muttered grimly. "It's a nice night for it, I suppose."

The ashes of the fire went dark at long last. Cold sank its needle talons into the world and began to pull it apart. Both men were invisible in the dark, except for the wet glisten of their unblinking eyes as they stared at each other over a battleground of years of accusations and grudges. There were a million things they could have said to each other, teaming in the isles. But Viz wasn't interested in hauling those splinters out now; there was a new line of thread woven through the thoughts of over a decade, one sown there by the past fortnight and tangled bloodily with everything he had once understood about himself and his purpose.

It didn't matter, of course—nothing could change for them now—but Diz had been the sounding board for his mind for far longer than this doomed dream.

"Do you think we were wrong?" He asked idly. The lieutenant stiffened, his eyes turning sharp.

"What?"

"Project Vizion," Viz clarified. "Were we wrong to think we could fix anything that way?"

"What's gotten in to you?" The look Diz was giving him was uncertain and unsettled, as though his captain had grown another head. There was another note in it, too—something speculative as though Viz were a puzzle to be figured out. "Isn't it a little late to be asking me that?"

Because it was late; the sun had long since set in a blaze of orange filament and the world had become a ballroom for moths and bats. It was late in another sense too; this was the sort of question it might have been prudent to ask many years ago, before they acquired criminal records in the majority of Andromeda's populated space. Before they ended up sat, cold and persecuted, in a forest on some backwater planet in a solar-system no one had ever heard of, waiting for it all to be over.

"We should never have survived that crash." Having seen the state of the ship, Viz was bluntly certain of that now. "We never would have if not for... why? Why did he do it?"

"You're not questioning the work of a decade because of the actions of one, soft-hearted child, are you?" Agitated—though, for Diz and his muted reactions, this would be a faucet easily overlooked by most—he began fiddling with the detritus surrounding him on the floor.

"Four. Four children. And that doctor woman. None of them had any cause to help us. So why did they do it?"

"I don't know." Diz selected a single leaf and inspected it in a manner which suggested he didn't want to look at Viz. Carefully, he began tearing it into even strips. "Anyway, we all agreed to spare Earth. What does it matter?"

"An agreement you almost broke, might I remind you. And I would have let you, in a heartbeat... it all seems such a waste." A waste of what, precisely, he didn't say—the saving of them, the near-destruction of Earth, the universe of violence. "We wouldn't have saved us, if we were in their shoes..."

"You're not allowed to get cold feet after you named the whole bloody enterprise after yourself." With an attitude of finality, Diz scattered the neatly shredded pieces of leaf over the remains of the fire. "It was the only way. We decided that a long time ago."

"Of course it was. I know that," Viz insisted, in a tone like knuckles rapping on a desk. "But were we wrong?"

Talking to Diz these days was like trying to nail a scuttling insect to a board in the dark using a spotlight the size of a pinhole. But this caught him; he looked up once more, and Viz saw a flash of something uncertain flit through his lieutenant's eyes like a bit of speared gossamer wing.

"What do you want from me?" Diz asked quietly. There was no mockery, no hostility; it was a genuine question. At that moment, he would have offered Viz any answer—any lie—the captain desired. Any response that would let him squirm away from the implication that they might have been leading themselves astray. To Viz, the aversion was clear as day, and yet he couldn't for the life of him figure out why; his second had never felt restraint necessary before, had never taken pains to be delicate with his critiques, would rarely even wait for invitation. He dug the needle in to that pinned wing, leaning over the remains of the fire.

"Honesty. For once."

"Of course it was... but that's how the universe works. The only thing every creature in existence shares is a right to be indiscriminately slaughtered. Nobody cared when it was us on the other end." Diz tilted his head slightly. "What would you have us do instead?"

'... Murder, criminal conspiracy, intergalactic terrorism...'

"Perhaps I should have just listened to you." Studiously, Viz began to pick blades of grass from his boots—he would at least meet his end looking neat. "Perhaps we should have just gone straight after The Enquiry."

"No," Diz disagreed sharply. "It wouldn't have been enough, we weren't prepared. It wouldn't have made a difference."

"You were far more optimistic about our chances back then."

"I wasn't optimistic, I was angry. We would have died."

"We're about to die now. We still have nothing to show for it. What a waste."

Conversation trailed off and Viz and Diz looked at each other. More specifically, Diz looked hopelessly into the well of Viz's empty eye socket—though empty is, perhaps, a false description; the hollow that had once housed an eye was filled with the glitter of computer chips, battery components, and sensors, a treasure trove with a radiation footprint as unique as a fingerprint.

Reality cascaded back over the pair and, with it, the internal sense of a ticking clock, of a heartbeat telling out an unspecified but limited number of beats, liable to stop at any time.

"Is there anything I can do?" Diz asked softly.

"No." Short of cutting off his head, there was no quick or easy way to get the circuitry out of him; there was half a mile of splinter-thin wire and twenty control chips delicately laced into Viz's brain. The electricity of all those components had been a constant companion to the workings of his mind since he'd lost the eye, and the cybernetics were as much a part of him as flesh.

In a word, he was doomed; the prospect was almost novel.

He studied his lieutenant. The mechanics in Diz's sides were purely that—mechanical, without sensory feedback or internal connection with his nervous system. No electronics, no radiation. There was no danger to him, no way to track him through the implants. If he ran, he'd likely escape undetected.

"You're dismissed, lieutenant," Viz told him gently, "you can go."

There was nothing kind about it, nor was there anything cruel. There was no change to his voice, the calm inflection of it. Nothing. It was the tone of voice a person might use to apologise to a stranger on the street, not to speak what may be their final words to someone who had been so vital for so long, someone who had been there for every disaster, every monstrosity, every agonising second of every torturous year. The impersonal altruism tasted strangely on his lips, like fresh blood from a desert-sapped wound.

The look Diz offered him in return was withering, dead-thing dry, tinged with something amused and condescending.

"No thank you," he sniffed primly. "I'm where I want to be."

"Suit yourself." Viz didn't thank him for it, though he was deeply grateful—if he had, Diz would have quarrelled, and he didn't want to argue. Not now, not when they had come to the end. "Will Quiz stay away?"

"Until it's over." This was said in a tone that was almost reassurance.

Against his will and all ordnance of reason, Viz was reassured. He wasn't alone, and there was a strange selfish satisfaction in the neatness of both guilty men dying side by side. The part of Viz that loved numbers was quietly contented by the prospect of being able to close that account at last.

But there were things to be said. Things that should have been said long since—things that stuck harshly in the alien's throat and pulled at his vocal cords, tangled in the fine fibres of him until the words couldn't be said without tearing something. But at the end of the world, what does a little gutting matter?

"Do you have any regrets?" Viz asked instead to stall for time—an unfair question, considering the circumstances and the person. Diz blew out a long breath, brow furrowed in consideration which was almost discomfort.

"I never got around to completing that new engine," he said softly at last. "I'd finished the last part for it as well, just never had time to construct it and install it in the old one's place." With something narrow and searching, he squinted at his commander. Diz did not return the question, perhaps for fear that Viz would list the whole project under a bottomless list of regrets.

Viz answered anyway. Not honestly, but honesty was not a prerequisite for conversations between them.

'I once knew you as well as I know myself... I regret that I don't actually understand you anymore.'

"There is a nebula nearby filled with compounds I've not seen before," he said instead. "I was intending to sift through it and isolate its materials for use in my studies. Some of them seemed quite interesting."

Nothing about Diz's face changed, and he did not smile, but something fond tugged at the fabric behind his eyes, the slightest twinge of affection that was more humour than anything else. Old softness, some immortal thing he kept trying to kill, mutilated and mutated but ever gone. Viz wished they weren't sat so far apart from each other.

Silence settled on them both, like incense-scented dust on the statues inside a mausoleum, made of dead roses and bones. In the distance, the unseen skyline heaved a sigh. A wind, hot as all the days of summer condensed and reeking of hot acid, billowed through the trees hard enough to rattle the branches in a single, draconic exhalation; a handful of leaves pattered over their heads, green mottled with a dour shade of amber, a confetti shower of bygone things. It was not so very late, but the hour itself—the point of time they occupied—felt old, as though every second was clocking in to do its duty for the last time.

Both soldiers were far too experienced to pretend not to recognise the signs of a ship attempting stealthy manoeuvres nearby. There was a beat where they carefully didn't look at each other and, when it passed, they both wore perfectly even expressions with all the frightened creases fastidiously ironed out.

"I... I'm glad it was you," Diz began without preamble or context. "I don't think we'd have made it this far if it had been someone else. I know we don't always see eye to eye, but I know you'd never lead me falsely—even if your insistence on moderation is infuriating. You were a good captain... I'm... I'm proud to have followed you. I wouldn't have followed anyone else."

Viz dipped his head in the barest acknowledgment, aware that any overt commentary would be taken as an attack, and any meaningful last remarks would be forced back down his throat.

How precisely could he summarise so many years of wretched desperation, of harried flight across the universe, of madness, fury, and cruelty? What is there left to say when staring down the fact that it has all been for naught?

Viz's intelligence lay in battle stratagem and the bloody viscera of warfare—not people. He had no idea what to say. But the time was upon him, and he would do his best.

"You... aren't who you used to be," he stated slowly. "And I won't say that I've never grown weary of how bitter and cruel you can be. At times, you're almost unbearable. And yet, I can't think of anyone else I'd rather be here with. I don't know where I'd be without you. Sometimes I hate the fact that you're not the man I knew years ago but...

"I'd miss you if you were gone, whatever you are now. I'm glad I met you. I'm glad we're still here."

Diz responded in kind—a simple inclination of the head. Like the owls around them settling in for their vigils, the night shuffled its vast wings and enveloped them in an air of downy resignation.

'... On all counts, this court finds the accused guilty...'

Something cracked in the undergrowth. Time's careless passing was no longer told out by the gentle susurration of sand against the bottle-neck of a glass or the tick tock of clocks, but by stealthy footsteps and broken branches.

Nerves suddenly alight, Viz stood up, full of jitters; his night vision had started to clear, and he could see the lean, bony trunks of the trees surrounding them, the ruffled satin of the canopy high above. After brushing his hands over himself to disperse a collection of burrs and twigs, he extended one to the dark blot still sat by the scorch mark on the floor, and drew it upwards until it stood as a knife-slash cut through the canvas of the world before him. At his full height, Diz was slightly taller than his commander, and at close quarters Viz had to tilt his head slightly to meet his eyes.

Together, they looked up. Past the branches with their pleated leaves, and the smoke and smog of Earth, there lay the velvety blackness of the sky, punctured with glistening stars like teeth. Transfixed by the home they had known and loved, both aliens stood in silence, mapping out the stars they knew—the ones they had been to, the ones they wouldn't visit again, the ones they had planned to venture to in the future. One of them could have drawn an intricate and expert map of them in seconds; the other knew their compositions and could have explained what their colours meant. Had there been longer, they might have said something on it, might have spent a minute or so enjoying each other's company and watching the world drift by. As it was, they looked up and felt the insignificance of their persons and the magnitude of their mistakes multiply in full; the screaming desire to exist coiled tightly in their hearts burnt brighter until it was painful, then went out altogether.

"What do you suppose Quiz will do with himself now?" Diz murmured without taking his eyes from the stars.

"Not sure." Viz clicked as he thought, subvocal components in his chest rasping over each other like wooden gears. "He did enjoy collecting those animal oddities when we were running the facility—perhaps he can find some purpose in that."

Quiet stretched out—no, that's a lie. The two stood in the clearing didn't speak to each other, but the forest around them was full of creaks and shudders, like an old house settling, it's rafters full of ghosts.

"He didn't really deserve any of what I said, did he?" Diz asked in a voice small enough that Viz almost didn't notice he'd said anything at all. There was no need to ask who 'he' was.

"No." Viz tightened his grip on the hand he had yet to let go of. "You can apologise when we see him again."

There was no judgement or blame in Viz's voice. As before, he spoke in the tones used for some casual, daytime conversation about the weather, or the menu, or something equally trite. He felt, quite suddenly, deeply, coldly calm, as though he had broken through the film of the ocean into the empty air far from any civilisation. Every breath of air was new and crisp as newly fallen snow or a fresh bank note.

Finally, with the tired fondness of an old friend, the sky let them go, and the pair looked away. They were a few inches from each other, hands still clasped between them, the last of the warmth in the world cradled in their conjoined palms. Diz's grip was bruising.

Solemnly, Viz scanned each feature of his lieutenant's face, each scale, cataloging every variance of colour in his countenance, committing to memory every moth-wing flicker of expression. Almost feverishly, Diz did the same. The breath in their lungs felt airless but vital—useless, but shared, as though they were one body.

The rustling grew louder—it came from all directions. It might have been the wind. In a more lenient world, a world with less in the way of teeth and claws, it would have been the wind.

"It's a pity the pistol died," Viz commented. "If I'd planned this a little better, I'd have kept two bullets in reserve."

The careful blankness broke and Diz's face lapsed back into a smile; a real smile, one totally devoid of the trappings of pleasantness, bitter and slightly cruel. He exhaled a laugh, singular and humourless.

"As always, it falls to me to make up for your inadequacy. What would you do without me?"

From somewhere within in his jacket, Diz withdrew two large kitchen knives, silver and wickedly sharp—much sharper than simple kitchen use necessitated. He pressed them both into Viz's hands before producing another and keeping it for himself. Three stolen knives; Viz swallowed a smile and it tasted bitter.

"Together," Diz whispered, hypnotically calm. It wasn't a contented calm, but the sailor's calm of knowing he wouldn't weather a storm and being at peace with it. His grip on Viz's hand somehow squeezed harder, fingers moulding around the bones. "We do this together, alright? Then we'll go find Quiz and figure out how to get off this planet."

There was no panic, no horror—not anymore. The comforting lies curled through the corridors of his brain and invited him to the fate that had been pursuing them since their escape from the facility as though it were some grand party. Viz squeezed the hand in his before letting it go; this was not, he supposed, such a bad way to die.

"Together," he agreed, savouring the finality—for there was something so very final about that last assertion that they would not be alone.

The bushes cracked their knuckles. Neither fugitive blinked.

"We'll be alright," Diz lied, "I promise."

Viz just smiled.

As one, they turned from each other to face the woods, which were full of eyes—hundreds of them, all pitch black, all staring unblinkingly; a hundred blank, slit-nosed faces with metal disks in their heads watching from the trees. They stood together. For a few, valiant minutes, they fought together.

And when the enemy's plasma bolts struck them, they fell together too. Side by side, they lay in the dirt, their eyes wide open.

'... Sentenced to public execution by firing squad before dawn. Long Reign The Imperial Inquisition.'


Somebody watched from the bushes. Somebody close enough to see everything, but far enough to be easily missed in the tumult. Somebody unnoticed—somebody the Enquiry personnel avoided as a river diverts about a rock in a stream. Some significant insignificance that everyone had forgotten.

It stood very still, frozen through to its core with horrified disbelief, as the tree-streaked tableau played out in flashes of gunfire. Fighting. Failing. Falling. Fallen. The very foundations of the watcher's world shuddered and wailed, but they remained silent, still as the stars above with their blazing cores.

Only when the Enquiry had departed—taking the limp forms of Viz and Diz with them—did Quiz take off running.


Phil hadn't found the road, so much as the road had found him. One minute, he'd been stumbling along through a forest that seemed increasingly determined to keep him—with brambles crawling sinuously up his legs, deceptive moss sinking his feet deep into the Earth, branches raking over his scalp with soft claws—and the next his feet were on solid ground. The tarmacked snail-trail of humanity boldly announced itself, self important and solid, and promising. Late to the party, the rain he had anticipated an hour previously had finally recognised its cue, and a light drizzle had glossed the asphalt to a shine. Phil's slow progress towards civilisation was stalked by an invisible shadow with transitory, matte footsteps.

Unbeknownst to him, he was being stalked by more than that.

Nestled securely within the fabric cavern of Phil's pocket, the treacherous remote blinked, it's red light tolling out as slowly and steadily as a heartbeat. The keepsake was a beacon; the gift—hastily given, kept in confusion, an ace, a shield that turned out worthless like so, so many schemes—had completed its metamorphosis and finally become a trap.

'It wouldn't have worked in space but... well, we aren't in space.'

'Everything we use operates using the same system, doesn't it?'

'It does.'

Phil heard something. A scuffle—no a shuffle. It was a whisper that sounded as though the wind had gained feet and risen up to walk behind him.

Then, there was a sudden jolt, a pain that numbness registered as pressure at his temple. The road gave a great, weary exhale and shrugged him off its back, and into darkness that smelled red and shadows that rose up to be his dancing partners.