Anton and Zoe sat cross-legged as the sand shifted around them. The desert flowed toward the center, trying to bury them, but Zoe let out a trickle of her Willpower and the sand halted. A circle flattened and stilled around them, like an eye in the center of the Hourglass’s perpetual storm.

With the sand no longer sinking them, Zoe set her mind to the task. She felt the focus of surgery — thousands of hours drilled and practiced — resurface, and the familiarity calmed her. Anton’s grin subsided beneath his studious poker face. She considered asking him one more time if he was ready but decided not to waste her breath.

He held the [Amberstuck Grenade] between his hands. The lump of polished amber and the frozen primitive squirrel inside. A jeweled piece of time and surprise. Beneath its surface, tightly wound Skein waited to spring. Anton’s calm breathing made his grip as secure as a surgical vice. She had a moment of wonder for the system-enhanced human body and what it could do before she buried it and committed to the task at hand.

The grenade was just one part of this. Cutting it apart was one thing, but she also needed to remove the time essence trapped inside the Title. From the feeling of pain that came every time she tried to access it, she knew where it was located, and that it was as similar to time essence as an organ was to a pint of blood.

“I’m going to cut out the Title,” Zoe said, thinking aloud, “and then I’ll cut open the grenade. With your help, I want to weave the grenade’s trigger mechanism into the Title. Does that make sense?”

Anton nodded.

“You make it sound easy. I think you should separate the trigger first.”

“But it’s a bomb, that’s the thing I’m —”

“If it’s deactivated, it’s just spare parts. We must be careful, but having the mechanism ready will make it easier. I suspect that the Time essence will be unstable when you extract it.”

“That makes sense, ok, hold still —”

“Another thing.”

“What?”

“Extract the Title from me.”

“Anton —”

He held up his hand.

“You used [Fools Rush In] more often than I did. My Title will be larger than yours, easier to find, easier to extract. You’re the boss. You’re the one with the skills to do this. You’re the one we can’t replace.”

“But if something goes wrong…”

He shrugged.

“Don’t let it go wrong.”

“Alright. Let’s start with the grenade.”

She reached forward with a single finger of chain and tapped the grenade. The intense focus of the situation let her feed into her Body Path, and the Skein inside the amber thrummed. Her other fingers tingled, waiting to synchronize the specific vibrations into another object, but she touched the grenade again. Her fingers lightly tapped like a steel drum as she got the hang of sounding out the network of Skein.

A framework of Wood cradled the Time essence. By cutting the wood, the Time would collapse out into a specific pattern and create the time-freezing effect of the grenade. The Wood served as the container, but the Blood essence fused with the Wood and Time to create the amber. The more she tapped, the clearer the picture became, until she realized she was procrastinating.

She took a breath.

Time to take the next step, but…

“I’m going to try something, Anton. Bring one of your eyes closer.”

“Alright.”

She reached out to the chrome eye and focused. She needed to show him what she saw, and she leaned upon [Sympathetic Resonance] and [Quest Breaker]. She wasn’t sure if that Title would even help in a situation like this but it was more of a good luck charm than anything. If she could break through the rigidity of her techniques…

She was procrastinating again.

A finger of chain touched Anton’s floating chrome eye at the same time as she touched her eyeball. Everything was Skein. Everything resonated.

See what I see, she willed the technique to work, for the information to transmit. A connection opened up, between her finger, the floating chrome technique, and Anton’s soul — and she felt something gazing at her through the crisscrossed web of his Skein, like an eye peering through heavy lashes, like a flower opening before the dawn, like —

Anton’s eye exploded, and he jerked his head back with a strangled cry.

“What the hell was that?” he said as a single tear of blood ran down his cheek.

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“Sorry!”

“You popped my eye like a bubble!”

“I’m sorry, but did you see anything?”

“What? What are you trying to do?”

“I want to transfer what I see into your eyes so you can analyze the Skein structure. If we’re both looking at the Skein, we’ll know what we’re doing.”

“Oh,” Anton said as he wiped away the blood. “See more stuff? Yeah, poke away, but be gentler this time.”

It took five more attempts. Anton’s cheeks were wet with blood, his eyes puffy, and his jaw tight, but finally he let out a sigh.

“I see what you see.”

“Good, should we take a break?”

He shook his head.

“I’m good,” he said as he closed his eyes of flesh and stared through floating chrome. “Cut away.”

###

Bella and Oriz walked in a slow, meandering circle some distance away from Zoe and Anton. They kept a lookout for any potential attacks or intruders, and Bella kept her sword at the ready. Their hands, one grey, the other pale pink and etched with black ink and white scars, interlinked between them.

“How are you holding up?” Oriz asked.

“Hmmm?”

“Being back in Hell, I mean, and so shortly after…”

“After we thought we were out for good?”

“Yeah.”

“Part of me wondered if we were ever really out. What if part of Hell is thinking you escaped?”

Oriz’s feet sank into the sand. She gazed out at the glass encasing the colossal Hourglass. Raw Mubilashi, or something similar, swam beyond. Why didn’t they try to enter through the cracks? Or, perhaps they did, and the sand they strode through was the processed and crystalized bodies of failed gods…

“I don’t think the Gambler is that psychologically inventive,” Oriz said, and it was a relief to speak such a heretical thought aloud. “I think he delighted in the crude and the cruel. His Hells are places of torture, of fire, of monsters, but to have such a trick like a whisper in the night, to think everyone else, even you or I, is some false creation of his abyssal afterlife… no, that is not so.”

“Maybe you don’t want to believe,” Bella said with a cheeky grin. “What if I’m nothing but an infernal hallucination, and any second now I’ll crumble away and you’ll be back in the bleeding cube and the crowlings and my bitch arse doing everything I can to disagree with you?”

Oriz shoved her into the sand.

“Shut up. That’s not funny.”

Bella laughed as she rolled over, the sand shifting over her ankles and hands as she reached out a hand.

“It’s kind of funny.”

Oriz took Bella’s hand, and when the young human pulled, she let herself fall on top of her. Her corn-colored hair spilled down and framed the angelic face looking up at her.

“I hate it here,” Bella said with a smile.

Oriz kissed her.

“I do as well,” she said as she kissed her once more before pulling away and standing. “We need to keep an eye out, though, as much as I want to let you distract me.”

Bella sighed.

“Fine,” she stood and dusted herself off. “What do you think of Zoe’s plan?”

Oriz’s lips tightened. What did Bella think of the plan? What did Bella want her to say? The presence of Zoe was like a tangled knot pulling at the threads between them.

“It is extreme.”

“Yeah, she doesn’t half-ass anything, does she?”

“No, she does not.”

They kept walking.

“I think it will work,” Bella said. “Once she can access [Fools Rush In], then we can get the demon and Skidmark and we can continue with our plan.”

Oriz shook her head.

“This Title… burning time… it seems such a shame to lose moments like these.”

“Yeah…”

They walked, feet crunching through the shifting sand as they continued in the slow circle around Zoe and Anton. When they reached their starting point, the sand had shifted enough to obscure any footprints, and so they kept walking, making a fresh set that would, in time, be wiped away.

###

The ghostly scalpel of [Mind’s Eye Incision] snipped through a thread of Skein like a razor through a guitar string. Zoe pinched the strand before it could ping away, and she carefully tucked and tied it off before she moved to the next one beside it. Cut by delicate cut, Zoe severed the activation mechanism from the [Amberstuck Grenade].

Anton continued holding the device steady. While his human eyes were closed and gummed with blood, his technique eyes floated so close they bathed the magical device in chrome.

Zoe sliced the last thread and tucked it away. They both let out a sigh. Now that they had removed the trigger mechanism, the device was truly inert.

“Ok,” Anton said. “I’ve compared this to the schematics for the [Mirrorbell] and I have some alterations to your plan.”

“Like what?”

One of the silver eyes shrank until it was a bead of startling light, and it passed into the amber and hovered in place, tracing out a network of Blood and Wood.

“Right here you have the intake valve, and beside it, you have the reservoir. The reservoir is small because the grenade doesn’t rely on having a lot of Time. Instead, it expands that small amount of essence into a wide area of space. So ignore the reservoir, we can use the Title instead to store our essence, but we need the intake valve.”

Zoe nodded.

“So that it can replenish itself?”

“Exactly.”

She manipulated the blade at the tip of her fingers. At first, it had been strange to cut by pointing rather than grasping a scalpel. She was worried her fingers would tremble, but the chains were sturdier than flesh. Anton was constantly using his breathing to keep himself still, but Zoe had no such problem. By leaning on the Black Star system she could lock a chain in place independently of her body. The Black Star could keep it still while she moved another. [Best Friends Secret Handshake] was truly a blessing.

She felt the Black Star’s approval at the thought, but it said nothing lest it distract her.

With a few incisions, she severed the intake valve. It remained connected to the trigger mechanism by strands of Skein. All it would take now was a single tap to remove these components from the reservoir, but that wasn’t a step they needed to take right now. It could wait until they had the Time from the Title to replace it.

The amber itself grew cloudy and cracked. The squirrel inside curled up, and a stench rose from the broken jewel. Long forgotten rot. With the Blood and Wood severed from Time, the corpse inside could now decompose naturally.

Zoe scrunched up her nose.

“Let’s take a break before we do the surgery.”

“I can keep going, boss.”

Zoe shook her head and stood.

“I want fresh air.”

“Ok.”

They left the dismantled grenade lying on the ground as they walked toward Bella and Oriz. Zoe kept a chain wrapped tight around the device, however, just in case any of the sandwraiths popped up from deep underground and spoiled everything.

“Done already?” Bella asked them.

Zoe shook her head.

“Taking a minute before I remove the Title from Anton.”

“And you’re not worried about that?” Bella asked him.

Anton shrugged.

“I trust the boss.”

“You’re mad,” Bella said with a grin. “But you’re alright, mate.”

“I know,” Anton said with a serious nod.

“Oh no,” Oriz said with a frown. “They’re coming back.”

She pointed into the distance, at the center of the Hourglass, where a colossal wave of sand raced toward them.