The flesh of the sandwraith pressed around Skidmark like a wet glove. She felt every pulse as the creature swam through the sand. In the dark, the heat, and the stench, reminded her too much of a mosh pit in a nasty pub basement. Some of her favorite shows had been in places like that, but at least they had music. All she could hear was the dull roar of a heartbeat — was it hers? She couldn’t be sure.

Was this a stomach? Or some kind of holding chamber? It felt like she was trapped inside of an oversized lambskin condom.

It still confused her how she had been swallowed. One minute, she was blasting the sandwraith with lightning from her fingertips, and the next, the next… no, she never blasted it… it snuck up and swallowed her from beneath like a fanged trapdoor before she even knew what was happening.

Even though it captured her, she refused to stay trapped.

She reached for her Skein and prepared to activate [Polarising Touch] when something chittered in her ear.

“I wouldn’t do that,” said the Four-Hearted Wasp.

A voice dry and alien in this wet space. Skidmark kicked as far away as possible, which wasn’t very far. Something crawled across her leg. Pinprick legs of a wasp. The chittering laugh filled the wet space.

“Get away from me,” she hissed through a tight-lipped mouth lest she taste anything. The smell was bad enough. “Stay back or I’ll zap you.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

“Shut up!”

Lightning worked its way up her arms, and the harsh blue glow lit up the pulsating red organs squishing around her. The demon was suspended upside down, its thin body entangled in ropes of pink guts. Arcing electric light reflected off the smooth black exoskeleton skull and its lipless grin.

“If you explode the sandwraith, the tonnage of the desert shall bury us.”

Skidmark blinked. Her technique fizzled out and the thick darkness returned. The demon was right, but she had to do something.

“Do you have a plan to get out of here?” she asked.

“You assume I want to escape.”

She blinked again. Stunned. Something dripped on her forehead. Before she could say anything in response, her gut shifted.

Falling.

A crash shook through the sandwraith and jumbled her about, and then light spilled onto her. The sandwraith opened up its mouth wide and heaved. Pulsating organs gripped her and launched her up toward the light. She hurtled out past the fanged maw and landed on the ground. It wobbled beneath her like a trampoline of custard skin. Her cheek hit the floor and, blinking against the light, she peered through the translucent layer.

Abyss.

She never feared heights, but sudden vertigo shriveled her mind. No plane ever flew this high, nor looked down on a land so dark. Hundreds of kilometers sank below her, and the grains of sand falling were as insignificant as stars in the sky. They vanished into the darkness or touched the tops of the mountains rising…

No…

Not mountains…

Shards of glass. Each one was so tall it hurt her mind to think about, and so sharp it hurt her eyes to look. The broken remnants of the bottom half of the Hourglass.

And the demon wanted them to fall toward that place?

The demon…

Something wet splatted onto the ground behind her. The Four-Hearted Wasp untangled its bony limbs, sat cross-legged, and threw back its head with a buzzing snort of laughter.

“My sense of direction is worse than I thought.”

“How can you laugh?” Skidmark’s sudden anger thickened her accent. “This is all your fault!”

“I too find the situation humorous,” said an unfamiliar voice; sensual, velvety, and full of curves.

Skidmark looked past the bony demon for the first time. The space was a cavern like a hollowed-out egg made from the same translucent slime as the floor. The high ceiling brought her back to Sunday mornings at Catholic school. Dark sand shifted across the ceiling as the desert flowed around the curved surface.

The sand was illuminated by the slime’s yellow phosphorescence, but a brighter, pulsing source of light illuminated the chamber. The source of the light was the source of the mysterious voice.

A demon.

She was tall, and wide, all curves from her golden luminescent eyes to her swollen breasts, to her wide birthing hips, and from the hips down a long wormlike body coiled around itself to make a throne. From her back extended the lacelike coral structures of the sandwraiths like a pair of haute couture wings.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Heavy eyelashes batted as she rested her long-nailed pinky in the corner of her mouth.

“To think I would once more have the Four-Hearted Wasp at my mercy.”

“You look as self-important as ever, No-Legged Worm.”

She chewed on the end of her black nailed pinky as her eyes flashed like the sun between clouds.

“And you look malnourished. Were you given no food in that cage?”

“Nothing as sweet as your wicked lies.”

Skidmark looked between them.

“You two know each other?”

“All demons know each other,” said the No-Legged Worm. “But what we had was something special. Until you threw it all away by revolting against the Gambler.”

“The Gambler is dead now.”

“You lie!”

The Four-Hearted Wasp shrugged.

“Naturally.”

Her eyebrows arched in surprise.

“I suppose it would explain your freedom… but not why you are in my domain.”

“Your domain? This broken thing of sand and glass?”

“Silence! Tell me why you are here!”

The Four-Hearted Wasp snickered at her contradictory demands.

“I am bound by a deal to guide this one and her party to the Angel.”

“What a pity you stumbled upon me then.”

The Four Hearted Wasp shrugged again. Skidmark wobbled to her feet.

“No need for pity,” she said. “Just return us to the others and we can be on our way. I’m sure you don’t want the others to bother you here. We can all go our separate ways.”

The No-Legged Worm tapped her chin with a glistening black pinky.

“Ah, yes, I could do that, couldn’t I? But right now I’m sure you’re counting on your friends rescuing you.”

“I wouldn’t call us friends…”

Her nostrils flared.

“That dark technique wrapped around your heart says otherwise! I’m sure the ‘friend’ who placed it around your heart is trying to track you right now, but while I rule the Hourglass, she shall have no such luck!”

She pointed her tail at the two of them and sprayed a thick gluey substance. The glue pinned Skidmark to the ground. Tacky, gummy, rotten — the same material used to make the doors.

“Stay put,” the No-Legged Worm snickered. "While I collect the rest of you.”

“What are you going to do with us?”

“Either slaves, food, or clients, that is up to you. I find people make better deals when they have no options. Now, hush.”

She sprayed a fine line of glue that covered Skidmark’s mouth and gagged her completely while leaving her nostrils free. Skidmark could do nothing but rage impotently as the No-Legged Worm laughed and uncoiled. Her long black nails parted the sac ceiling neatly. Not a single grain of sand spilled into the chamber as she swam up into the sand above.

###

The wall of sand raced across the desert like a gathering wave. Dust reared above the flowing grains and created a cloud that obscured the glass walls of the hourglass. A single ridge spearheaded the wave, and the desert cascading behind it took on the appearance of a woman’s face snarling with ill-mannered glee.

“That can’t be good,” said Bella.

Oriz squinted, judging.

“We have around nine minutes till it gets here.”

“What is it?”

“Nine minutes till we find out,” Anton said as he turned to Zoe. “Can you extract the Title before then?”

Zoe’s heart hammered.

“Depends if you want to live or not.”

“I want to live.”

She nodded and suppressed the tremble building up inside her. Why couldn’t anything be easy?

ding!

Some people walk a hard life so others don’t have to.

“We could wait and fight it off,” Zoe said. “Maybe we’re strong enough…”

Oriz shook her head.

“I can’t believe I’m suggesting this, but do the surgery.”

“But —”

“Last time the worms picked us off. We beat two, but they took two of us. This is a bigger enemy. Probably one of their elites.” She glanced at Bella. “It’s not worth risking our lives.”

“Just worth risking Anton’s?”

Oriz steeled her features as she met Zoe’s glare, and after precious seconds slipped away, she nodded. The tenuous thread between them, the technique binding their hearts, frayed…

But endured.

For now.

Because as much as Zoe hated it, she agreed with the alien’s logic.

But this is the last time, she told herself. When I escape Hell, I won’t treat the lives of my friends so cheaply.

How many times had she made that promise before?

Would she ever let herself keep it?

Anton gripped her shoulder and looked her dead in the eye.

“No time for angst, boss, you’ve got to cut my brain open.”

Her grin was forced, and sickly, but it was there.

“Ok. Activate [Fools Rush In].”

He squinted as the disabled title throbbed inside his mind.

“Done,” he said with a strained voice.

“Do you want to be conscious?”

“Not if I don’t have —”

She squeezed [Our Hearts Toll as One] and his eyes rolled back. He collapsed into her chains and she held him aloft. All of her chains came into play. She used two chains from her feet to raise herself over him as the others formed a table and vice to keep Anton immobile. [Mind’s Eye Incision] activated, and her fingers split apart into twenty flexible blades, and she reeled the dismantled hunk of amber closer. She needed it ready and at hand.

“Is there anything we can do to help?” Oriz asked.

“Stay out of my way.”

Without another word, she cut.

###

Anton joked about her cutting open his brain, but the Title wasn’t located inside the skull. It sat inside the soul, and there was already too much going on inside the relatively small area of the human head. Everything was dense there and tangled as the regions for pleasure, perception, hatred, love, loss, and a thousand other permutations of experience overlapped and struggled for dominance.

The mind strove to be one thing, but it could only ever be multitudes.

Zoe’s blades instead moved down to the sternum and sliced into the center of his chest. Passing through the clothes and flesh like steam through the air, she slid into the overlapping Skein that made Anton a member of the Crimson Armada System.

He was more complicated than the grenade, but no less explosive. Living Skein pushed against her blades, and she morphed some into hooks with a thought. These tools moved the skein away as she guided her remaining blades toward the Title that still throbbed from Anton’s attempted activation.

She let out a gasp as she found it.

Located deep beneath his sternum, deeper than a human chest cavity should have allowed, lay the Title. It clung to the web of Skein like a gelatinous centipede. Twelve segments, each with tiny claws that knotted themselves around the shimmering gossamer of Sky and Wind and Air that made up the core of Anton’s being. Eleven of the segments pulsed a violent red like inflamed flesh, but one lay there atrophied and exsanguinated, a pallid pink raisin. That must be the single-use Anton made of the ability.

Despite the ugly, swollen appearance, Zoe was relieved. She feared the Title would be interwoven with his Skein, something that couldn’t be extracted, but here it was barely attached. This made sense if a Title was something the Gambler could give or take away.

With no time to sit thinking, she morphed her blades into slender tweezers and started disentangling the claws from the surrounding Skein. She had to hurry, for the wall of sand drew ever closer.