“Oh shit!” Gwil spilled his spaghetti on his lap as he leapt out of his seat.

No one heard the noise because of their partying. But Gwil saw their essence through the wall.

A horde of Taluses was marching down the hall.

“Get out of the way!”

Everyone scrambled as Gwil flipped over the table nearest to the entrance. The tabletop was a sturdy slab of marble.

A few of his comrades helped Gwil push it to block the door. There were a lot of statues, maybe fifty. Hopefully Cort and Ansoir are okay.

“Wait, I have an idea.” Gwil snatched a pickaxe out of someone’s hands. Flaring Nirva, he slammed the axe down on the joint of the table’s thick, pedestal-style leg. The wood splintered, and a second swing fully snapped the leg off.

“Get the other tables,” he shouted. “Break off all the legs!”

If they stacked all the marble slabs together, they’d have a formidable barrier.

His companions piled themselves against the slab as the statues thundered closer. Gwil pulled himself up the table’s edge to look through the gap at the top of the doorframe.

He’d meant to get a better look at what they were up against and received a metal fist to the jaw. Gwil spat out one of his teeth, wondered if it would grow back, reached into the throng and started swinging the pickaxe in a mad flurry.

Amidst a storm of chipped stone bits, the Taluses pounded against the barrier. Cracks were forming.

***

“I can help with that,” Leira said. She twisted the knobs on her flamethrower to the low end and then aimed at an empty space.

Twisting the throttle unleashed a narrow beam of crimson fire. It burned a hole right through the wall. Leira scribbled her name as a smoldering cutout in the wall as easily as she’d write it on a piece of paper.

That bastard. Buzzard had definitely understated the capabilities of this weapon.

Leira shooed the escapees away from the table they’d been carrying and had them crouch behind it to both shield themselves and keep it upright.

She sheared the leg off like she was cutting a block of cheese and then moved to the next one.

They created a hasty sort of assembly line. When Leira finished with the first table, a group of the escapees carried it over to the door and positioned it against the first one. Just in time—a piece of that one had broken off, and statue limbs were reaching through the hole.

A different group brought her the next table, and in less than three minutes, they’d stacked all six slabs in front of the doorway.

Gwil, who was lying on top of the stack, jumped down. His face looked like a raisin, all purple and swollen.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll hold them here. You all run.”

“Fuck you! We ain’t running!” yelled Limmy.

Leira smiled. She liked Limmy. The woman had green lips and wore hoop piercings in her eyelids, and she didn’t take any bullshit.

“We’re here to kill or die!” shouted someone else.

“I don’t mean run away,” Gwil said. He took a spot alongside the others who were pushing against the barrier and added his strength to theirs. “I mean go run wild! Tear this place down. Go find a car and drive it up that big staircase.”

The escapees cheered and went off to raise hell. Some went through the door on the other end of the dining hall, others burst through the crumbling section of the wall that Leira had burned—which led outdoors—and a few went through the swinging doors that led to the kitchens.

The only ones who remained were those who held the barrier with Gwil. The statues pounded against it, an unending clap of thunder.

“Get outta here guys,” Gwil said to them.

“Are you crazy? You go. We need you to fight.”

“Go kill Burgermeister Jaqlov and that cowboy fucker.”

Gwil’s grin was small against his swollen cheeks, though the swelling was already subsiding. Leira could see the healing actively happening.

“I’m gonna,” Gwil said. “But these statues come first.”

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“Actually, Gwil,” Leira said. She held up her flamethrower. “I think I have an idea for this little problem.”

“Great,” Gwil said. “You all clear out—you saw what Leira did to that big drill machine.”

They scurried away and Gwil shifted himself to better cover the barrier. Leira swallowed against a foul taste and cranked up the knobs on the flamethrower.

“Leira, what’d you think of Doctor Buzzard?” Gwil asked as he watched her fiddle with the device, nonplussed by the furious pounding at his back.

“That he’s a dangerous asshole,” she said. “What do you think?”

“Hmm… I think he really wants to fix everything, but there’s just so many problems that it makes him crazy. He’s too smart.”

Leira laughed. “He did offer to look after all the escapees earlier. Kind of.”

“Really?” Gwil said. “Phew. I was worried about that. I don’t wanna deal with so many people. It’s way too much responsibility. Hey, what are you gonna do with that fire-spitter? Won’t it be a bad mix with the Kaia?”

“That’s exactly what I’m banking on,” Leira said. “The engines don’t have that much Kaia in them, and it's refined, so I don’t think the explosion will be too big, but it should be enough to fuck up the statues.”

“Okay,” Gwil said.

“C’mon, don’t worry,” Leira said. “You and I won’t get killed by something silly like that.”

“Huh? I wasn’t worried. I was just asking.”

Leira poked her tongue out, squinting to read the numbers and labels and gauges. Truth be told, none of it meant anything to her. She’d just cranked everything up all the way.

“I think it’s ready,” she said. “But it’s probably not safe to test it, so let’s just go for it.” She gestured for Gwil to get up. “Let me stand on your shoulders.”

He stood and planted one hand against the barrier. With the other, he helped her climb up. She steadied herself and then pulled herself up to look over the barrier.

“Oh shit, that’s a lot of statues.” Some were headless, a smoke spewed from others. They were like livestock crammed in a pen, going berserk as they awaited the slaughter. “Perfect.”

Leira adjusted herself so that she could crouch behind the marble and use it as shielding. She held the flamethrower over her head, aimed it, and twisted the throttle.

An inferno worthy of the Seventh Hell was unleashed.

Leira’s eyeflower withered and curled inward. Her hair sizzled.

Perhaps the Taluses had some sense of self-preservation, because they stopped pounding on the barrier. Leira clenched her teeth as the searing heat scalded her hands.

The flames roared like a horde of demons. The wall surrounding the door caught fire.

A flicker of silence marked the first Kaia detonation. Chunks of the ceiling collapsed. The blaze devoured the hallway.

“Leira!” Gwil shouted.

She ignored him, ignored the white-hot knives flaying her hands. Just a little longer.

Debris fell on them and whips of fire lashed out. The successive spells of silence were maddening—each a false reprieve dangled and then snatched away, like having her head repeatedly dunked in water.

She could not breathe. The World was a pendulum, swinging between nothingness and destruction.

Gwil staggered beneath her as the flame-engulfed wall crumbled. Only then did Leira release the throttle.

Gwil caught her in his arms and dashed away as the ceiling fully caved. They crossed to the far end of the room.

All the Kaia lights in the dining hall had shattered. The firelight cast the room as a hellish place.

Gwil laid her down on the floor and wrapped his fingers around her wrists.

Her hands were screaming red and glistening, covered with bubbling and burst blisters. Browned blood and pus dribbled over ruined skin.

Gwil scrunched his face up. “Oh, Leira, what…” he trailed off. His grip tightened around her wrists, and she felt a pins-and-needles sensation.

It took a moment for her to realize that he was trying to heal her. It doesn’t work that way, Gwil. She couldn’t bring herself to say it, but she didn’t need to. He knew. He was trying anyway.

Jaw quivering, Leira shook her head and made the crumbly lotus bud twitch. “Once this thing blooms, I can weep an ointment. I’ve had worse burns. It’ll be fine.”

“Why didn’t you let me do that?”

Leira shrugged. The movement made her lose the fight against the weepiness that was wrenching at her face. Tears seeped out of her squeezed-shut eye, and she made a noise that was half-laugh, half sob. “I didn’t think of it!”

The fire’s roar had diminished to a persistent crackle cut through with crashes.

Gwil brushed the hair out of her face. She heard the burnt strands crinkle. Ashy bits dusted her nose.

“I wish one of us had,” he said.

“Yeah, you idiot!” And then she couldn’t stop wailing. “It really fucking hurts!”

“There’s some cake on the floor over there. Would that help?”

“Y-yeah,” she whimpered.

***

Gwil went to get her the cake, but first he peeked down the hall. It had been turned into a flaming canyon of ruin, flooded with mounds of burning rubble. A thick column of smoke poured into the dining hall.

He crouched to look up into the ceiling. The three floors above had all crashed down. But the manor’s stone skeleton stood strong against the fire.

Pocking the piles of rubble were strange circles of evisceration, clean-cut and perfect. Those wounds were glassy and black, completely empty—tiny whispers of the crater that Isca had made of the mountain.

Statue limbs stuck out at odd angles all throughout. None so much as twitched.

He went back to the fallen cake and shoveled it back onto the platter. As Gwil fixed up a tray of hors d'oeuvres for Cort and Ansoir, a smoldering ceiling beam slammed down beside him, and he decided he’d better hurry.

Balancing the two trays, he brought the cake back to Leira.

Gwil set it down next to her and, despite her injuries, Leira plunged her hands into the three-tiered cake and began stuffing her face.

She nodded at him and said, “’Oo ‘av some tuh.”

They were both grabbing handfuls of the giant cake and cramming their mouths full. It had more layers than Gwil could count—chocolate, nuts, whipped cream, normal cream, fruit.

“’Oly shuh,” he said. “’O gud!”

Leira nodded and then started laughing, which sprayed flecks of cake from her mouth. That made Gwil laugh and do the same.

He wiped his hands off on a nearby tablecloth. The dining hall, with its stone floor, mostly resisted the fire, but flames were crawling across the ceiling toward them.

“How are your hands?” Gwil asked.

With a loud gulp, she managed to swallow. “The icing is really soothing,” she said, holding up her caked hands.

Gwil watched the fire as Leira wiped her face off on the tablecloth—she left her hands sheathed with icing.

“I think we’d better go to the kitchens,” he said. “Some of the others went that way, but I think the fire’s gonna spread there.”

“Yeah, okay.” Leira stood and poked Gwil in the chest. “I’ll kill that stupid scientist. I swear I will.”

“I dunno,” Gwil said. “You’re the one who keeps destroying stuff.”

Leira laughed. “It was more fun with statues than people, at least.”