While Mika sped off as fast as her construct could go, the din of chaos behind her intensified. Unable to stop herself, she glanced over her shoulder in time to see the beast close its enormous maw upon two women at once, their screams quickly muffled. The monster’s body warped and pulsed, two more faces growing amongst the hundreds on its head.

In the next heartbeat the abomination leapt upon and began to devour another defenseless victim, and she wrenched her gaze away. Her stomach churned, and she was forced to swallow back vomit.

None of those people have constructs to help them. The realization filled her with shame. This was an outskirts district, after all. The people living here weren’t Singers. It would take forever for any help to get to them…assuming it was coming at all.

I’ve got to do something.

Adjusting her course, she put forth another burst of speed—this time headed for the Sentinel she’d seen on her way to the tunnel. The screaming echoed down the street as she went, chasing her. Accusing her.

I’m coming back, I’m coming back for you, she promised silently. After a short time that felt much, much longer, she was there, sliding off Ixos’ back before he’d even stopped. Scrabbling up the ladder of its dock, she slid into the Sentinel’s cockpit, pressed her hands to the faint glow of its control panels, and squeezed her eyes shut.

At once the darkness was replaced by a new sort of vision, devoid of any color save violet but capable of perceiving things her own sight could not. By their heat and the electric energy of their bodies, she could sense the whereabouts of every living creature within several hundred paces of her.

But she was drained already, having pushed Ixos more and harder that day than she ever normally did.

I have to try.

Concentrating hard, she spread her awareness through the crystal nodes and channels embedded in the stone body around her. Felt the extent of its massive limbs and the great weight of its bulk and took them as her own. And then she hummed—and with a surge of warm, skin-tingling power they flared to wakefulness. The sensation was overwhelming in its intensity, and Mika took a long breath to steady herself. Then, sinking into the Deep Trance, she sought the right song.

It came to her tongue before her mind knew she’d found it. And as the low, flowing notes drew up and out of her, the Sentinel lurched unsteadily to its feet. But with each syllable she sang, the already meager reserves of her energy drained. She took one thundering step, then two, and she was panting. Sweat streamed down her forehead. In the near distance the shouting and crashing continued, grew ever closer.

Mika sang another Deepword, took another step, and her eyes drooped shut. Another note, and everything went black. When she came to, her vision was blurry. Her crystal sight faded and her senses withdrew. She opened her true eyes as the Sentinal went dormant once more, pushed back into the confines of her own tiny body.

For a moment, she merely lolled into the cradle of the cockpit, the world spinning around her.

I…have to help…I…have to…

But she couldn’t help, because she was too weak. So, so damnably weak. I always have been, and I always will be. For several heartbeats she nearly allowed her despair to drag her under like miremoss, to immobilize and suffocate and kill her. But she couldn’t stop herself from hearing. With her eyes closed and her body immobile, the keenest of her senses rose to the fore. Sound became sight as she heard further than ever it was possible to see.

And what she heard was the death of a city.

The thundering downfall of Sentinals. The wretched cries of people robbed of their flesh and turned against their own. Desperate Songs of war echoing and faltering and cut off. And too she heard that there were now not one, but several nightmare beasts eating their way down the streets toward her, growing ever larger and more horrible all the way.

Something stirred inside her—and with it, the barest spark of energy. Groaning, she pulled her eyes open and pushed herself to her feet. With absurd difficulty she climbed from the cockpit to scramble down the Sentinel’s side. But the spark caught, and her strength recovered with each passing heartbeat. Yet it was only just enough to jog as she hummed Ixos back to life, his earlier feast of energy easing the task. But when she climbed upon his back, he dropped immediately to the ground.

Cursing in frustration, Mika made for the nearest warren by foot with the construct trailing behind her. As she drew within a pace of the entrance, there was another gut-quaking roar. She skidded to a halt, trilling in horror at the sight of a many-faced beast as it tried to force its way out of the warren…but its bulk was too great for the door.

Nowhere that has people is safe. Nowhere is safe!

Nowhere, perhaps…except the forgotten vent that not a soul but her had used in years.

Turning, she flung herself in the opposite direction, back to the tunnel. Several times she nearly tripped, every recovery a leeching effort. But fear drove her forward, fear and instinct and that vital spark within her. For though her Singing was pathetic, there was something of worth she could do for her people, something of immeasurable value inside of her. Something to protect at all costs.

Pounding, resonant, earth-shaking steps grew ever louder behind her as the familiar storehouses came into view. Mika dared not look back, even to check on Ixos. She could only pray he’d keep up as she put forth one final burst of effort and doubled her speed, crashing through the shadowwort as the great abomination shrieked and roared behind her, so close and so loud the sound was like a spear to her eardrums and her whole body tensed with pain.

And then she was through, into the tunnel, turning with sweat dripping into her eyes and heart battering her ribs. And there was Ixos, just a few paces behind—and immediately following him, the beast. Uninterested in the construct, it wailed as it hurtled toward the opening. Then Ixos was in, squeezing past it to dive into her arms as the beasts’s head slammed in behind him and the tunnel went dark.

The monster’s thousand eyes popped open, glowing green and yellow and pink and orange, their slit pupils going wide in the darkness. Eyes like those of her friends and family, people she knew and people she hated and people she’d met only in passing. Her people. Mika screamed, turning and stumbling forward through the darkness for as long as she could until at last she couldn’t hold it in any longer and she stopped to vomit into the brush and cry and scream some more.

By the time she’d stumbled to the tunnel’s end, there was no need for goggles. Night had fallen in the Overworld. Only faint, silvery moonlight made it through the iridescence of the Boundary. Breathing hard as she closed in on it, Mika pressed a hand to the film, shut her eyes and tapped into the Core. On contact, her every nerve lit up with alarm.

The Core was screaming. Its words—which were not so much words as they were meaning injected directly into her mind—repeated over and over again.

GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!

Then it went silent, and Mika’s hands chilled as the breeze brushed her fingertips. The Boundary had vanished, and that could mean only one thing.

The Core was dead.

Terror struck her like a lightning bolt, all consuming and debilitating and electrifying at once. Waves of despair and sickness rocked her in turns. And then shock settled in to smother all else under its frigid, unrelenting blankness. Something inside her spoke, and she wasn’t sure if it was that contrary voice of hers she always tried to ignore, or instinct, or a death-wish, or all three.

“Go,” it said. “Go into the trees.”

This time, she listened to it.

It was a strange feeling, stepping past the ghost of the boundary and above the ground.

She did not feel entirely inside of her body, nor fully in control of it. And yet she was more her own master in that moment than she ever had been before. Home was a nightmare, and her dream lay ahead…forming itself rapidly into terrifying reality. All she could do was move forward. Refuse to look back. She sniffed and wiped at her face with an over-long sleeve.

The slope beneath the tunnel’s opening was steep, and the moss slid under her boots as she made her way down into the shadowed greenery below. The moon, half-full, washed the Rooted Sea in colorless light. And though the wind had died, the trees churned nonetheless. Great creatures moved beneath the leaves, and in the distance something skimmed the canopy, drifting eastward. Birds and other beasts sang and howled out from the hidden depths.

Humming, Ixos butted up at her side, and she placed a hand over the slope of his back.

“We’ve got each other,” whispered Mika, as much to herself as to him. “We’ll make it.”

Somehow.

As they made their way down and the first trees of the forest’s edge rose around them, Mika tried to force her mind into enough clarity to form a plan.

First and foremost, I need rest, she concluded. Which means shelter. They were far from any of the cavern’s greater openings, so the dangers she had to concern herself with were the occupants of the forest itself. But of them, she knew frustratingly little. Only that they were as many and varied as they were dangerous and hostile.

But they can’t possibly be worse than what’s back there.

Steeling herself and working always not to think of what lay behind her, Mika forged forward. The trees of the shore were scrawny things compared to those ahead, and yet still they seemed to her impossibly tall, several times broader at the trunk than she was of height. The ferns brushed over the top of her head and moss drenched everything, so thick and deep that it went nearly to her calf with every step. And though the canopy blocked out the moonlight, the sloping forest floor was not entirely without illumination.

Foxfire fungus painted the trees with pastel hues that reminded her of home, blooming in equal measure amongst mushrooms that were like black blisters bursting from the wood. There were creatures skulking in the branches whose markings glowed as well, some of them flickering or going out entirely as she approached.

Her progress was slow, and though she scanned constantly and even risked a few trills, she encountered nothing which might serve as refuge. What was worse, rather than fleeing her presence, many creatures seemed drawn to it. And though for now they kept their distance, that distance grew ever shorter the deeper in she went. Soon she could see them clearly…two-legged beasts with long tails and talons like scythes, whose dark feathers reflected the colors of the forest.

With her next step, Mika gasped and nearly fell backward in her haste to stop. Several of the things had run up ahead of her and were closing in now, their yellow eyes shining from the shadows. She turned on her heel, trilled into the dark again and again in a rapid burst.

But she already knew what she would see.

The beasts had surrounded her, and they were coming in for the kill.

Scrabbling onto Ixos’ back, she prayed she’d regained enough energy to hover out of reach. But he sagged below her, barely a hand’s breadth from the ground. Her best chance was an attack, then—but she doubted if Ixos had enough energy in him for two decent blasts. She’d be lucky to get one.

In the next heartbeat the creatures darted in together, forming a snarling, snapping circle around her. She hummed, and all six of Ixos’ appendages unfolded from beneath his body, pointing outward as Mika frantically tried to guess which of the beasts might be the pack’s leader.

Then one of them leapt suddenly forward and she lurched sideways, narrowly avoiding its needle-sharp teeth as she dropped to the forest floor. Humming another command, she managed to roll under Ixos for cover just as he unleashed a violet bolt that sent her attacker flying backward in a spray of feathers and vaporized flesh. Then he dropped, pinning her beneath him. The remaining hunters took immediate advantage, biting at whatever bits of her they could get to, pain searing through her flesh as their teeth tore into her forearm and legs.

There was a deafening blast from somewhere nearby. Through the ringing pain, Mika faintly felt the thump of a dropped body. The other beasts scattered and were gone. Then through the ground she sensed the approach of footsteps. Ixos’s weight was lifted off of her, and she found herself staring blearily up at what appeared to be a piece of tree trunk in the shape of a very tall person. But then its colors flowed together and resolved anew, revealing a figure with light brown skin and sparkling violet-gray eyes, his long sage-colored hair swept back in a mane of cascading braids. But it was by his small, pointed ears, round pupils and strangely narrow nose that she surmised what he must be.

An elf.

In his hands he hefted a long weapon of some kind, all matte green metal and wood, the tip of its barrel issuing a stream of smoke. He grinned as he stopped a little less than a pace away to peer down at her, mouthing words too muffled by the aftermath of the blast to decipher.

Before she could so much as summon the effort to protest, he’d slung the weapon over his back and scooped her up. Bundling her to his chest without a care for the blood soaking through his clothes, he carried her over to a nearby tree. She trilled and writhed in protest, but every movement was a fresh blast of pain, and her efforts got her nowhere. Shifting the whole weight of Mika’s body to one arm, the elf grasped one of the many vines that draped from the branches above. Then, whistling, he twined it about his arm and pulled.

In the next instant they were flying upward through the branches, and Mika watched helplessly as Ixos disappeared from sight beneath the leaves.