> Wow, that was fast! Less than 14 minutes and we’ve already got a list of a dozen contestants who were sent to the same place as their precious ones. I’m attaching the contestant codes so you can verify.

>

> – Radio transmission from Voices for Non-Citizens

“That’s not a building! It’s alive!”

The person shouting was a man with light brown skin. I didn’t know his nationality, but he was one of the other people who had Life Sense. That lent unfortunate credibility to his claim.

I shouldered my way through the crowd and closed my eyes, focusing on picking up details from my supernatural sense. “It’s not all alive. It’s definitely regular stone near the door. There are a lot of living things inside, though, and a lot of them are shaped like walls and floor. It could just be some kind of moss or lichen…”

“I am not walking inside a monster disguised as a castle!” someone shouted.

I grimaced. Even if the castle wasn't really a monster, I couldn't pretend not to understand their hesitation. The sandy area was dangerous, but we'd learned many of its most deadly tricks. It was unlikely that any of that hard-won learning would apply to anything within the stone building.

Entering would expose us to a new and unknown set of dangers.

“How big is it, really?” I called. “Can we go around?

There were a few moments of confusion as people consulted their various abilities. Apparently the castle was dark inside and fog wreathed the exterior, which made Clairvoyance hard to use. Not impossible, though.

After a minute, Lindani gestured to our right. “I followed the outside wall in that direction. It curved, but I found no end to it nearby.”

Someone else had done the same to our left, with similar results.

I took a step toward the door, the cloudcar rolling close behind me. “Sorry, everyone. My oldest son’s still in there, or on the other side of it. I’m going in.”

My words triggered an outpouring of anger that quickly devolved into incomprehensible babble.

Pointy raised her voice. “I am not translating your threats! If you try to force us to stay, we will not help you. The castle will be dangerous, I am sure, but I believe it will be within our capability to handle if we stick together.”

A short woman raised a hand. “I won’t try to stop you, but I’ll be staying outside with anyone who wishes to. I speak French and Italian, and the man next to me speaks French and English.”

“I speak English and Urdu!” another man called.

Their words sparked a pile-on. A minute later, roughly two-thirds of our group was standing off to one side, intent on relying on a complex web of bilingual translators to maintain communication. Sem was among their number. He looked sheepish, but clearly wasn’t in a rush to head into the castle.

Lindani stayed with me. She didn’t look happy, but almost none of our group did. Hell, I wasn’t happy to be heading in.

I turned to address them before heading into the building. “Thank you all for your help.”

“Not like you’re giving us much choice,” a muscular man growled.

“Hush, you!” Lindani said. “We could stay, if we wanted no one to understand our words. Her daughter is the only reason you can even complain right now. Can you truly fault her for going to save her other child?”

“Plus, it’s not going to be that dangerous,” agreed a girl with pierced eyebrows. “There are still loads of us. We can take down anything that comes for us, and we’ll probably earn better rewards. We might need those!”

An elderly man called over to us from next to Sem. “If you don’t like it, stay! No one will be able to understand me once the turtle leaves, but I am staying. You could too.”

The younger man made a sour face, but made no move to join the larger group.

“Thanks,” I said to Lindani.

She grimaced. “I do not like it, but I can’t blame you. Myself? Yes! If only I had helped Malusi and Themba more with their English homework, or sat with them to watch their American shows. Schools are better these days.”

“There’s never enough time,” I said. “Especially when you’ve got kids to care for.”

Lindani gave me a sad smile, and I turned back toward the entrance. The entire process had only delayed us by a few minutes, but any delay chafed when Micah was in danger.

And Vince, I whispered to myself.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

He was an afterthought compared to my kids - I trusted him to take care of himself - but I’d only just gotten him back. I’d only just stopped worrying that he was dying to some unknown danger, and I’d never know what happened to him. It seemed dreadfully unfair to have to go through those same feelings again, only a few days after he returned.

I pushed my worry for both of them aside forcefully. I needed to focus on the here-and-now: Gavin and Cassie were with me already, and we were heading into dangerous territory with a smaller group of half-willing allies.

The door was just barely wide enough to admit Cassie’s cloudcar, and the curving hallway wasn’t much wider. The ceilings were unreasonably high for such a narrow space, lofting almost twenty feet above our heads. The walls were made of dark-colored stones, irregular in shape and size. I had a moment of irrational irritation. The sand outside had been brown! How could the stones here be nearly black? Sand was just pulverized stone!

It was a stupid thought, of course: this entire area was completely artificial. If the space lawyers’ broadcasts had been accurate, I was likely walking around inside of Mars or one of the gas giants’ moons.

Focus! I yelled at myself.

We’d only traveled a short distance, just out of sight of the door, before we came to the first “living” section. To my relief, it was visually distinct from the rest of the building: the walls were covered in a yellow-brown pebbled texture. If it wasn’t a plant, it was probably some kind of stationary animal, similar to a clam or a barnacle.

Not that we put any faith in that.

As soon as it had been illuminated by the light bobbing ahead of our group, we’d fired off a number of ranged attacks. I’d even shot it with my handgun, although I’d been careful to use Assisted Strike and focus on having my ricochet strike a point further along the hallway.

The yellow stuff didn’t react as we destroyed more than half its mass, unless you counted the dust and plant matter that was kicked into the air as we shredded it.

We were paranoid enough to count it: an air controller sent a gust forward, pushing the debris away from us.

“I have Cleanse!” a teenage boy called, darting forward. “Let me test it.”

He grabbed a clump of plant matter out of the air and squinted at it, then relaxed. “It shouldn’t be too dangerous. I Cleansed for everything more harmful to breathe than grass pollen, and nothing came out.”

I raised my eyebrows. What a clever kid! I glanced at Pointy and she nodded, clearly filing the strategy away for future use, now that Cassie had Cleanse. We’d have to remember to pass the idea to George, too. You could set almost any criteria for Cleanse, but using it to test for poisons could be difficult. Apples contained small amounts of cyanide, after all, and even the noble potato contains small amounts of a relatively-innocuous poison. Set the wrong criteria, and you could easily decide that something safe was dangerous, or vice versa. Using something like grass pollen as a baseline was inspired: it wasn’t great to breathe, but even being hit in the face with a bag of it shouldn’t be fatal, so using it as a point of comparison should keep Cleanse from being triggered by minor irritants.

“Nice work!” I called.

The kid smiled at me and took a step further down the hallway, then screamed as a softball-sized mass hit the side of his neck.

Immediately, I dropped my Telekinetic objects and grabbed onto the boy’s clothes, yanking him toward us with all my strength.

I was far from the only one to react. A woman with clawed fingertips reached him first, bringing her hand around like a striking snake and coming away from his neck holding something that resembled a three-pronged starfish. It went limp as her claws pierced it, but the corpse remained.

The back of the creature was an almost perfect mimicry of the moss around it, but the underside was very different. Suction cups similar to an octopus’s littered the surface, surrounded by curling, barbed spikes, and the back of the boy’s neck was a ragged mess, after only having the monster on him for a second!

Part of that might be how roughly it was torn away, I admitted, although I didn’t blame the woman in the slightest.

His neck was already scabbing over and I glanced down to see Gavin’s tail snaking by me. I glared back at my son. “You’re supposed to be resting!”

“I am! I didn’t heal him all the way.”

I glared at him until he pulled his tail back inside and shut the door of the cloudcar, then raised my voice. “Is anyone with Healing Touch fresh enough to finish the healing? The boy needs more, and I think… can you heal yourself?”

My last question was directed toward the woman who had killed the… wallfish? Wallstar? No, it wasn’t really a star, it only had three arms.

Her hand had a few small gouges in it, where the curved spines had pierced her skin as she’d pulled the monster clear. She was staring at it with a strangely relaxed expression. “What? Oh. Yeah. I can.”

She kept staring.

“Are you going to do that?” No, something was clearly fucky here. I should be assertive. “Heal yourself.”

“Okay,” she responded. The small cuts vanished.

Belatedly, I realized the Cleansing boy wasn’t even whimpering. He’d screamed when the monster had attacked, but he’d been remarkably calm since, just dangling in my Telekinetic grip as two other healers came forward to finish fixing his injuries.

I shoved him upright. “Hey, are you alright?”

He turned toward me and blinked slowly, giving me a happy smile. “I’m fine.”

“He’s been drugged.” The speaker was a blonde-haired woman in late middle age. “I used to work in a hospital. He’s acting just like someone dosed with opiates. Does anyone have Cure Poison?”

No one did.

I grimaced. “Cleanse will be too energy-intensive.”

“There was one person with Cure Poison in the group outside,” Pointy offered reluctantly. “I am sure they would cure these two, and it might be possible to bribe them to come along with us in exchange for a spare firearm.”

“If we have-”

Lindani stiffened. “The exit is gone!”

Her words triggered a panicked stampede. Those closest to the exit backtracked, shouts quickly confirming her words:

“There’s just a wall here now!”

“It’s a dead end!”

“We’re trapped!”