“Is that…?” Alecia started to ask, and then trailed off, apparently unsure how to continue.

“Our guide from the survey unit,” Merigold finished for her, voice cracking.

“Not the time to be debating who he is,” Reese said, taking advantage of Merigold’s iron grip on her wrist to tow her back towards the building.

“Not in there,” Alecia snarled, turning and starting towards an alley twenty yards in the opposite direction of Zip. “If we go inside, he’ll follow us.”

“Why the heck would he do that?” Reese demanded, but she and Merigold lost no time following Alecia anyway. Lighting ripped up the street behind them just as the soft shade between buildings swallowed them up. The buildings shielded them from the worst of the debris kicked up by the attack, but Merigold still felt shards of rock bouncing off her spine as they headed for the next street over.

“They’re after Merigold!” Alecia shouted over her shoulder.

“Merigold?” Reese, too, looked back, dark eyes wide. Merigold knew her sister wanted to hear the rest of the story, which was not terribly long, but still too long to be recounted in between sucking air into her lungs to keep running for her life. She did not even have the breath to ask where Alecia was leading them; she certainly seemed to have a plan.

They pelted out onto the next street, which was appropriately named Greenway. It abutted a lovely, if tiny, arbor, which offered a pleasant respite from the heat in the summer. On most days, crowds thronged Greenway, in part because it was one of the most beautiful places in South Hakarth to be outside, in part because it was lined by all the hottest shops in the commerce district, and in part because it was only one street over from the train tracks.

Alecia kept them moving, weaving through panicked crowds shoving towards the entrances of buildings or running for the train tracks. Alecia seemed to have also subscribed to the belief that the tracks were an apt destination. She took them through the narrow paths of the arbor, down Greenway Crossing, which ran perpendicular to Greenway, and out onto the train tracks. From childhood, everyone in Hakarth learned to listen for the bellowing horn of oncoming trains, and to feel for the unmistakable rumble through its tracks. Their was neither now, though the rumble would have been difficult to feel amidst the stampede of onlookers huddled in wait for the train.

To Merigold’s surprise, Alecia kept on past them, shouting for the crowds to get away. Another explosion rocked the street behind them. Birds shot into the sky, erupting over the tallest buildings on Greenway.

They kept on for two more blocks, as the crowds dwindled and the expensive buildings of the commerce district abruptly transformed into the functionally austere buildings that housed businesses that were not open to the public. Broad, bright shop windows were replaced by narrow chasms spanned by rippling glass or shuttered against the afternoon noise. Massive signs proclaiming goods and services faded into plaques, declaring this or that architects, welders, or engineers. They stopped in front of a building behind a high brick wall – too high for Merigold to see over.

Leaning over her knees, she gasped for breath and rubbed the sweat out of her eyes. Reese, in front of her, was dong much the same. Out of the three of them, Alecia was the least affected, but even she leaned on the wall, looking back the way they had come.

“We’re here,” she announced once she had reclaimed enough breath to do so. She did not explain where here was, but Merigold knew regardless. There were few places in Hakarth that warranted walls; anything that required privacy, which was rare, anything that handled sewage, which mostly existed on the outskirts of Hakarth, and anything that handled death.

“A crematorium,” Reese panted.

“What…are you…thinking…Alecia?” Merigold gasped, feeling a shiver run down her spine as the sound of shouting one street over was met with the sound of whistles. Not train whistles, but the whistles the Seniors in the Combat Guilds used to get people out of the way when they had to handle threats in crowded areas. Some unit or other, it seemed, had tracked down the veritable zombie, Zip.

“I’m thinking there will be some bodies in here…waiting to be cremated,” Alecia said with a gesture at the opening in the wall. It had no gate. The walls around crematoriums were to delineate them from the hubbub of Hakarth, not to keep people out. Who, after all, would want to disturb the dead? Rogue necromancers had never been a problem in the city before.

“And what? You want me to…raise one to…fight that thing? It will take…too long.”

“That would be nice,” Alecia admitted. “But actually, I was thinking…we could use—”

“The furnace!” Reese said at het same time as Alecia.

“Gods…how do you….both have your breath back?”

“Come on,” Reese said, breaking into a run again, and making her through the gap in the wall. Alecia hurried after her. Merigold shook her head, but did the same. The sounds of battle followed after them, drawing inexorably closer.

Inside the wall was a plot of dusty earth that could have housed several buildings, but was instead home to a few benches, gnarled trees that cast a deep shade, and maintained planters filled with a heady variety of flowers. The building where the furnace had to be located was fairly large, and for good reason; it had to house not only the furnace, but the bodies to be cremated, and areas for loved ones to say their final farewells in peace. The front of the building was welcoming, shaded by a freshly painted lattice thick with climbing roses, and a door inset with stained glass in the shape of a withering purple flame. It lay open, since Reese and Alecia had already gone inside.

Merigold followed them. Her footsteps sounded loud and heavy on the sandstone floors of the foyer, and continued to echo around her as she passed more richly maintained flowers and a silent viewing area open to the warm spring air. The furnace was at the back of the crematorium, and Reese and Alecia were roving around it when Merigold arrived.

“So, how will we…get it to work?” she asked. “None of us are fire elementals.”

“That’s only a small hiccup in our plan,” Alecia noted, gesturing at a massive spell circle filled with runes etched into the front of the furnace. “There are hardly enough fire elementals to go around the city, so Illuminators use these – very complicated – circles to allow fire elementals to store power in the furnaces. They have to be recharged every few days, or more if…” Alecia trailed off, “well, anyway, there should be some charge left here right now. I can sense it.”

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“So, we just have to get that thing into the furnace,” Reese said, peering at the circle with interest. “Any plan for how to do that?”

“Getting Zombie Zip into the furnace is the last thing we need to do,” Merigold said, trying to ignore the way the building shook underneath them as shouts erupted outside.

“Zombie Zip,” Reese echoed incredulously.

“You don’t think we should kill it. He’s not—” Alecia began, but Merigold interrupted her.

“No, I’m saying it’s literally the last thing to do. Clearly, an erowist has somehow possessed Zip’s body. It will kill us before we get it into that furnace. We need to separate them, somehow capture its core, and destroy it.”

“The core must be in Zip’s body,” Alecia argued. “The furnace would destroy it.”

“There’s no way that furnace will contain an erowist.”

“Woah,” Reese stopped their argument with two raised hands, looking between Alecia and Merigold. “Alecia, you’re an Illuminator. You can draw a paralysis run into the floor, right?”

“It won’t work on erowist,” Alecia stated.

“Zombie Zip out there isn’t an all erowist. It should work on his body,” Reese said. Alecia, looking thoughtful, cocked her head in a way that said she might agree. “So then we paralyze him, carry him to the furnace—”

“You can’t move him, Reese,” Alecia interrupted. “Once he leaves the circle, the paralysis will wear off, and it doesn’t sound like I have the time to make more than one,” she paused and added, “much less the energy.”

Reese stuck out her lower lip, thinking. Something crashed into the crematorium, and the sound of brick shattering echoed up and down the hall. Alecia was pulling out her brush and running to the doorway to get to work, muttering about figuring the rest out later. Reese looked through the doorway in horror, and Merigold followed her gaze. There was a man standing in the rubble-strewn hallway – not Zombie Zip, but someone wearing a cuirass dyed forest green. The tongue of electricity that lashed the air in front of him and hung there, a fatal thread of doom, suggested he was a psychic.

“Reese,” Merigold shouted to be heard above the roar of battle just outside the doorway. Her sister looked at her, wild-eyed. “Get ready to work the furnace. And stay here, no matter what.” Reese nodded, possibly reacting to the urgency in Merigold’s tone.

Merigold knelt beside Alecia, who was deep in the throes of her work. She would not have time to create a very powerful circle, but so long as she finished her work, whatever Alecia created would be enough to trap Zip’s body for at least a few minutes. Long enough for help to arrive, or for them to come up with the rest of their plan.

“Alecia,” Merigold said. Her friend did not pause, nor look up, but Merigold knew she was listening. Merigold was watching the battle unfold in the hallway anyway; she had eyes only for the shambling figure that had appeared through the gaping hole in the brickwork that had once housed the front door of the crematorium. “I’m going to go out there, and tell whoever is fighting that creature that we need to let him through this door. Whatever that—”

She stopped, growing very pale, and very still, as the psychic in front of her was hurled backwards with a scream. She did not see where he landed, but she thought, from the sickening smack of impact, that he was most certainly dead.

“We’re out of time,” she managed, feeling the erowist’s eyes turn towards her as it dragged itself into the foyer.

“You cannot run, Merigold Lee.” It’s voice reached her despite the distance, like a radio frequency on a channel she could not change away from. “I know what you did. I saw it all.”

“Get ready, Merigold,” Alecia growled, dragging her from the creature’s view as a bolt of raw green energy shot into the room, lighting up even its darkest corners. Reese cowered by the furnace, covering her eyes with her hands. Merigold and Alecia crashed to the hard floor. With incredible speed, Zip entered the doorway…

And froze. Those haunting green eyes spat sparks. Light poured from the creature’s half-open mouth. Static electricity arced from the ruined clothes and scraggly hair of the old man’s corpse, spawning threads of power that faded just a few inches into the surrounding atmosphere.

“DISGUSTING VERMIN! NOTHING WILL STOP ME. SOON ENOUGH, YOU WILL DIE. YOU WILL….”

Merigold tried to drown out the sound of the creature spitting rage and cursing, despite the fact that Zip’s broken jaw was frozen in place.

“What now?” Reese cried from beside the furnace. She had one hand on the clay brick, close enough that she could activate the rune with a touch if needed.

“The circle will only last so long! We have to figure out how to move him!” Merigold shouted back, only to realize something that made her, like the erowist possessing Zip’s body, freeze. Hurriedly, she pushed herself to her feet, and snatched the brush and ink from Alecia. She sprang forward, and with assured strokes, painted a distorted half-circle on Zip’s wrinkled forehead, filling it with three print-perfect runes.

It had an immediate effect.

The sparks arcing across the dead man’s body ceased. The luminous gleam of his eyes and mouth went dark. Something started to billow out around him – the ectoplasmic, neon green energy of the erowist.

Silence descended like a thunderclap. Neither Alecia nor Reese were saying anything else, and the erowist had finally stopped cursing. Outside the room with the furnace, if there were survivors of the disastrous battle with the erowist, they picked themselves up in the hush without a sound.

Merigold, no longer hurried, sank to her knees. For a long moment, she stared at the sandstone floor, trying to steady her breathing. And then she calmly sat up a little straighter, adjusted the sleeves of her sweaty sweater, which had been an excellent choice for an outing with friends but not for a battle with one of the erowist, and withdrew a notebook from her bag. It was the same notebook she always carried.

The one she would have used as a Drafter.

No one interrupted her as she began to write. Reese uncurled from the side of the furnace, staring. Alecia came to peer at the still unmoving erowist.

“What did you do?” she eventually, finally, asked. Merigold did not look up, enthralled in her work.

“I destroyed blocked the channels Zip used, once, to connect to the Astral Plane. I made him an unsuitable host for the erowist, whose core is still trapped inside,” she answered.

“Oh,” Alecia said, looking bewildered, and the impressed, and then relieved. “So, we can move him? We can put him in the furnace?”

“Yes,” Merigold said, crossing the final line on the final rune in her contract. She stood slowly, bringing it with her to hold at eye level for the erowist, or at least for Zip’s corpse. “But I have a better idea. Now that it would be easy for us to dispatch the erowist in that furnace there,” she gestured at the furnace for dramatic effect, feeling a tiny burst of pleasure when Reese touched the rune and flames roared to life in its massive gullet, “I want to offer the erowist a choice. Destruction or...a deal. Are you reading?” she asked, preparing to turn the page on her contract.

“Moldering sack of flesh…”

“Destruction it is then,” Merigold said with just the right amount of glee, withdrawing the contract and turning aside to make room for Alecia to drag the old man towards the furnace. Alecia, who had no idea what was happening, and looked skeptical of Merigold’s plan, did not move, but the effect was instantaneous. The erowist began to pulse lavender, then gold, in an awful halo around Zip’s corpse.

“You think I will serve you for the rest of your miserable existence? You think I won’t kill you as you sleep, as you eat, as you..”

“You won’t,” Merigold said calmly, “because your core would be destroyed if you did. What’s a hundred years for something like you, pure energy from the Astral Plane? Serve me, and when I die, you’ll be free to go back where you came from, but never, never, to return here.”

The angry pulsing continued, growing more urgent. A few tendrils of electricity spun around Zip’s body, but the erowist was trapped, and could not go anywhere without its core. Merigold did not relish the idea of trying to dig it out of whatever orifice the erowist had managed to embed it in in the corpse.

“I agree! I agree to your terms.”

“I also agree to the terms of this contract,” Merigold said with a hard stare, watching as it crumbled from her hands in a burst of indigo fire. Then she brushed her hands together, removing any traces of clinging ash, and turned to Alecia and Reese to say, “Help me find this thing’s core before we cremate…Zombie Zip. The erowist and I have come to an agreement.”

It turned out the two of them had an awful lot to say about her declaration.