What their new American bosses were planning to do with their captives now that they had taken over was not really clear to Liana. They might not really know it themselves. In this change of management it probably wasn't clear to anyone why they were prisoners anymore even, and Liana certainly didn't feel like drawing the attention of the powerful man in grey to ask what was going to happen to her. He might be one of her own kind from her own world, but he certainly didn't feel any safer than Andira herself. He was the same dangerous type, just from a different trade union, Liana told herself. She knew all too well what humans were capable of when they had power and money in mind. The worst things sometimes… She had no illusions about that!

She turned her head and looked out the window. The guards kept their guns pointed at her and her companions, but it seemed they barely reacted to what she was doing as long as she stayed where she was. Outside the move was in full force, at least that’s what she concluded from what she could see, with people coming and going with gear and vehicles, mostly all heading in the same direction. And then she saw a group of Drotnira patrolling as if nothing had happened. Everything outside was still going on as if nothing had happened? She had the impression that the Nuanderrans completely ignored the entire move of the STC, probably because they knew nothing about it.

A strange feeling ran down her spine: the Onnobolda hadn't realised yet what had happened to their leader! She also saw other Drotnira patrolling here and there, who clearly didn't know their boss had changed. But she didn't see any Nummerfa. Where had they gone? Had they left without warning the Drotnira? Or had the STC lured them away somehow? Even with all her extraordinary telepathic powers, Andira couldn’t have warned anyone before she was shot, it had been too sudden. And that meant that apart from them only the people of the STC knew what had happened to the leader of the Onnobolda, and she herself seemed to be the only one who wasn't in too much shock to react now. She just had no idea what to do next.

A group of STC agents left the room, and a few others arrived. Suddenly John stopped yelling into his smartphone and addressed everyone present. He held his STC badge high in the air, shouting an order to his men, which was repeated by an invisible loudspeaker throughout the base. “Phase 3, to the portal!” Liana had no idea what that meant, but she hoped it would divert their attention and their weapons to something else than her. In the back of her mind she was still waiting for a lost moment when she could create an invisible gate for all three of them to escape. The problem was that she had a hard time communicating that to the other two in this state: the otherwise optimistic Inaya seemed to have lost all of her willpower ever since the man with the glasses and gun had forced them out of the side dimension, and Lun didn't look much better. The confrontation with evil and violence had indeed been more difficult for them than they could have anticipated. The same was the case with Marah and Frest, who had been part of Andira's militia, and who stood there almost like wax figures.

But Liana couldn't give up now. It was too important. Not only the lives of the three of them depended on it, but probably the lives of many people in her own world, and perhaps in multiple worlds. The plan of mass extinction of the terrible Gorchbolds that the Onnobolda had concocted may have been called off for now with this change of power, but other trouble would certainly still be coming her way, and that of her world. If these people, or their clients, were going to use these weapons for what people usually used weapons for in her world she could only envision endless disaster scenarios! And whatever was happening here, it wouldn't last very long, by the way: The Americans were now all moving en masse and seemed to conclude their relocation operation with their so-called phase three. With a few rough nudges, the closest soldiers signaled their prisoners to hurry. The man in gray pointed to a device next to Andira's chair that two of their men picked up, but the others pointed their guns at Liana, Lun, Inaya, Marah, and Frest.

They all walked out in a strange procession, with John first, the prisoners in the middle, and the two men with the strange device last. Fortunately, one of the men also still had Lun and Liana's backpacks with him, which Liana had also never lost sight of. She didn't want to leave this world without her sweater if it would be possible at all! The roof of the first staircase of the ziggurat of the nameless city of the ancient aliens was virtually empty by now. Most of the people had disappeared, and most of the stuff was gone too. Empty skeletons of installations looked ghostly in the light of enormous lamps, and between them a group of Drotnira kept on patrolling as if nothing special was going on. Liana even thought they looked happier today, probably relieved that the Oranderrans were packing their things and disappearing out of sight.

Deep under them she noticed a whole torrent of people, carrying all kinds of things, who all seemed to disappear behind the corner, while only very few came in the opposite direction. But where did they actually go? Something had been said about a portal, was that where they were going? And so they came to a staircase, an outside staircase at the edge of the terrace of the pyramid. “I take the elevator, you take the stairs.” John said, and the rest of the STC officers and the prisoners were sent down the stairs. Walking down those stairs was an experience in itself, which in other circumstances would have been quite the sensation. It only went from the first step of the pyramid to the ground floor, but seemed endless, and was clearly not man-made. She had to be very careful not to fall in this light, with all the strangeness of the shapes here. Not only did the steps have an odd size, the angles also felt very wrong. Typical for the designs of the ancient aliens, the ones who had destroyed their own world with their own technologies, Liana thought. The same technologies that were now being moved by hordes of soldiers to an unknown place. Liana had no idea where that was, but she fervently hoped against her better judgment that it wasn't somewhere in her own world.

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

An organisation with shady purposes that possessed this kind of Kavanderran technology would be a dangerous power that could have a very bad influence on world politics, bringing in a new kind of warfare.

Meanwhile, she started to get tired. This dreadful staircase seemed endless, and it would not have been a pleasant descent even without weapons aimed at her in this strange light. But every endless staircase also had to come to an end, and she kept on going without ever losing her attention. When they finally arrived downstairs Liana was completely exhausted, and gasped. She felt that this walk had taken hours but her sense of time wasn’t really accurate right now. The other four prisoners, all Nuanderrans, seemed less physically exhausted, but much more psychologically broken, she noted. Inaya and Lun barely reacted to their surroundings anymore and seemed to go along on autopilot without much hope.

When she got down, everything was a lot quieter than she'd ever seen the city here. The biggest move was clearly over, and there was hardly anyone to be seen. Only here and there she saw Drotnira on their night shift, visibly delighted with the sudden calm and absence of humans. Nummerfa were nowhere to be seen. But their walk was not over when they were down. They now had to follow the wall of the ziggurat, which again seemed endless, and their guards were clearly growing more nervous by the minute. Apparently they wanted to get to whatever their destination was as quickly as possible. It seemed to be somewhere behind the slowly approaching corner of the massive wall. Their weapons still jabbed at the travellers, and their eyes blazed. You could tell they'd rather be somewhere else now, and not carry any prisoners.

Liana sensed that something terrible was coming, something these people didn't want to experience. And that, of course, made them a lot more dangerous. An armed soldier in a panic is much more dangerous than one who is just quietly guarding something unimportant. And these ones got more and more nervous, though they didn't talk about what was about to happen. Inaya gave her a questioning look, and Liana remembered that she didn't need spoken words to communicate with Inaya. “What's the matter with these men? They're scared themselves!" She said. Inaya had clearly noticed the same thing. “Yes, they are scared, they want to get 'there' quickly before 'it' happens. But their minds are too confused to know what 'there' and 'it' are.”

The man who had his unknown weapon pointed at Inaya yelled for them to move on. They were almost at the end of the wall. On the corner was another STC agent waiting for them. He was clearly relieved that they arrived, and typed something on his smartphone. “You're the last ones. We need to be fast now.” Liana saw her suspicions of complete evacuation confirmed, and when she turned the corner she saw how it had worked. They had a gate to another world! It wasn't the first time Liana thought she'd stumbled into a bad movie when she saw the heavily guarded portal into which the stream of movers disappeared. The gate itself was a terrifying monstrosity full of strange lights, just big enough for one of the jeeps to drive through. Liana felt a great horror when they approached it, as if she saw an abomination whose mere existence was a blasphemy against all possible gods. It almost seemed like a high-budget parody on the simple wooden gate that Akhina had used in the in-between world.

The Superior Tech Corps was apparently at the end of its exodus and that probably wasn't a good sign. John was standing in front of the gate, surveying everything, still with his smartphone in hand. He looked pleased while the last of the materials disappeared into the gate, and the world around them was almost empty. John only now noticed the passers-by with the captives, and beckoned his men to come along. They approached the gate, but they still kept their weapons pointed at the prisoners. In the end almost all the people were gone except John and his last soldiers. In the distance there were other Drotnira wandering about, but they paid no attention to the scene. This whole place suddenly felt empty, desolate, and threatening, and completely alien again.

Liana was certain now that all of this had indeed been planned for much longer than today and that she and her companions had just dropped in at the right (or wrong) time by accident. The American was apparently done with his most important business, and finally turned to the prisoners. "I'm sorry, but you guys will have to stay here." He looked pleased, and walked over to a huge black square thing not far from the gate and continued his explanation. “We have everything we need now. We have enough to make our own gate whenever we want, and all the technology we can use to finish everything Andira had planned, but in our own way. The rest will stay here. But not just like that.”

He took some kind of remote control out of a pocket in his jacket. "When we're gone you’ll have 5 minutes and then this bomb will wipe everything out." He looked at Inaya and Lun, and apparently thought they still had something threatening about them, but ignored Liana. “But maybe we should put you down first, just to be sure.” He pressed a button and disappeared in the gate, but just before he left, he gave an unmistakable signal to his soldiers, who still had their guns pointed at Liana and her companions. Liana saw their fingers move and stiffened. She almost thought she wouldn't make it to the next moment, but suddenly someone jumped into action next to her. Inaya finally realised what their intention was and suddenly shouted 'No' very loudly in her own language. With a mental desperation she invaded the heads of all the Americans who were still on this side of the gate, and they suddenly grabbed their heads and dropped their weapons. Writhing and mad with pain, they all dropped to the ground simultaneously.

That Inaya did such a thing was a sign that she was in despair, but Liana knew that even this wouldn't be enough. Within five minutes everything would be wiped out by a bomb and Liana was the only one of the three who had understood the English and knew what was going on. Inaya was fighting in a mental frenzy, holding the enemies to the ground in great pain, but Lun still stood defeated beside her. Meanwhile, Marah and Frest also seemed to wake up. They could have understood the English but didn't know what it was about. Liana looked at the bomb, which was ticking, and at the Americans, and then at Inaya, who was mentally very busy and wouldn't listen right away, and might not even have the strength to flee through the dimensions to Nuanderra now.

Was this really the end?