Gunshots in the Outscape were a singular thing. One or two were easily enough to dispatch any nightmare—and when they weren’t, the hand holding the gun rarely lasted much longer than that. Bella held six bullets, and that was all I’d ever needed from her, a singular spin of the barrel.

Not this. Not here. A ribbon of light chewed its way across the darkened square, throwing up sprays of dirt and splinters of wood, mixing with the particles of glass in the air from the shattered streetlamp. Its sound was strange and low and repetitive, like the clunk-clunk-clunk of a factory conveyor belt. I don’t know whether Robin grabbed for my arm first or I for hers, and it didn’t matter, as we bolted for the street. “Down!” I hissed at her as soon as the cacophonous sound stilled and the air seemed to take a breath. “Down! We can’t make a silhouette!”

“What’s happeni-”

“Down!” I all but threw her to the ground before dropping to the grass myself. There was a stinging wetness on the back of my neck. I put my hand to it and my fingers came away sticky with blood and sparkling with glass. If Robin hadn’t fought with me, hadn’t pulled me away from the streetlamp, I suspected my head and upper body would have been in much worse shape.

There was a heavy silence. No insects, no wind. If we stayed here too long, we might hear the the hiss and pop of slowly-cooling metal, three inches buried into the ground. It was my professional (and personal) opinion that we shouldn’t stay that long. But I had to ask: “When you said something wasn’t right here, Robin,” I whispered. Then I gave up whispering, because it was pointless and our assailant certainly couldn’t hear us. “What did you mean? What did you feel? Did you know this was going to happen before the shooting started?”

“No,” she said. “Not this.”

I heard that pause. “But what?”

“Are you still trying to send me away?”

Oh. She was angry at me. I found when the bullets were flying I didn’t much care. “It’s an easy question. What’d you feel and was it the bullets coming our way? And I think you’d better answer damn quick before they start flying again.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway! You-”

That machine gun opened up again. I shoved Robin down up against the grass again, covering her head with my arm. It was an experimental burst more than anything, trying to flush us out like ducks from the reeds, and it ground to a halt after only a few seconds. “I’m sorry,” I said, once my ears had stopped ringing. “I shouldn’t have arranged this without telling you or asking you. Everyone else wants you as their pawn—I shouldn’t do the same.” I could faintly see her nod in the darkness. “Now talk to me, Robin.”

Her voice was shaky. “It wasn’t this. I don’t know, it—I didn’t know it was anything specific. It was like that lightness in your stomach, just before you start falling, like you’re really high over some sort of cliff and if you step forward you’ll go off it.”

“Once we get round that corner,” I said. “I think we’ll be out of the firing line. But we gotta run for it first. Ready?”

“Is—how far is it?”

“Hundred yards, about. Twenty seconds.”

“Will he see us?”

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I stuck my tongue out. There were still streetlights there, in front of which we’d be obvious shadows. “Put the lights between you and that gun,” I said. “He’ll be less accurate aiming into the light than in front of it. Now, quickly, before he starts again.”

Robin jumped to her feet faster than I did, but she waited for me before she started running. Stupid. That short distance felt a hell of a longer than it had just a second ago, the road stretching in front of me and riddled with potential hazards. The glare of the lamps, which I’d said would protect us, filled the top half of my vision, a kind of blinder I couldn’t afford. There was no way I could have heard the gun spooling up, but I was convinced I did, the accelerating mechanical sounds that would tear through me like the winding of a clock.

If I was wrong, if he saw me through these blinding incandescent lights, then that clock would measure the seconds of my life. I grit my teeth and sprinted a little faster—Robin was already in front of me, and needed no encouragement as that terrible clunk-clunk-clunk began to follow us, tracking lightning through the air and our half-second-old footsteps.

Then I was around that brick wall, wincing as chips of stone were knocked out just inches from my face. “Damn!” I swiped a hand along my face, clearing a bit of the blood and grass-lined grime that had accumulated there. “What do they think they’re doing?”

Conjager was pressed up against the same wall. A grimace was plastered across his face, his teeth pulled back, and he had one hand pressed against the back of his knee, blood trickling between his fingers. “Nice of you to join me here,” he snapped. “Took you long enough to find cover, not that I signed up for this. How’d this happen? Why’s Zamir out there shooting at us?”

“She’s never touched a gun in her life,” I said. “But she sure as hell sold us out and set us up to someone.” I nodded to his leg. “You hurt?”

“Clipped me. They weren’t aiming at me, though.”

“Right.” I turned back to Robin. “What were you telling me?”

She blinked. “Um. I thought it was this stupid city making me feel like that. That’s what you said nightmares were like, that’s what I thought. But it’s not the same, every time, it doesn’t always feel like this. That’s what I was saying, if you’d just listened-’

“Focus.”

“It was like this when I saw Fletcher. That sort of bad.”

I frowned. “That…doesn’t make any sense. You are describing a nightmare—falling. That’s what it feels like, the dizziness and the pull, the feeling of standing over a precipice no matter where you are. But it’s not Fletcher’s nightmare and it’s not Zamir’s. I mean-” I stopped. I took Bella from my pocket and spun her around in my hands to think, Conjager wincing a little at the motion. “Hold on. You said you’ve been feeling it since you arrived? Since Fletcher?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s Chesnes’ nightmare, then. Something at the back of your mind. Something pushing you.”

She looked alarmed at that, running a hand through her hair as though she could pull it out like a bug, toss and stamp it on the ground. “What if I don’t want it there?”

“Well, keep it. Saved our damn hides.”

Conjager straightened. There was a bead of sweat on his forehead, but otherwise he might not have been wounded at all. No pain, not even that which he wanted. An automaton, who’d notice only when he started to fall apart. “The more pertinent question, Hexel, is what we do about it. They want us dead, and they know we’re not. I fear,” he said, “their silence now is because they’re tracking us down.”

“Great,” I said.

“We should go get them,” Robin said.

“What?”

“You left Fletcher, and now she knows everything. She’s the danger that meant you tried to send me away. And if we run away now,” she said, “then—it’ll be the same, except with a bigger gun and I don’t know if we’ll be lucky again. I don’t_—I don’t feel very lucky.” She shook her head. “I don’t want it to happen again, Starling. If I can’t go home at least I want this place to be less awful.”

Conjager shrugged. “She’s not wrong.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want to get, ah, perforated.”

“No, Starling. It has to end now. Please,” Robin said.

I stared at her. I didn’t have her odd residual nightmare, no, but I had my own pit in my stomach, the guilt of trying to hand Robin off and the utter catastrophe it’d turned out to be. Zamir had never earned that much trust from me, not for the responsibility of another person. “Ah, hell,” I said. “I owe you that much. And maybe there’s a bonus in it for me, too.”

“What’s that?”

“Breaking Zamir’s nose when I find her.”