Archive of Our Own

When the next truck rumbled through the portal, the noise in the intake bay doubled. A glass tank in the back of the truck was full of bright floating balls of light that made the tinkling sound of wind chimes and water—tolerable enough when there was one of them, but deafening by the truckload.

“You can’t argue that those are people,” Sjin said, pacing along the painted lines on the floor in boredom. “They can’t have brains in there. Do you think they feel pain?”

“Probably not,” said Lalna, leaning against the door of the interrogation room. “I don’t think they even know they’ve been caught.”

One of the wisps sent a thin bolt of electricity against the wall of the tank. It dissipated harmlessly against the glass. The truck came to a halt a good distance from the portal and a forklift moved forward to move the tank into place at the end of a row of similar tanks. The intake bay was massive and echoing, and not even a quarter filled with tanks and cages. At this end of the room, a few interrogation rooms were set into the wall where YogLabs employees could talk to the more sentient of their new acquisitions, but at the moment, all but one of the rooms was empty.

“It sounds like someone’s pissing into a toilet,” said Sips, not even turning around from the window of the interrogation room. As soon as he said it, it became impossible to unhear it. Sjin laughed and continued pacing.

“Piss wisps,” he said.

“You’re sure she doesn’t need help in there? Those witches aren’t talking,” Sips added, cupping his hands against the glass to get a better view into the interrogation room.

“She can handle it,” Lalna said, still leaning against the closed door.

“She doesn’t do bad cop very well,” Sips said.

“Have you ever met Nano?” Lalna said incredulously, turning to look at him.

“I’m just saying.”

“She doesn’t need help. She’s terrifying.”

“Maybe she needs a good cop,” Sjin suggested.

“I can be good cop,” Sips said. “I could bring them coffee or some shit. Think the coffee machine is working?”

Sjin and Lalna both shuddered. Across the room, the portal flickered and then brightened, the sign of something new on its way. Two YogLabs mechs stomped through, flamethrowers still smoking. They left dirty footprints full of mud and leaves on the floor as they crossed the room.

The door behind Lalna opened. He flailed and caught himself, turning. Nano stared at him grimly, then shouldered past him, closing the door behind herself.

“No luck?” Lalna asked.

“They won’t talk,” Nano said. “They say I’m not skilled enough in the art. Of course I’m not! That’s why I’m asking them questions!”

“Told you she needed a bad cop,” said Sips. “I could get those witch bitches talking in five minutes.”

Nano bristled. “Ha! I’d like to see that.” Lalna laid a calming hand on her shoulder, but she brushed it off in irritation.

“Sit back and watch a master at work. Sjin, come when I give the signal.” Sips cracked his knuckles and opened the door to the interrogation room, striding inside.

“I always do,” Sjin said, going to the window to watch.

“Give me a good reason not to stab him in the throat,” Nano said in an undertone to Lalna.

“It’ll look bad on your performance review,” Lalna replied. “Let’s go back to the lab.”

“And just leave him here?”

“Yup.”

Nano paused, looking toward the window, then grinned. “Let’s go.”

The banging on the castle door filtered into Zoeya’s dreams seamlessly enough that she didn’t wake up until the door to her bedroom burst open.

“Get up!” Rythian had blue light dripping from one hand and was using it to illuminate the floor under the bed where Zoeya had left her shoes. “Quickly! We have to run.”

“Wha—?” Zoeya said muzzily, sitting up and rubbing at her face. There was another figure in the doorway, backlit by the hall light. Was that Nilesy? What time was it, anyway?

Rythian tossed her shoes onto the bed. “Get dressed. We have five minutes.”

Zoeya obligingly took the shoes, still shaking off sleep. Rythian was fully dressed and looked like he hadn’t been to sleep yet. He went to the closet and started shoving clothes into his alchemy bag. Nilesy stepped into the room, looking awkward.

“There are giant robots out there, Zoeya,” he said. “They’ve been capturing everyone they can find. Lom saw them taking some dryads.”

“Giant robots?” Zoeya crawled out of bed and pulled open a drawer, grabbing the first clothes she could find. Her prosthetic arm was on the table, plugged in to a wall socket to charge. She unplugged it and strapped it on. “Whose giant robots? Where did they come from?”

“No idea,” said Nilesy, turning his back so Zoeya could change.

When Zoeya was all changed and had tossed some stuff in a bag, the three of them headed back downstairs. Lomadia was just outside, leaning on a broom and holding a second broom in her hand. She had an owl on her shoulder and was staring intently at a dull orange glow on the horizon.

Teep was pacing the edge of the forest, bow in hand, tail slowly swishing like an angry cat. He raised his head and sniffed the air, nostrils flaring.

“They’re nearly here,” Lomadia said urgently, tossing the second broom to Nilesy. “I can smell smoke now.”

Zoeya could smell it too. It might have been half a mile away, or even less. A loud mechanical rumbling sound was coming through the trees. “We can’t leave the animals here,” she said, turning toward the farms behind the castle.

“The fire won’t reach the castle,” Rythian said, catching her arm. “The river protects us here.”

“They’re not the ones in danger from the mechs,” Lomadia added darkly. “They only seemed to be interested in magic things.”

Nilesy mounted his broom. “They’re too close for my comfort.” His broom breezed along the ground in a slow, steady arc, rising gently.

“Where are we headed?” Zoeya asked.

“There’s a Twilight Forest portal to the north of us,” Rythian said. “We could shelter there for now.”

Lomadia mounted her own broom. “That’ll work for the short term.” She followed Nilesy. Teep melted away into the underbrush, finding his own way to the portal.

Zoeya squeezed her hand into a fist, feeling her flying ring warm up. “What do you mean, short term? Do you think there’ll be a long term?” Her feet lifted off the ground. “Who even has giant robots anyway?”

Lomadia and Nilesy had to take wide circles to ramp upward, but the flying rings took Zoeya and Rythian straight up. Zoeya was over the tree level in just a few seconds, and that’s when the view became clear.

Under the full moon, the forest was dark gray, split by the silvery river snaking through it. Very close to the east, though, a ragged line of lights marched toward them. It wasn’t a forest fire, though there were licks of flame that occasionally rose into the air. The lights were mostly electric, steady and glaring. A floodlight was shining through the trees, rolling steadily forward.

Rythian caught her eye, then moved toward the lights. Zoeya followed.

“Are you crazy?” Lomadia called to them.

“I just want to see,” Zoeya called back.

“I’ve seen. I don’t want to see anymore,” Lomadia said. “We’ll meet you at the portal.”

“Okay.” Zoeya waved to them, then hurried to catch up with Rythian. The air up here was cold, and the wind tasted like ashes.

The first mech lumbered into view, a quarter mile from the castle. It was big, like an ambulatory tank, big enough to house two or three people, although she could only see one through the wind screen. The person inside was wearing a uniform that she didn’t recognize. As she watched, it came to a halt and raised a cannon arm. It fired a ball that burst open into a net in midair. A hundred feet away, a pech, fleeing with its basket on its back, tumbled to the ground, tangled.

“Rythian,” Zoeya said.

“I saw it,” Rythian replied. His katana was in his hands.

The two of them moved down in tandem. Zoeya’s mind raced as she tried to think of what she could do to help. She didn’t like violence, but she couldn’t think of any other way to stop this mech. They probably wouldn’t listen to a reasoned debate.

The mech started forward again. Two smaller mechs, each one the size of a horse, darted nimbly around it and pounced on the pech, hauling it up and spiriting it back the way they’d come.

“Ready?” Rythian whispered.

“Don’t kill anyone if you don’t have to,” Zoeya whispered back.

Rythian split away from Zoeya, darting through the trees to the right. Zoeya went left, giving the large mech a wide berth. She couldn’t face this mech head on, but if she flanked it, she might have an advantage.

There was a familiar vwip and suddenly Rythian was on top of the mech, balanced over the windscreen, his katana in hand. Zoeya raised her robotic arm, powering up the weapons system. A ball of pure energy danced in her metal palm, lighting up the leaves around her. In the sudden light, she saw the startled face of the mech operator—a middle aged woman in orange overalls—turn her way. She released the ball of energy.

It smashed into the windscreen like a snowball, dissipating over the glass, and for a second Zoeya thought it hadn’t worked. Then the glass started to melt into slag where the ball had hit. Rythian brought up his katana and then slammed it down—not into the operator, but into the control panel. It burst into sparks. The operator, panicking, pulled a lever and tumbled out the back of the mech to escape. She scrambled to run away. Rythian and Zoeya let her go. One mech down.

Two dryads burst through the trees, bounding down the slope like a pair of startled deer. They veered to the right upon sight of the mech.

Then three more large mechs, one of them with the floodlight, came through the trees in pursuit, and Zoeya drew back a step. One of them fired nets, two at once. One of the nets tangled in a tree, but the other took down a dryad. The floodlight turned onto Zoeya, Rythian and the fallen mech.

“Zoeya,” Rythian said, but Zoeya was already squeezing her fist with the flying ring, feeling it vibrate slightly as her feet lifted off the ground.

A net arched toward her. She darted sideways and it slapped into her, a heavy bundle of rope, but didn’t tangle her. She shoved it off and kept rising into the air, Rythian following close behind.

It was barely a second before they were above the treeline and out of the range of the floodlight, but it felt like it took forever. A wretched scream rang out, sending a chill through Zoeya. She couldn’t tell if it was human or animal. She started toward the sound and Rythian caught her arm again.

“We can’t do anything for them,” he said.

“You don’t know that,” Zoeya said.

“We don’t have the resources to fight this army right now,” Rythian insisted. “How many mechs can you see down there?”

“But—” Zoeya stared at the line of mechs—at least a dozen, and that was just in the immediate vicinity—and sighed, the fight draining out of her. “I don’t like this.”

“Neither do I.” Rythian tugged gently on her arm. “Let’s meet up with Nilesy and Lomadia. We can think of a plan.”

The two of them slipped through the trees, rising higher as they went. There was smoke rising from Blackrock Castle, and Zoeya could see a mech standing outside the front door. Two people in orange coveralls were carrying the condenser out of the castle. The animals in the pens were milling in confusion but seemed unharmed.

They kept going, flying further into the darkness, away from the smoke and noise. The Twilight Forest portal announced itself with a soft purple glow from the forest floor.

Zoeya touched down on the humus next to the portal. The red and yellow flowers that surrounded hadn’t survived the hard frost of a few weeks earlier and were now nothing but dry brown stalks, but the portal remained, a rippling pool of water that was too deep to see the bottom.

Far in the distance, Zoeya heard an engine roar. She looked over her shoulder, feeling her heart break.

“We’ll be back,” Rythian said, catching her expression.

“Yeah.” Zoeya stepped forward, and before her toes even touched the water, she felt the portal take hold of her—

—A feeling like falling from a great height—

—A hard wrench of gravity reversing, and the ground becoming the sky—

—and she was standing on dead leaves in a dim, humid forest. She took in a breath of what should have been clear, vegetation-rich air and instead choked on the smell of exhaust and burning coal. Someone grabbed her arm and yanked her sideways.

“Get down,” Lomadia hissed, pulling Zoeya into some raspberry bushes. Zoeya landed on her butt and stared around in confusion. Nilesy was crouched next to them.

Just ahead of them, fifty feet from the portal, the forest had been sheared off like someone had bitten it in half. The tall trees and rich soil ended abruptly at the edge of a quarry. A conveyor belt carried loads of crumbled vinteum ore and amber bearing stone up into a giant macerator. More mechs stomped around, their footsteps sending vibrations through the forest floor that Zoeya could feel in her bones.

The enemy had beaten them here.

“I’m busy,” Honeydew grumbled when the door to his office burst open. “Read the sign!”

Xephos strode into the room without stopping. “Come on. I have something to show you.”

“Did you read the sign?”

“Something about a dwarf at work,” Xephos said, stopping next to his desk. “Good to see that the behavior modification implant is working. I expected you to be napping.”

“I can’t take a break now. I’m on a streak,” said Honeydew. “Ah, fuck.”

Xephos leaned over the desk to look at his computer screen and his pleased expression turned exasperated. “Tetris.”

“Look at that.” Honeydew jabbed his finger at the L-shaped piece that had landed in the wrong spot. “I had my all time high score and you distracted me. Do you know how long I’ve been playing this?”

“On company time?” Xephos asked.

“Three hours,” Honeydew said as if he hadn’t spoken. “Three hours, Xephos! Look at my score!”

“Doesn’t matter.” Xephos closed Honeydew’s laptop, narrowly avoiding squishing the dwarf’s fingers. “Get up. I have to show you something. You’ll like it, I promise.”

Honeydew rubbed at his eyes. “I’d better,” he grumbled under his breath, pushing back his chair.

Xephos bounced out of the office again, full of energy. Honeydew followed at a more sedate pace into the lobby, which was bustling with activity. The noise echoed off the tiled marble floors and high ceiling. A network of colorful lines ran off down various hallways, each color leading in a different direction.

“I’ve never seen it so busy in here,” Honeydew said to Xephos as they walked, following a purple line in the floor. Two testificates in lab coats rushed past them with clipboards.

“It’s the new venture,” Xephos said, looking very pleased with himself. “We’ve doubled our assets already, and you should see what some of my scientists are working on.”

“Magic, yeah? I never had a head for all that woo woo crap.” Honeydew continued along at a stroll, forcing Xephos to keep hanging back to keep pace with him. “Or the technical sciencey crap either. To be honest, I’m just good at digging holes.”

“And that’s exactly what I need from you.” Xephos grinned at him, sweeping a hand forward as they approached a set of double doors. The doors slid open and let them into a glaringly bright hallway, part of the new addition to the facility.

“Digging?” Honeydew perked up. On the right side of the hall, heavy reinforced windows looking down onto large slickly tiled rooms full of scientists. In one, someone in large mech armor was fighting some sort of magical tree monster. A pile of dismembered tree limbs sat in the corner, indicative of the fate of previous tree monsters.

Xephos stopped in front of a heavy metal door and tapped a code into a keypad there. The door ground upward and the two of them ducked under it, into a small lab.

The lab’s shiny new surfaces were at odds with the mess on every table. A lab bench was covered in stone disks, some of them carved with different colored runes. A sack full of chicken feathers sat on the floor. A block of sculptor’s clay was half-unwrapped on the counter by the door, next to a row of bottles of different colored potions and a brewing stand.

“What’s all this?” Honeydew squinted into a long tray of seedlings that were sprouting under a sunlamp.

“Aum, I think,” Xephos said distractedly. “Or blue orchids or something. I can’t tell them apart. Here, look at this.”

Honeydew started forward, then leapt back with a yelp when a figure materialized ahead of him with a small popping sound. Lalna, seeming just as startled by his yelp, flinched away from him. The bucket of glowing liquid in his arms sloshed, soaking his t-shirt and lab coat.

“Jesus,” Honeydew said, clutching at his chest. “Where the hell did you come from?”

“I could have materialized right inside you!” Lalna said, horrified. “Read the sign!” He freed a hand from the bucket and pointed at the floor, where someone had marked out a lopsided circle with masking tape and had written DO NOT ENTER: TELEPORTATION ZONE.

“Is that… could that happen?” Honeydew edged away from the circle.

Lalna stepped out of the circle and set the bucket down on the counter, then peeled his wet shirt away from his chest, grimacing. “In theory.”

Sjin popped into existence behind him and made a startled “whup!” noise when he saw them. Unlike Lalna in his jeans, t-shirt and lab coat, Sjin was wearing some sort of formal blue robes with gold stitching.

“I’m showing Honeydew around,” said Xephos. “Tell us what you’re up to.”

Sjin held up his right hand, which was wreathed in white flame. “We’ve been teleporting back and forth to the new worksite to get some supplies. Liquid etherium doesn’t occur naturally here and we haven’t started importing it yet.” He held up his other hand, which was holding a fistful of dripping wet flowers. “Wakeblooms don’t grow around here either, but I’m going to change that.”

“You can just teleport wherever you want?” Honeydew asked. He reached out and waved his hand through the white flames on Sjin’s hand. It didn’t feel like anything at all.

“I can only teleport somewhere I’ve already set my mark,” Sjin said. “I have my mark set here and Lalna set his in the forest, so we just teleport each other back and forth.”

“What’s the new site like? I haven’t been there yet.”

“I can send you if you want.” Lalna held up a hand.

“No, no, I’m okay.” Honeydew backed away. “I think I’d rather walk.”

“It’s a long walk,” Lalna said with a laugh. “It’s a few thousand miles away.”

“It’s nice,” Sjin said. “Lots of trees and fresh air. They have animals I’ve never seen before. They’ve got weird tree spirits and floating lights, and you should see the giant snakes.”

“Giant snakes?”

“Nagas,” said Xephos excitedly. “We’re bringing in a specimen to take apart. They’re the size of busses and they can eat through anything.”

“And you’re bringing it here,” Honeydew said flatly.

“It’ll be anesthetized,” Xephos said. “And once the surgery is done, we’ll put it down. There’s no risk. We’re doing this with every new thing we find.”

“Gosh, it’s a good thing we have someone who enjoys doing exploratory surgery on all these living creatures,” Honeydew said. Lalna looked uncomfortable. Xephos shot Honeydew a frown and cleared his throat.

“Sjin brought up a good point earlier,” he said. He reached into a cardboard box full of silvery blue powder and took a fistful of the stuff, then let it rain back into the box. “We don’t have a steady source of reagents for these spells, and this is just one of the different systems of magic supported by this ecosystem. Ars Magica alone uses tons of vinteum ore and chimerite and moonstone. You know how you get moonstone? You mine it from meteorites. How can we rely on that? I want to go right to the source for that and set up a mining base on the moon.”

“Meteors don’t come from the moon.”

“Don’t question the logic of magical rocks. And don’t even get me started on sunstone. Guess where that comes from,” Xephos said. “We’ve set up a few basic quarries at the new site, but it’s not going fast enough. What do you think of a orbital mining laser?”

“Now you’re talking my language,” Honeydew said.

It was relaxing out in the forest. The altar was far enough from the YogLabs outpost that the sound of machinery was only the faintest distant hum. Nano knew there were mechs surrounding this section of the forest to keep watch over the locals, but at the moment they seemed to be keeping their distance. Lalna and Sjin had been in and out, finding materials for their own research, but they seemed to be done with that for now. She was alone.

She’d made witch’s chalk from the recipe she’d managed to pry out of the witches she’d interrogated, and had gotten a spell book from a raid on a witches’ circle. There were a lot of gaps in her knowledge, but she was pretty sure she’d be able to make something happen eventually.

Nano sat back on her heels, admiring her handiwork. She’d made it halfway around the circle so far, laboriously copying runes from the spell book. A cool breeze lifted the hair on the back of her neck. She’d recently cut it chin length with an undercut, and it was so much lighter than the heavy curtain she used to have. She didn’t miss it.

The red cloth over the altar flapped in the breeze, and one corner flipped up over the jet-black skull she’d set on top. Nano stretched, rolling her shoulders. It was a cool mid-autumn day, but in the sun it was very warm. Birds were singing and a wisp was bobbing lazily over the wildflowers in the field. She leaned over the runes again.

Somewhere nearby, a mech engine whined. Nano lifted her head, frowning. They shouldn’t have been this close.

The whining continued, like an engine struggling, and then there was a crash of something heavy falling through branches. Nano leapt to her feet, drawing her needlegun. Someone shouted “They’re—” and then was cut off.

Nano flicked on her radio with one hand while breaking into a jog. Wildflowers whipped against her legs and she narrowly avoided twisting her ankle in a rabbit hole.

“The locals are moving in on the southeast corner,” she said into the radio. “Request backup immediately.” She reached the edge of the field, where the first trees rose up to blot out the sun. “I think they might have taken out a mech.”

The radio murmured acknowledgement. It suddenly seemed too loud in the quiet forest. Nano turned the radio off, moving warily. She could smell smoke.

The mech was fifty feet into the woods, flat on its back. One of its legs had been sheared off at the knee, and the wind screen on the front was shattered. The operator, whoever it had been, had already dissolved into sludge. Clones never lasted long after death. There was a crossbow bolt buried deep in the head rest, which suggested the cause of death.

Nano peered up into the trees around her, ducking down behind the mech. She couldn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean anything. This new magical land had taught her not to make any assumptions.

Something moved in the trees and she jerked her gun up, but it was only a zombie. It had probably been a testificate once, though it was missing half its face now. She aimed at it, but before she could pull the trigger, gunfire broke out maybe a hundred yards to the south. The zombie turned toward the noise and ambled off.

Nano followed. She shot the zombie in the back of the head and ran past its corpse. The gunfire continued in short bursts.

She reached the edge of the trees again, at the end of a dirt road that had been churned up by construction machinery over the course of the past week. Fallen trees lined both sides of the road, and in the middle, a mech was being besieged by a masked man and a woman with some sort of pulse rifle attached to her arm. A second mech, further down the road, was under attack by two people on—were those brooms?

The windscreen shattered on the mech closest to them, but before the masked man could bring down his katana, two crossbow bolts zipped out of the trees near Nano and thunked into the cockpit. The clone dissolved. The woman with the gun arm whirled around.

“Teep, I told you not to kill!” she said.

“I don’t think they’re really people,” said the masked man, sheathing his katana. “Not the way they dissolved like that.”

Something came out of the trees wielding a crossbow, and Nano gaped. It was tall and scaled and green, with a long, sinewy tail, and for all intents and purposes it looked like a nine-foot-tall velociraptor with, apparently, opposable thumbs. Were there things like that in the woods all along and she hadn’t known? Holy shit, she was going to need to increase the security detail.

“I don’t care,” the woman said. “We’re better than that.”

With a roar, three mechs and an armored truck turned the corner at the other end of the road, coming toward them at quite a clip. Backup had arrived. The woman, man and…dinosaur…sprinted for the side of the road. The other mech crashed to its knees and then flat onto its face. The two people on brooms rose up into the air. They might get away before the cavalry got close enough.

Nano holstered her needlegun and took out the portal gun. Lalna laughed at her for taking it everywhere she went, but she found it useful. You never know when you might need it. She shot one portal into the center of the road, and the other after the fleeing attackers.

One of the attackers, the man, fell through the portal she’d set and came popping out of the one in the middle of the road. She dismissed the portal underneath him and he crashed into the dirt. The woman turned back, looking shocked. Nano aimed a portal at her, but before she could pull the trigger, she saw the dinosaur turn its head directly in her direction.

Fuck.

It flowed down the road toward her in a dead run, its tail straight out behind it for balance. Nano shot a portal into the trunk of the tree next to her and the other portal into the abandoned mech and dove inside, falling into the goopy mess the dead clone had left behind. She got her hands on the controls and wrenched back on the yoke, spinning the cockpit around to face the dinosaur.

Bullets rang out as the other mechs and truck got into range. Normally this mech would be bulletproof, but not with its shattered wind screen. The dinosaur had stopped and was drawing a bead on her with the crossbow. Nano didn’t even have time to aim. She squeezed the trigger on the yoke.

It was too late for both of them. The gun arm of the mech fired a pellet that snapped open like a parachute, except made of net. The dinosaur fired at the same moment. The net slammed into the dinosaur, wrapping around him and knocking him to the ground, but Nano didn’t see it. The crossbow bolt hit her directly in the eye, snapping her head back. For the briefest of moments, there was pain.

And then a gush of liquid, and Nano sat up, sputtering. Cryogenic slush drained out of the cloning pod around her. Bright lights glared down on her from overhead. She rubbed at her eyes with pruny fingers.

A scientist leaned over her with a frown. “The natives are restless, hmm?” he said, checking something off on a clipboard. “Let me get you some clothes.”

The atmosphere in Blackrock castle was funereal. Everyone sat inside of Teep’s lookout tower in defeated silence.

Rythian blamed himself. If he’d been more on top of things, he could have avoided that portal, and if Teep hadn’t run out to help him, he never would have been caught by the enemy. Zoeya hadn’t wanted to retreat and honestly neither had he, but they just weren’t powerful enough to stand up to a barrage of bullets. The five of them against two mechs was fine. Four against four was another story. If they’d stayed, they would have been caught or worse, and then where would they be.

It didn’t make Rythian feel any better.

“So now what?” Zoeya said, breaking the silence. “How do we rescue Tee?”

“We figure out where they’re holding him, I guess,” said Lomadia.

“Fighting them isn’t going to work for us,” Rythian said. “We’ll need to be sneakier next time.”

“Where could they be holding him, though?” Zoeya said. “That compound is tiny. They couldn’t fit all of those mechs and trucks in there plus so many prisoners…” She shrank a little, her voice getting small. “Do you think they’re really keeping the prisoners alive?”

“Yes,” said Rythian firmly, though he honestly had no idea. “They must be.” It was impossible to think otherwise.

“They must have a portal,” said Nilesy. “Zoeya’s right. They can’t fit everyone in there. They have their main base elsewhere.”

“Where, then? Portals don’t just go to the Nether and the Twilight Forest anymore. They could go anywhere in the world,” Lomadia said. “They could literally be on the other side of the planet.”

“That would require a lot of power, though,” Zoeya said. “Nether and Twilight Forest portals work in weird magical ways, but portals between two places in the overworld have to be powered, and the further apart they are, the more power they take. They’d need a bajillion nuclear reactors to power something going that far.”

“Power,” said Rythian, sitting upright. An idea was forming. “What kind of power?”

“Everything takes redstone flux these days,” Zoeya said with a shrug. “It could be anything running it. If I had to guess, it’d be a reactor, though. Solar and wind turbines just don’t provide enough power for something on that scale.”

“If we disabled their power source, they wouldn’t be able to power any portals at all,” said Rythian. “They wouldn’t be able to come back.”

“Not until they fixed it,” Zoeya said slowly.

“Unless we made it unfixable,” said Nilesy, starting to sound excited. “I’m pretty good at messing stuff up. Let me in there with a bucket of water and I guarantee their reactor will be beyond repair.”

“We’d need to go through their portals to get to their main headquarters,” Zoeya said. “They probably watch those.”

“Haven’t you watched any action movies? You sneak in on one of their trucks,” Nilesy said. “How skilled are you at clinging to the bottom of a moving truck like a monkey?”

“There’s one problem,” said Lomadia. “If we break the reactor while we’re on the other side, we can’t come back.”

Silence fell again. Everyone exchanged looks. Nilesy’s face was falling. Zoeya caught Rythian’s eye, and he could see a hard glint there.

“These people aren’t just hurting us. If we could get rid of them, even if just temporarily, we could give this whole region a chance to arm themselves before they came back. If it means saving the lives of the people who live around here, I’m willing to take that chance,” she said.

“There’s no way we could leave Teep in their hands,” Rythian added. “I’d rather be over there with him than over here without.”

Nilesy was looking back and forth between the two of them. “And hopefully none of us will get stuck over there,” he said. “We’ll figure out a way. Right?”

“We’ll try to think of something,” said Lomadia.

Lalna stood in the hallway, peering through the reinforced glass at the lab below. A scientist in a white lab coat was vivisecting a snake that was easily the size of a train car. Each shiny green scale was larger than the scientist’s hand. Its insides were bright red.

“They were taking down mechs with swords?” Sips said dubiously from beside Lalna. “Are you sure this wasn’t one of your animes?”

“This wasn’t one of my animes,” Nano said in disgust. “I wasn’t the only witness, either. And they didn’t just have swords. One of them had some sort of plasma cannon.”

“And two witches on broomsticks,” Sjin said.

“What, are you calling me a liar?” Nano turned away from the window toward them.

Lalna stepped back from the window, putting himself firmly between Nano and Sjin. “It’s not like we haven’t seen weirder things,” he said.

“I will curse you, Sjin. Don’t think I won’t,” said Nano.

“Yeah?” Sjin faced her, grinning. “Want to see my newest spell? I call it firestorm.”

“Guys,” Lalna said, holding up both his hands to keep the two of them apart. “I will disarm you both if I have to.”

“Why do you have to meddle, goggle boy?” asked Sips. “Who made you the babysitter?”

“Last time you three were together unsupervised, there was an attempted murder,” Lalna said. “And now you all know magic.”

“Are you saying you’re afraid for Nano’s safety?” Sjin asked. Nano growled.

“I have a poppet with your blood, Sjin. You don’t want to know what I can do with that,” she said.

“You don’t even know what you can do with that, because the witches won’t talk,” said Sjin.

“Jesus Christ,” said Lalna, stepping bodily between Nano and Sjin as Nano moved forward. “Sjin, she doesn’t need magic to cut off your balls while you’re sleeping.”

“And I will, too,” said Nano. Lalna shot her a warning look.

“What a guy,” Sips said. “You’re such a good guy, Lalna. I don’t believe what anyone says about you.”

“He’s not always a good guy,” said Sjin.

“Sure he is,” said Sips. “We keep his bad side locked up.”

They all looked down into the room. The scientist, his scrubs bloody from the vivisection, was being led out of the room in handcuffs. A giant bloody eggsac lay on the table next to the naga’s body, full of eggs.

The ender pearl was a quivering, rubbery ball in Zoeya’s hand. She kept having the odd urge to squeeze it until it popped, but they were such an annoyance to harvest that she resisted.

The compound was lit by floodlights and patrolled by a pair of mechs. They couldn’t attack the mechs this time, or else they’d alert the enemy, so they had to be sneaky. Zoeya pressed her back against the wall, listening to the heavy footsteps of the mech stomp past her hiding spot.

She couldn’t see the mech, so she had to trust that it was taking the same path that it had been taking. She was wedged behind a crate, in the junction of two walls. The giant metal doors to the building were closed, but there was a grate inset into the door that an ender pearl could easily fit through.

The footsteps paused twenty feet away, then started again, the noise retreating around the side of the building. Zoeya squeezed out from behind the crate and burst into a sprint, pounding across the pavement to the doors. She only had five seconds before the next mech was going to come into view at the other end of the building.

She reached the doors with a second to spare, barely stopped herself from slamming into them. She pushed the ender pearl between two bars and braced herself. The ender pearl burst like a rotten orange on the floor, and with a vwip, Zoeya teleported through the grate just as the second mech turned the corner.

Rythian was waiting inside the grate. He grabbed her arm and yanked her away from the door before she could even get her bearings. They ducked behind a shelving unit as the mech stomped past the door.

“Everything okay?” Zoeya whispered.

“So far,” Rythian breathed, his eyes fixed on the grate. Lomadia was due to come through next.

Zoeya took the chance to look around the room. It was a wide storage room with poured cement floors and corrugated metal walls. One end of the room was taken up by a massive portal that shimmered purple. Painted lines on the ground led right up to the portal. The floor was dirty with tire tracks and muddy footprints. The shelves here were filled with metal crates. There were no people here.

Rythian eased past Zoeya, heading for the grate again. Zoeya heard footsteps slapping across the ground outside and then Lomadia was shoving an ender pearl through. Rythian dragged her back to their hiding spot.

“As soon as Nilesy’s through, we’ll run for the portal,” said Rythian when they were back in hiding. “I want to go first because we don’t know what’s on the other side of it yet.”

“Be careful,” Zoeya said. “Don’t fight anyone. Just come back through.”

He peeled off a glove and held it up. “I’ll throw this back through the portal within ten seconds if it’s all clear. If it doesn’t arrive, don’t come through.”

“And then what?” Zoeya said. “Do we just leave? We can’t let them capture you too.”

“We went over this already,” Rythian said. “If I get caught over there, I’ll do everything I can to shut down the portal.”

Footsteps outside again. Lomadia jumped up and grabbed Nilesy when he came through.

“Promise me you won’t come through if I don’t throw the glove through,” said Rythian to Zoeya.

“I’m not letting you martyr yourself,” Zoeya said. “But I promise.”

The mech footsteps rumbled past. Rythian met Zoeya’s gaze, then nodded and slipped out from behind the shelves. He crept across the floor to the portal, then stepped through without looking back.

“If he doesn’t give us the signal, I’m going after him,” said Zoeya, approaching the portal.

“Gotcha,” said Lomadia, following, with Nilesy right behind.

A glove flew through the portal and slapped onto the floor. Zoeya and Lomadia exchanged a glance and headed through.

If Zoeya was asked to describe an evil science corporation, she would probably describe YogLabs exactly. It just had that evil science look, with the antiseptic white tiled floors and cold fluorescent lighting. The hallway she was in right now had a line of yellow and black striped paint running along the wall. She was hoping this meant she was getting close to something important.

They had split up just inside the portal. First priority was finding the prisoners. Second was finding the power plant. So far Zoeya hadn’t run into any YogLabs employees, but she wasn’t sure what she would do if she did. She knew she wouldn’t be able to hurt anyone, and wasn’t really confident in her ability to talk her way out of a situation.

The hall ended in a metal door. The sign on it said DANGER!!--ACQUISITIONS CONTAINMENT--DANGER!!!!

“Sounds promising,” Zoeya murmured. She stepped forward on the pressure pad, but the door just beeped in a discouraging way.

There were small glass windows on either side of the door. She peered through at the dark hallway beyond. There was no gap to put an ender pearl through, but she still had her robot arm. She backed away from the door and lifted her arm. An orb of plasma queued up.

It hit the glass with a dull whump. The glass showed char marks but did not melt. It must have been reinforced in some way. She queued up another one and shot it again, then again.

On the fourth time, the glass started to drip, and after another few times, she had burned out a hole big enough to throw a pearl through. She pitched the pearl through, careful not to break the pearl in the smoldering glass—the thought of ending up halfway inside melted glass was horrifying.

The pearl broke on the floor on the other side of the door, and Zoeya was suddenly standing there. She held out a hand to the wall to steady herself, then froze at the sound of a distant cry.

It was coming from down the hall. She broke into a run, down the hall and through another set of double doors. These ones opened at a push.

She was in a hallway lined with glass cages. A half dozen dryads were in the cage closest to the door, sitting on the tiled floor. The next cage down held a few peches that had been parted from their baskets. After that, a cage of wisps.

The dryads brightened when they saw her. Zoeya approached their cage. There was no clue anywhere to how the cages might open. The walls were featureless and there wasn’t even a door to the cage.

“Do you know how to open this?” she said to the dryads. There was a round of headshaking.

She could melt the glass, but her arm didn’t have enough charge to do that for every cage in this hallway. There had to be a lever or a keypad somewhere, but she couldn’t see any.

She started down the hallway, passing the pech and the wisps and then a few cages of imps and mana creepers and kobolds and red caps. The end of the hall took a sharp left turn toward more cages, but still no sign of a lever. She kept going down that hall, then through another set of doors.

Zoeya came to a dead stop on the other side of the doors. She was in a hallway that overlooked a massive room. A giant glass cage in the center of the room was suspended over the floor. A walkway stretched out to the cage, which seemed to only have one occupant: a blond man, maybe in his late twenties or early thirties, sitting on the edge of a cot. He was wearing a set of medical scrubs and was reading a book.

Okay. He was clearly a prisoner, but unlike the others, it looked like he’d been here a while if they’d given him a book. The security measures seemed a little extreme. What had he done to get thrown in here? Was he dangerous, or did he just know too much?

A sign on the window in the hallway read DO NOT TAP ON THE GLASS. Zoeya did, and the man looked up. She pointed at him, then gave him an exaggerated shrug. He hesitated, then pointed to the end of the hallway she was in.

She walked to the end of the hallway. Just on the other side of the doors, she found a door to the right that led to a stairwell leading down. The stairs took her to the walkway that stretched out to the cage. She moved carefully, knowing that there could be increased security around here, but she still didn’t see anyone.

Zoeya crossed the walkway to the cage. The floor fifty feet below them seemed very far away, lost in shadows. The man came to the glass door of the cage, peering out at her curiously. He was tall, but not taller than Rythian. His hair was messy, like he ran his hands through it a lot and probably didn’t have access to a mirror.

“Uh, hey,” she said, waving at him awkwardly. “What are you in for?”

He reached out and tapped the door, where there was a plexiglass disk. She reached out and touched it. It moved under her fingers, and she realized she could swing it out of the way to reveal a mesh screen that she could talk into.

“Can you control metal with your brain?” she asked.

“I, uh.” He looked like he’d been caught flat-footed. “What?”

“Is this a Magneto situation here? Or is a Loki one? Or Hannibal Lecter? Or Khan? Or, uh…I can’t think of any more people in glass cells but I’m sure they exist. My point is, are you a supervillain?”

“No, of course not,” he said, shaking his head and holding up his hands in what was probably meant to be a gesture of harmlessness, but only served to show her a weird assortment of scars, as if he’d punched his way through glass once. “I’m nothing like that. I used to work here, but I was a—I was a whistleblower.”

“I knew it,” she said. “You knew too much, right? They couldn’t let you leave alive, but they still needed your expertise?”

He smiled. For some reason, it didn’t seem as reassuring as it should have been. “Yeah, that’s it.”

Zoeya hesitated. Something just didn’t seem right about this. Maybe it was his eyes, which were a rust brown, almost red color, and which didn’t smile when his mouth did. Or maybe it was the way his emotions seemed a step behind his reactions, like they were being poorly translated. But he was a prisoner of YogLabs, and any enemy of her enemy was an enemy of…no wait, that wasn’t right.

“You’re here to free the other prisoners, aren’t you?” he said. “I know how you can get them out.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“Let me out,” he replied.

She bit her lip. Was she making a terrible mistake?

“Do you know where the YogLabs reactors are?” she said.

“I can show you where they are,” he replied.

She couldn’t waste any more time on this. Taking a deep breath, Zoeya nodded and stepped away from the door, queuing up a ball of plasma on her robot arm.

Nilesy skulked down the hallway, broom in hand. If anyone asked, he was going to pretend to be janitorial staff. Though if he had to guess, they probably had some sort of cleaning robots in here. It seemed like the kind of place that used cleaning robots.

YogLabs was a maze. He wasn’t even sure if he’d already been down this hall before. Every so often he’d get to a lounge or a sitting area with a nice water feature or something, and he would be pretty sure he hadn’t seen that before, but then there would be more hallways with doors leading into biohazard containment rooms or weapons testing chambers or whatever that he knew he’d seen already. How many biohazard containment rooms could one place have?

He hadn’t seen a single person, which wasn’t that surprising considering the time of night. It was quiet enough in here that he was feeling pretty secure, which meant he was completed unprepared when he turned the corner and ran into two men who were coming out of a room marked “Magical Regulation Enforcement.” Below that, a handwritten note read CHEAT POLICE.

“They make these drinks with little paper umbrellas as a garnish, and I just—” The first man, a tall, pale guy with a mop of black hair, stopped when he saw Nilesy. “Hey, who’s this piss wisp? The cheat police are closed for the night. Come back tomorrow.”

“Oh, me?” Nilesy clutched his broom. “I’m just… cleaning. The floors.” He glanced down at the spotless tile. “The robots are charging so I’m just, uh, filling in for them.”

The two men exchanged a glance, and then the shorter of the two slung an arm around Nilesy’s shoulder. “Where do you normally work? We haven’t seen you around.” He guided Nilesy, gently but firmly, down the hall. The other guy took his place at Nilesy’s other side, blocking all avenues of escape.

“I worked in the—the p-pool,” Nilesy stuttered, praying that the place actually had a pool. Surely it must. “Cleaning it. At night.”

“With your broom,” said the shorter man. He had an impressive mustache.

“I have other tools,” said Nilesy defensively.

“You know, we were looking for a pool boy,” said the taller man. “How are you at making margaritas? It’s a key skill for a pool boy to have.”

“I can make a mean margarita,” said Nilesy. What the hell. He was well and truly caught by this point, so he might as well go along with it.

“Great,” said the shorter man. “What about daiquiris? I love strawberry daiquiris.”

“My daiquiris are phenomenal.”

“We can’t just take you at your word, though.” The taller man opened a door ahead of them, letting the two of them through. “You might just be lying to get the job. We don’t like lying, cheating scum around here.”

“To the pool boy interview chamber?” said the shorter man.

“You read my mind, Sjin,” said the taller man. “We have a rigorous pool boy interview process. We can’t hire just anyone.”

Lalna sat in the middle of the crafting altar, paging through his compendium. He’d spent far too long trying to connect a series of essence conduits from the obelisk to the crafting altar, and it just wasn’t working, so he was taking a break. He probably should go to bed, but he never liked to leave a problem unsolved. Anyway, Sjin was off doing stupid shit with Sips, and Lalna had to take advantage of the quiet.

He heard a door open nearby. Speak of the devil. “Sjin, come fix this for me,” he called, not looking up from his book.

Silence. Lalna rolled his shoulders and stretched, working out a crick in his neck. How long had he been working on this? It was well past midnight. “Sjin?”

There was a whisper of noise behind him, and then an arm wrapped around his neck, yanking him backward against someone’s chest. Lalna made a gurgling sound, clutching at the arm, but froze when something cold and hard pressed against the side of his head.

“Hands down,” breathed a man’s voice in his ear.

Lalna reluctantly let go of the man’s arm and let his hands drop, although the pressure against his neck was uncomfortably tight. Who could have gotten this deep into the facility? There were safety measures in place.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Quiet. Get up.” His captor hauled at him and Lalna scrambled awkwardly to his feet. His captor seemed to be slightly taller than him, so he had to stay up on his toes to keep from strangling himself.

“I think you made a wrong turn somewhere,” Lalna said, fighting the urge to pry at the man’s arm again.

“I’m here about a dinosaur,” said the man, urging Lalna toward the door. Lalna shuffled forward.

“A dinosaur? I didn’t do anything to any dinosaurs.” Someone had been talking about dinosaurs recently, hadn’t they? Was it Nano?

“He’s green and scaly. Maybe fifteen feet from head to tail.”

“Ohhh.” The mental image of the giant naga being dissected on the table came to him. Could that be classified as a dinosaur? It did look pretty prehistoric.

The man’s arm tightened. “You know what I’m talking about.”

“Okay, look.” Lalna held up his hands, pushing back against the persistent force that was moving him toward the door. “You’re not the first person to make this mistake. He’s a divergent clone, okay? I’m a completely different person from him. That man you saw vivisecting your dinosaur wasn’t me at all.”

The man behind him inhaled quickly, and the hard thing against his neck dug in with enough force to make a tendon under his skin creak alarmingly. “You vivisected him,” the man said, his voice dangerously empty.

“No, that’s what I’m saying. I didn’t—” Lalna stopped. “Are you sure your dinosaur was male? Because I saw eggs.”

There was a pause.

“It can be hard to tell with reptiles,” Lalna said.

“Show me where you keep your prisoners,” the man ground out, avoiding the question entirely.

“Let go of my neck,” Lalna replied. “I can’t walk like this.”

The hard thing against his neck shifted. The man brought it into Lalna’s line of sight. It was a wand, capped with gold.

“One hit with this will turn your bones to ashes,” said the man. “It’ll be excruciating and it won’t kill you for a while. Don’t try anything.”

He unwound his arm from Lalna’s neck. Lalna rubbed at his throat and glanced over his shoulder. The man had a purple scarf wrapped around the lower half of his face. There was a pale streak in his dark hair. He was dressed like a lot of the locals they’d seen around here—lots of leather and dark fabrics. He had a string of potions tied to his belt.

“Go,” the man said, glowering at him. Lalna turned away and started walking.

The halls were empty. Lalna wasn’t actually that concerned about his bones turning to ash—he’d just respawn in a cloning pod if that happened. What he was concerned about was the idea of a local, maybe even more than one, running loose in YogLabs. If he got a chance, he was going to have to sound the alarm.

“Don’t try anything,” the man growled, as if reading his mind. Maybe he was. They still didn’t know the extent of the magic here.

“They’re not prisoners,” said Lalna as they walked. “I mean you can’t hold a tree prisoner, or some floating ball of light.”

“They’re prisoners if they’re sentient,” said the man. “And if you’re torturing them—”

“We’re not torturing anyone. It’s for science,” said Lalna defensively. “We need to learn about these things.”

“By vivisecting them?”

“They were anesthetized.”

“You’re filth,” the man growled. “I can’t believe you’re saying that like it makes a difference.”

“Personally I think the anesthesia makes a big difference.”

“It doesn’t change the fact that you’re cutting open living beings just to see what’s inside them.”

“The giant snake didn’t fit in our MRI machine.”

“A naga.” The man’s voice betrayed relief. “You vivisected a naga, not Teep.”

“I didn’t vivisect anyone. I already said that.” They reached a set of doors that were locked with a keypad. Lalna typed in a code. The keypad beeped and flashed red.

“Do it right,” said the man sharply.

“You’re making me nervous,” said Lalna.

“No I’m not. You don’t care if I kill you because you’re a clone just like the rest of them.” The man dug the wand into the back of Lalna’s skull. “Turning your bones to ashes isn’t the only thing I can do. If you type it wrong again, you’ll find out.”

Lalna’s hand hesitated over the keypad. It would take three wrong tries to lock the door and send an alert to security. The man wasn’t going to give him that long. He considered calling the man’s bluff, but he honestly didn’t think the man was bluffing. He typed the code in correctly and the doors slid open.

They stepped into a hallway. One wall of the hallway was glass, overlooking a big room with a glass prison in the center. Lalna had trained himself not to look in that direction—rarely ever came down here at all if he could help it—but this time he looked. If he could distract this man with Lalnable—

Wait.

Lalna came to a dead stop in the middle of the hallway. The man sidestepped, just barely avoiding crashing into him.

“What’s—”

“He got out,” Lalna said, rushing to the window and pressing his face against it to see if Lalnable was just hiding under the cot or something. “He’s—did you let him out?”

“Who? Was Teep in here? Get away from the window.” The man grabbed his shoulder and yanked him back. Lalna shoved his hand in the pocket of his lab coat and the man slammed him against the other wall with quicker reflexes than Lalna had expected. Lalna’s fingers closed over his spell book, but he couldn’t pull it free before the man cracked his head into the cinderblock wall. The wand dug into Lalna’s throat again, just under his chin.

“Drop it. Whatever it is, drop it. Hands up.”

“Lalnable got out,” Lalna said, shoving his thumb under the cover of the spell book and silently counting the pages. “Whatever you’re doing here doesn’t matter. We have to find him.”

“Let go of it.”

“He’s a serial killer, and someone let him out.”

The man grabbed his wrist, wrenching his hand and the spell book out of his lab coat pocket. Light flared in Lalna’s hand as he called up whichever spell he’d managed to open to. The light impacted with the man’s chest, but instead of teleporting away, as Lalna had been hoping he’d do, he stumbled backward, the wand clattering to the floor.

“Fuck—” The man clutched at his face. “What did you—”

Lalna snatched up the wand and backed away. “Sorry,” he said, flipping through the book to the right page. Light flared in his hand again. “You’ll only be blind for a minute. If you’re lucky, there won’t be creepers out there.”

He fired again and the man blinked out of existence.

“Shut up!” Nano grabbed a fistful of leaves and stabbed her knife into the mandrake’s writhing body, cutting its shrieking blissfully silent. “Oh my god, you make it very rewarding to kill you. It’s not the greatest evolutionary tactic.”

She tossed the mandrake’s corpse—could it be called a corpse?—onto the pile of the others and grabbed the next mandrake by its leaves. She yanked.

For a second she thought this mandrake was extra shrieky until she realized that the alarm in the hallway was sounding, and a red light by the door was flashing. In YogLabs, an alarm like that meant very bad things indeed. Nano leapt to her feet and ran to the door, drawing her needle gun from her belt and crashing gracelessly through the mandrakes.

She shoved the door open and burst into the hallway, needle gun drawn, then backpedaled as she nearly ran into a very surprised looking woman in the hallway. Nano raised her gun and the woman raised her crossbow at the same time. Stalemate.

Three uprooted mandrakes sprinted out the door behind Nano and began weaving in circles around their legs. The noise was loud enough that it seemed to connect directly with Nano’s gag reflex. If this kept up much longer, she was going to vomit.

The woman was squinting in pain as well. Nano recognized her from the attack earlier. She was one of the witches who had been attacking a mech.

Nano pressed her free hand to her ear, trying in vain to muffle the noise. The woman gagged, clamping a hand over her mouth.

“Truce?” Nano said. The woman hesitated, then nodded. They both warily lowered their weapons.

Nano leaned down and grabbed one of the mandrakes by its head leaves. She put the needle gun point blank against its head and pulled the trigger. The woman stepped on another one and held it down with her foot while she shot a crossbow bolt into its body. The third one was taken out by a well placed kick driving it into the wall.

“Oh god, I hate these things,” Nano said, picking up the corpses by their leaves. “Why do they exist?”

“They don’t wake up if you harvest them at night,” said the woman.

“It is night.”

“You have them under grow lamps, though, don’t you?” The woman nodded to the still open door to the lab.

“Yeah…” Nano admitted. She gave the woman a suspicious glance, then walked back into the lab. The woman followed.

Nano flipped off the grow lamps. It plunged the room into semi darkness, lit only by the light from the open doorway to the hall. She leaned down and uprooted another mandrake, already cringing in anticipation of the noise, but the mandrake just dangled like she was holding a kitten by the scruff of its neck.

“That’s amazing,” she said, stabbing it and tossing it into the pile. “You’re a witch, aren’t you? I saw you with your broom earlier.”

“I am,” said the woman carefully.

“Can you give me any more tips?”

“If you help me.” The woman leaned her elbow on the top of her broom. “I need to find where you’ve been keeping the prisoners. My friend was captured.”

“The dinosaur,” said Nano.

“Yes,” said the woman.

“He shot me in the head, you know,” Nano said.

“You got better.”

Nano crossed her arms over her chest. “He’s really your friend?”

The woman smiled faintly. “He’s great once you get to know him.”

“And you promise you’ll teach me about witchcraft if I help you get him out?”

“Absolutely,” said the woman.

Nano paused, then shrugged. “I don’t really need any of the prisoners for my research, to be honest. Follow me.”

The walls were lined with pods, each one containing a sleeping human body in fluid. Zoeya stared, her steps getting slower and slower.

“These are clones?” she said.

The man who called himself Lalnable didn’t look back. “They’re the bodies YogLabs makes the clones from,” he said, walking straight through the room without stopping. “Without them, they can’t make new clones.”

“Does every employee have one?”

This time he paused, looking back. “Everyone does,” he said with another smile that didn’t reach his eyes.

Zoeya started forward again, her awe draining away into unease again. “You’re sure the reactor is this way?”

“It’s just through here. The cloning room takes the most power,” said Lalnable.

Zoeya approached him and came to a stop a few feet away. “So if you were a former employee, did you have a clone in here?”

Lalnable studied her for a second, then pointed. “I still do. See? Right up there.”

Zoeya followed his finger. Up on the wall, in the second row, she could see him, blond hair floating in the fluid. It was clearly him. She felt some of her unease drain away. He hadn’t been lying. He really was an employee.

“So why do they still have a clone of you, if you’re their prisoner now?” she said.

“Why get rid of a perfectly good employee, when you can just fix it to be more obedient?” he said, lowering his hand. He was still looking at her, not the body in the tank. “They like fixing people here at YogLabs.”

Zoeya felt a chill run down her spine. “Show me to the reactor,” she said quietly.

He turned away again and headed down pathway to the doors on the opposite side. These doors were locked with a keypad, but he typed in a code and they opened.

The hum of the reactor was like music to Zoeya’s ears. Lalnable led her into the room, where two massive blocks of steel and glass, each the size of a small building, stood side by side. Giant turbines spun, each blade the size of a train car.

Zoeya looked up at the giant reactor. “Tell me how to destroy this,” she said.

He followed her gaze, and this time the smile reached his eyes. “A uncontrolled meltdown that size will irradiate forty square miles around here.”

“Tell me how to do this so that doesn’t happen. There are enough safety measures in place here that we should be able to permanently disable the reactor without releasing radiation into the atmosphere, right?” Zoeya sat down in the chair at the control panel. She only understood maybe half of what she was looking at.

“There might be a few farmers out there somewhere, but not much else.” Lalnable shrugged, walking to the turbines and looking up at them. “If the toxic waste hasn’t driven them away already.”

Zoeya looked up at him. “It’ll kill all of the employees, and I’m not willing to do that. Tell me how this works.”

He clasped his hands behind his back and then turned to look at her, like a science professor at the front of a class. “You know how this turbine works, right? The reactor heats up water, creating steam, which turns the turbines to create power, and the turbines cool the steam back to water, where it is pumped back into the reactor.”

“So if we can disable the turbine, the reactor will overheat,” Zoeya said.

“You’re right, there are a number of failsafes. We’ll have to take out a couple to make sure it takes out the whole reactor before it’s stopped.” He nodded to her robot arm. “It won’t be hard to take them out with that.”

An alarm went off, muffled under the sound of the reactor. They both looked toward the door automatically.

“I think they realized I’m missing,” said Lalnable mildly. “Ready?”

Lomadia and Nano arrived at the prison block to find wisps and dryads and imps and all manner of creatures pouring out of the open doors and milling about in confusion. A few mana creepers saw them and started bobbing forward on their stubby legs.

“They can’t do much,” Lomadia said as one of them detonated with a blue flare, sending a shockwave through the hallway but not causing any appreciable damage. “Not unless you’re into Ars Magica. Teep? Teep, can you hear me?”

Something roared from down the hall, and Nano froze next to Lomadia. Lomadia stood up on tiptoes and could just see the scaly head of the velociraptor over the dryads in front of her. Teep flowed through the crowd, who needed very little convincing to get out of the way.

Teep saw Nano and bared his teeth. Lomadia put herself between the two of them, taking Teep’s snout in her hands like he was a skittish horse.

“She’s helping us. You killed her, remember? You’re even. Let’s just get all of these people out of here.”

Teep nodded, although his eye was still fixed on Nano.

“‘H-hi,” Nano said, giving him a small wave. “Truce?”

The stomping footsteps of the mech cut off abruptly when Rythian stepped through the portal. He’d ended up a mile from the compound on the other side of the portal, out in the middle of the magic forest, and had had to make his way past the mechs again, terrified all along that the portals would be out by the time he got to them. Looks like there was still some time.

He broke into a jog, crossing the warehouse room quickly. He wasn’t sure how long it was going to take him to retrace his steps and find that damned scientist, but he was going to have to try. He had no idea whether any of the others were successful.

Light kindled across the room, and then a wisp bobbed into the room, tinkling gently. Behind it, Rythian could hear voices and footsteps. He dropped back next to a forklift, drawing his katana. Another wisp popped into the room, and then a dinosaur came through.

“Teep!” Rythian hissed. The dinosaur saw him and bounded toward him. Lomadia came through the doorway behind him, followed by a woman that Rythian didn’t recognize. Rythian gave Teep a hug, or as much of a hug as one could give a dinosaur.

“What are you doing back here?” Lomadia asked.

“I was teleported,” Rythian said grimly. “Have you seen Zoeya?”

“No. Have you seen Nilesy?”

“No,” Rythian said. “I’m going back in. If I see Nilesy, I’ll tell him we’ve gotten the prisoners out.”

“Are the mechs still out there?” Lomadia pointed to the portal. Rythian hesitated.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I can’t take them out alone,” Lomadia said.

“Please,” said the woman next to her, hefting some sort of gun. “You have me.”

Lomadia glanced at her, then nodded decisively. “Okay. Rythian, good luck.”

“You too,” Rythian said. “Help them, Teep. I’ll be out when I can.” He headed for the door.

“That one.” Lalnable guided her hand up with a light touch, helping her aim at a series of valves up near a catwalk. “We need to get rid of those.”

Zoeya called up a ball of plasma. She was uncomfortable with his proximity, but was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt for the moment. “You’re sure?”

“I helped build this place,” he said, sounding affronted. “I know what I’m doing. After this, we’re all set.”

There was an increasingly angry hissing sound coming from the reactor. She released the ball of plasma. It seared through the air and then splattered on the valves, eating through them.

“How long will it—” she started to say, and then something popped inside the reactor, like the sound of a bulb bursting. The lights in the room turned out, plunging them into darkness.

“There we go,” Lalnable said cheerfully.

A siren started, so loud and echoing that Zoeya flinched. Lalnable laughed. She couldn’t see him in the darkness, and she suddenly wanted to get very far away from him.

“When will the failsafes kick in?” she asked.

“Give it ten or so minutes. You can wait here if you like.” His voice was further from her than she’d expected. She brought up another plasma ball on her arm to light up the room. The plasma ball was smaller than the others, and the LED screen flashed a red warning sign of a nearly depleted battery.

“There aren’t any failsafes, are there?” Zoeya said with a slow dawning horror.

“Well, there were,” he said, spinning around to look at her. “Your plasma cannon took care of that.” He drove his elbow into the glass window on a fire safety cabinet and yanked out the fire extinguisher.

“How can I stop this?” She looked down at the control panel, then up at the reactor. The turbines had stopped spinning and a fire had started somewhere inside. She could see the dancing lights of the flames.

He was already out the door. She vaulted the control panel and ran after him, and arrived in the doorway in time to see him driving the fire extinguisher into the glass shell of a clone pod. It burst and water came pouring out.

She raised her arm with the ball of plasma. “Stop it. Stop right now!”

Lalnable didn’t look up at her as he hauled the man out of the cloning pod. The man was tall and lanky, with brown hair and a goatee. Lalnable let him drop to the floor, then stood over him with the fire extinguisher.

“Stop!” Zoeya screamed. She released the ball of plasma but Lalnable dropped to his knees next to the man and brought down the fire extinguisher onto the man’s head with a sickening crunch. Zoeya’s plasma ball hit the broken cloning pod behind them.

Lalnable looked up at her, grinning. “You missed,” he said, getting to his feet again. The fire extinguisher dripped blood.

“Who was he?” Zoeya asked, her voice shaking. She wanted to shoot him, but the thought of firing this plasma into a living person made her feel ill.

“He was the man who imprisoned me.” Lalnable went to the next pod, which held a short, portly dwarf with a bright red beard. “And this is his friend. Are you going to stop me?”

“If you attack him, yes.” Zoeya queued up another plasma ball. It was even smaller and weaker than the previous one.

Lalnable’s eyes flicked to the ball of plasma, and then he swung the fire extinguisher. The glass smashed and water gushed out. Zoeya released the plasma ball.

It impacted with his shoulderblade, slamming him into the broken glass of the pod. He let out a noise, half cry of pain, half laugh, and then grabbed the dwarf with both his hands and hauled him out of the tank. He shoved a hand into the cryogenic slush and slapped a fistful of it onto his shoulder.

“Didn’t think you’d pull the trigger,” he said between short, pained gasps, leaning against the tank. “Good girl.”

“Tell me how to fix the reactor,” Zoeya said, trying to queue up another plasma ball. The robot arm blinked red and refused. Dammit.

“Don’t be stupid. It’s unfixable. You already knew that.” Lalnable scooped up another fistful of slush. “Just make a run for it.”

“I can’t,” Zoeya said. “I’m not going to do that. I’ll find a way.” She backed away from him and then turned and ran back into the reactor room.

“That’s my phone,” Sips said, patting his pockets and nearly toppling over when the sudden move put him off balance. “Is that my phone? Sjin, that’s your phone.”

“It’s not my phone,” said Sjin, laying on his back on the floor of the employee lounge. “My phone doesn’t make that sound.”

“It sounds like your phone.”

“Guys, guys, it’s not a phone.” Nilesy picked up the tequila bottle from the floor and sat back on the couch. The evening had started with margaritas, but each successive drink had shed ingredients until they were just on pure alcohol. “It’s an owl. Believe me, I know owls.”

“He knows owls. Can you get a load of this guy, Sjin?” Sips kept checking his pockets, though he’d forgotten why he was doing it. “He knows owls.”

Sjin started giggling on the floor, and then Sips started too and they were both lost for a bit. Finally Nilesy sat up straight on the couch. There was a flashing light next to the door of the employee lounge.

“Oh my god, guys. The building is on fire,” he said.

“Are your owls telling you that?” Sjin asked. Sips giggled.

“Shh,” Nilesy said. “Shhhh.”

They all fell silent. Now that Nilesy was paying attention to it, he realized that the alarm was fairly shrieking. How long had it been going off? Wow, he was really drunk.

“I think we need to evacuate,” he said.

“You can’t get out of your pool boy interview that easily,” said Sips. “We haven’t even started.”

“You passed the margarita portion of the test with flying colors,” said Sjin. “Pour me another?”

“No, guys, alcohol will make you more flammable,” Nilesy said. “That’s a bad idea.”

“The pool!” Sips stopped patting his pockets. “We need to go to the pool! We won’t catch fire there.”

“Yes! Help me up.” Sjin struggled up to his elbows. Sips reached a hand down to him but when Sjin grabbed it, Sips toppled over.

Nilesy rolled off the couch and onto his hands and knees, then carefully got to his feet. Sips got back up and the two of them helped Sjin up as well. The three of them clung to each other for balance and slowly moved to the door.

“It’s to the right, I think,” said Sips. “No, wait, is it left? Nilesy, you work there. Where is it?”

“I don’t work here,” Nilesy said. “You knew that was a lie, right?”

“Oh, right,” said Sjin. “I think I knew that. Didn’t I?”

Sips snorted. “You didn’t know that, Sjin. You believed him.”

“I did not.”

“Did too, dumbass. It’s to the left. Definitely the left.”

They staggered on. All the lights were out except for the flashing red lights at the end of each hallway.

“I don’t have my bathing suit,” Nilesy said suddenly as the thought occurred to him. “I can’t swim in these clothes.”

“I guess that means you’ll have to go skinny dipping,” said Sjin. “That’s what I’m going to do.”

“That’s not even a question,” said Sips. “It’s mandatory. No clothes allowed. Here it is.” He steered the three of them to the right. Sjin stepped on the pressure pad but the doors didn’t budge.

“Aw, shit,” said Sips. “No power. I forgot.” He peeled himself away from the group and dug his fingers in the door. “Help me, Sjin.”

The three of them pried at the door and after a few minutes they managed to budge it open enough to slip through. Inside, the room was lit with a purple glow.

“It’s small. Think it’ll fit the three of us?” Sjin walked to the edge of the pool and looked down.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a problem.” Nilesy joined him and stared down into the Twilight Forest portal. “It’s bigger than you think.”

“That’s what he said,” said Sips. “Get in, pool boy. Let’s see how well you swim.”

“Honeydew!” Xephos banged on the penthouse door. “How can you sleep through this? Answer the fucking door.”

The door creaked open and the dwarf glared at him, peeling an ear plug out of his ear. “Christ, Xephos, what’s this all about?”

“Hear those alarms?” Xephos waved a hand at the hallway behind him.

“Yeah? So there’s a fire. Don’t we have robots for that?”

“That’s not the fire alarm. That’s the nuclear meltdown alarm. We need to get out of here.”

“We have a specific nuclear meltdown alarm?” Honeydew said. “And you didn’t tell me?”

“It’s mentioned in all the mandatory staff safety assemblies that you never attend,” said Xephos. “Come on, we need to get out of here.”

“But I need to pack.” Honeydew looked over his shoulder into the penthouse.

“We don’t have time. It’s been going off for a while now.” Xephos grabbed his arm and pulled. “Come on. The overworld portals are all out but there’s a secret passage leading to a Nether portal in my office in case of emergency. If we’re lucky, we can get through it before the radiation gets too bad.”

“What about everyone else? Have you seen Lalna?”

“Everyone knows the evacuation procedure.” Xephos yanked him down the hall. Honeydew hurried to keep up with his long stride. “If you ever want to have children again, come with me.”

The floor of the cloning room was covered in blood and slush and was lit only by the red emergency lights. Lalna came to a stop in front of Honeydew’s cloning tank. The dwarf was dead, right next to Xephos’s corpse.

A wisp floated around the room, seeming unconcerned with the noise and flashing lights. It probably didn’t even realize it was in danger. Could wisps be killed by radiation?

It looked like the locals, whoever they were, had released all the prisoners. Two mana creepers had waylaid him on the way here, draining his mana down to nothing, and an unfriendly wisp had zapped him. Everything else seemed to have made a run for it. He couldn’t say he was that sad about it.

Bloody footprints led back out the door where Lalna had entered, but the door to the reactor room was hanging open, so that’s where he headed.

There was a woman sitting in front of the control panel, staring at it hopelessly. A fire blazed inside the reactor, casting orange light in the room. Her head jerked up when he came in.

“What are you doing in here? Get out,” Lalna said. “You’re going to die.”

“I was hoping the radiation would give me a superpower and I could save the day,” she said guardedly. “Why did you come back?”

He stared at her, then looked over his shoulder. “So you saw Lalnable and he left you alive?”

“You’re the clone?” The woman studied him. “You do look a little different.”

“He’s the clone,” Lalna said, then corrected himself. “We’re both clones. What did you do to the reactor?”

The woman pointed. He looked up and saw the damage to the release valves.

“It can’t be stopped now,” Lalna said, approaching the control panel. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

“But all the employees—”

“Whoever is in here is getting out as fast as possible.” Lalna leaned over the control panel and pulled the switch to open the vents. It would start venting some of the heat into the atmosphere, giving them a little more time, but not enough. “The only thing you’ll do if you stay is die.”

“The clones in the other room will die too.”

He spread his hands and backed away from the control panel. “I’m sure they’d appreciate you dying with them. It’s very noble of you. I’m out of here.”

The woman hesitated a second longer, then got up. “You’re sure nothing could be done?”

“I built this reactor,” Lalna said. “I know it everything about it.”

The woman snorted at that for some reason, and then followed him. “Okay. Can we really get out of here?”

“There’s a Twilight Forest portal,” Lalna said. “It’s only down the hall.”

They started out of the room, and by the time they were halfway across the cloning room, they were running. There was a loud bang behind them, and then new shrieking alarms. Lalna risked a glance back and saw flame shooting across the reactor room.

“What was that?” Zoeya asked between gasps.

“Let’s not think about it,” he said, although his chest was filling with dread. It was happening faster than he’d hoped.

They hit the doors at the end and burst out into the hall, then turned to the right. Another explosion sounded, this one so big that the whole hallway shook. Pipes in the ceiling burst and boiling hot fluid started spraying down into the hallway ahead of them with all the force of a fire hose.

“Down this way,” Lalna said, backpedaling. “I think we can go around…”

But the doors at the other end of the hall were closed and the pressure pad wouldn’t open them. Lalna dug his fingernails into the crack between the doors and tried to pry them open, but they wouldn’t budge. The woman flicked a switch on her robot arm with increasing frustration and panic, but nothing happened.

“Think we can survive the burns if we run through?” Lalna asked, looking down the hall toward the pouring water. “I don’t know any ice spells yet.” He pulled his spell book out of his pocket. His mana hadn’t regenerated enough yet to teleport even one person yet, let alone the both of them.

The woman looked over her shoulder too. “I don’t know,” she said. “How bad is radiation poisoning?”

“Pretty bad,” Lalna said. “But if we’re lucky, we’ll die in an explosion.”

“Right.” The woman hugged herself. “Right.”

“I’ve died a lot,” Lalna offered. “It’s not so bad.”

“You came back, though,” said the woman. “That’s kind of the part that matters to me right now.”

“Yeah.” Lalna looked toward the cloning room. That other version of him would die in its pod. It was ironic that Lalnable might be the only version of him to survive this. Was ironic the right word? Horrifying. It was horrifying.

“Zoeya?”

The voice was far away, but both of them heard it. The woman—Zoeya—straightened up.

“Rythian!” she screamed.

A figure appeared down the hall, on the other side of the boiling water. It was the man that Lalna had teleported earlier. He came running toward them.

“How well does he do with boiling water?” Lalna asked.

The man drew back an arm and pitched an ender pearl at them. It sailed past the stream of water and splattered on the floor just past the danger. The man teleported, still running. Zoeya flung her arms around him.

“How many of those do you have?” she asked.

Rythian opened his palm. There were two pearls in his hand.

“Okay, um. Do they work if we all hold onto each other?” the woman asked.

“No,” said Rythian. He pressed one of them into the woman’s hand. “Go.”

“I’m not leaving without you,” Zoeya said, refusing it.

“It doesn’t matter,” said Lalna. An explosion echoed his words. “She won’t get out of here in time. None of us will.”

“Teleport us,” Rythian said. “You did it before.”

“I don’t have enough mana,” Lalna replied, holding out his hand. It glowed with a dull purple light, signifying a failed spell.

Zoeya grabbed a potion from Rythian’s belt, yanking it free. She shoved it at Lalna. “Drink it. It’s mana regen.”

“She’s right,” Rythian said, though he sounded more than a little surprised.

“I pay attention, Rythian,” Zoeya said.

Lalna took it and tossed it back, draining the bottle in two gulps. It tasted sort of like glass cleaning fluid, and it tingled all down his throat. He called up the spell, and this time the light in his hand burned white.

“Okay,” he said. “Who’s first?”

Xephos’s office showed signs of someone coming through it in a hurry. The secret door hidden in the bookcase had been left hanging open, and there were books all over the floor.

The secret passage led down a long staircase and ended in a Nether portal, which glimmered purple and whispered just beyond the edge of hearing. Lalnable held his knife down at his side and waited for a second, listening.

Then he raised his knife and stepped through.