An hour later, I found myself sitting at large conference table.

We were in a brightly lit government building somewhere north of Sacramento. MEAD had brought a single teleporter pad to this reality, and after the centipede’s appearance, Clifton had given it to a radish demon with instructions to carry it four hundred miles south to the nearest FBI field office.

Apparently, the demons were taking orders from anyone if they deemed it could keep my mother safe.

Michael’s offspring marathoned the distance in a little over a half hour, setting up the pad and activating the quantum connector to its counterpart back in Pendervale. I’d met everyone else at the Pendervale pad, erected in a parking lot about ten miles from the centipede, and we’d all been teleported to a safe meeting place.

Painted portraits of men in suits hung on the walls. A wide window revealed a suburban road prickled with potholes. Cars bustled past. I wondered if the drivers had heard about the futuristic conflict or the oxygen-guzzling behemoth that had appeared in Pendervale that morning. They didn’t act like it.

At the table around me were an odd collection of individuals.

My mother sat to my left, and Jack sat to my right, Violet balanced on his lap. Michael and five other radish demons leaned against the wall behind us, casting an intimidating aura over my mother.

Lannon sat at one head of the table. A group of MEAD soldiers stood behind him in a show of force matching my mother’s demons.

Next to Lannon was Clifton and another FBI agent. A man named Whitehall. And sitting at the other head of the table was the captain of the anti-MEAD task force which had followed us to this reality. He was surly and straight-backed with a bald head and bags under his eyes making him look older than he probably was. He regarded Lannon with a sour expression. Big guns dangled from his hips. Their barrels knocked hollowly against the legs of his chair like bamboo windchimes.

The man introduced himself only as Vargo. He didn’t have a posse of fighters backing him up at the table. He didn’t need them.

Lannon broke the silence.

“Thanks for gathering here, everyone.”

He looked at Vargo as he spoke.

He continued, “To recap our situation, a creature known as a hungry centipede has entered this reality through a faulty interdimensional bridge. It’s currently swallowing up the air on this planet. The radish demons are the only ones familiar with these things, and by their guessing, we have about four days before the atmosphere of this Earth is unsalvageable and about two before the air becomes too thin to breathe on the opposite side of the globe.”

Great news.

“There are no functioning portals on this planet. We have no bridgemaker and no way to communicate across the multiverse to call for help.”

“What about the other side of your bridge? The one captured by the Republic?” Clifton asked. “If they discover the end on this Earth isn’t working, maybe they’ll realize something happened and use a bridgemaker to create another pathway to us.”

Vargo snorted.

“And create another access point to an off-the-grid reality? One that isn’t supposed to be connected to the multiverse at all? It would take weeks to get that paperwork approved.”

“What about MEAD?” Clifton pressed. “They made one thread to this planet to help us. Maybe they’ll make another?”

Lannon shrugged.

“I can’t say for sure. Most of our available fighting force is already here. The rest of MEAD will wait until they expect the fighting to be over before trying to reestablish contact. Probably at least five or six days.”

“So we have no way off this reality and no rescue coming in time? That’s what I’m hearing?” Whitehall asked.

“Pretty much,” Lannon answered.

“So what are our options?”

“Either we find a way to stop this centipede, or we all die.”

“Armor-piercing lasers and thermic missiles didn’t touch it,” Vargo said. “Have you got any more firepower?”

Lannon shrugged. He looked over at Clifton and Whitehall.

“What kinds of weapons do you fight your wars with here? What are we working with?”

Clifton and Whitehall met eyes briefly before Clifton spoke.

“Nuclear?” she proposed.

Vargo made a sound of disgust.

“Of course this is a nuclear Earth. Still practicing medicine like Neanderthals, but they’ve got nukes.”

“Hey,” Lannon urged. “Let’s cast judgement later and focus on using what we’ve got.”

“What is it?” Whitehall demanded, offended.

“Nuclear weapons are banned in the connected multiverse,” Lannon explained. “Too sloppy. They make entire provinces uninhabitable for centuries with the radiation. We use fluoro-thermic weapons instead. Similar explosive power, but much more precise. Plus, no radiation.”

“Well,” Clifton retorted. “It’s what we’ve got, and there’s currently a hydrogen bomb inbound for Pendervale.”

I did a double-take.

“Excuse me, what?” I spoke up for the first time. “You’re going to drop a nuke on Pendervale?”

Clifton met my eyes. There was a weariness in her gaze. Like she was a mother tired of explaining how the world worked, and I was the insolent child.

“We’ve been broadcasting an evacuation warning all over Pendervale for the last hour. We can’t afford to wait any longer. This thing will destroy the world in a matter of days. We have to hit it as hard as we can.”

Forget Revella, this woman was unforgivingly cold.

Jack rose from his chair, putting Violet in my lap and putting his hands on the table for support as he balanced on his uninjured leg.

“You can’t give them more time to evacuate?” he demanded. “There’s over a hundred thousand people in Pendervale.”

Clifton didn’t back away.

“Sit down, Mr. Barrett. You’re only here because your wife and mother-in-law are important to our strategy.”

“You don’t have the right to destroy our home!”

Vargo raised a hand to stop us.

“Don’t waste your breathe arguing,” he said. “I just received visuals. The bomb’s been dropped.”

Jack fell back into his seat, stunned. I felt similar. Like someone had just scooped out my insides and spilled them out onto the carpet. Violet wasn’t paying attention to our conversation, but she noticed my legs stiffen underneath her. She looked at me, quizzically.

“You’re not going to like this,” Vargo said, addressing the FBI representatives.

He typed commands into a tablet computer, and the video file was transferred to us. Clifton and Whitehall watched it on the communicator Lannon had given them. Lannon and I watched the video through our corneal lenses.

Augmented-reality images danced over my view of the boardroom table. The shot was taken from high altitude, from one of the few drones that had survived our fighting and managed to avoid being caught in the vortex.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

The mountainous coil of the centipede was projected over the table in gossamer light. The drone was far away, and the image was fuzzed, but I could still make out the swirling black hole of a mouth grinding and heaving as it pulled down the sky.

A few seconds passed. I didn’t see a bomb fall, but a sudden flash of white destroyed the image. The view switched to another drone camera, much farther away.

A fireball morphed into a towering mushroom. I scanned the video frame, searching for the centipede. Movement alerted me to its presence. The arthropod had been knocked aside by the blast, but that was all.

Unbothered, it slithered over the blazing char, lifting its head and continuing to feast.

That was incredibly fucking disappointing.

The mushroom in the sky began to collapse as the centipede inhaled the smoke. Jack touched my shoulder. I turned off the video stream.

“What are you seeing? Did the bomb go off?”

“It didn’t do anything,” I murmured.

Clifton smacked the communicator down on the table.

“Not a damn thing,” she echoed angrily.

I didn’t have it in me to worry about covering Violet’s ears. Her home and school and friends had all just been carbonized in a taxpayer-funded inferno.

“So Pendervale…” Jack trailed off.

“It’s gone,” I said, staring in disgust at the agents across from me.

Someone behind me cleared their throat.

“I could’ve told you that was going to happen,” a voice said.

We snapped our attention to the sound. It was Michael.

“Your weapons won’t work against a hungry centipede. Not even your strongest.”

“And why not?” asked Lannon.

“You all can’t seem to wrap your head around the fact that this thing is from the interdimensional void. It follows different rules. Especially those governing the transfer of thermal and kinetic energy across its body. It’ll dissipate even the biggest bomb into a millionth of its original force upon impact.”

“How do you know that?” Clifton challenged.

“Because we can do the same thing, on a smaller scale.”

Michael produced a laser gun that he must’ve claimed from a fallen human. The power setting was low, although still enough to blast through the drywall of the room around us. He held the muzzle a few inches away from his thigh and pulled the trigger.

I flinched involuntarily, but Michael didn’t react. There was a flash of light and a hiss of the cooling system in the gun, but the laser dissolved into his leg. It didn’t even burn his pants, which made sense, since his pants were technically part of his human shell. Part of his skin.

Gross.

Michael put the gun back.

“Your universes are islands where physical laws have solidified into unbreakable rules. We live in the ocean between these islands. Those rules are different for us.”

“So you’re saying there’s nothing we can do against this thing?” Lannon asked.

Michael shrugged.

“Think of it like those body shields you humans wear. The hungry centipede has a body shield that divides any three-dimensional attack a millionfold. Until you can bypass that, there’s nothing you can do.”

I put an arm around Violet and pulled her closer to my chest. She studied the fabric of my shirt, blissfully ignorant of the weight of the conversation around her.

The rest of the room was as stunned as I was. Being told your entire planet was going to be sucked dry like a juice box in a toddler’s hands, and there was nothing you could do about it? It wasn’t the kind of news one had a quick retort against.

Clifton was the first to speak.

“What about you?”

She was staring at Michael.

He looked at her, confused, and she elaborated.

“You said radish demons have the same ability to control physics as the hungry centipede. You could cancel out the centipede’s ability with your own powers.”

Michael shook his head with alarm.

“No. Can’t do it. A hungry centipede is way more powerful than me.”

“What about all of you? Six radish demons working together?”

The posse of demons standing behind Michael grew agitated as well. Shifting their weight from side to side and wringing their clawed hands.

“Theoretically, several of us might be able to punch a hole in the hungry centipede’s energy distortion field if we could get close enough…”

Clifton’s eyes widened, but Michael hurried to finish his statement, “…but there’s no way we could get that close without being eaten. This thing is our natural predator.”

Clifton had been tensed, ready to leap out of her seat. She lowered herself back into the cushion, but the fire still burned behind her eyes. Half an idea was better than nothing.

Next, it was Lannon’s turn to build on her foundation.

“What if we helped you get close?”

Vargo cast Lannon a warning glare, but the MEAD leader continued.

“We have portable force fields, flight packs, shockwave generators…with our technology, maybe we could give you the mobility and protection to get close enough to nullify the field.”

Vargo slapped a hand down on the table.

“Absolutely not. Do you forget that these are radish demons we’re dealing with. It could be a disaster if our technology were to fall into their hands.”

Lannon didn’t back down.

“Are you forgetting that we’re all about to die? If it has a chance of working, I say we go for it.”

“It’s madness.”

“It might be the only choice we have.”

Lannon looked at Michael and company.

“So? Do you think it could work?”

Michael hesitated.

“How fast can you move with a flight pack?”

“They can easily hit two hundred, but that’ll drain the battery quickly.”

“Battery life isn’t a problem. We can just move electrons back to the start of the circuit when we need more power.”

“Another reason this is a bad idea,” Vargo snapped. “Their control of electromagnetism means that our weapons work better for them than for us. If they turn on us…”

Lannon ignored the man and repeated himself to Michael.

“Do you think it could work?”

“It might work, in theory, but we can’t do it.”

Lannon frowned.

“Why not?”

“We just can’t.”

Lannon rose to his feet.

“If you’re going to shut down our only shot at getting off this planet alive, you better give me a goddamn reason why.”

“We can’t.”

Lannon inhaled to retort, but I spoke up.

“Wait.”

He did.

I looked between Lannon and the radish demons huddled behind my mother.

“I think what Michael’s saying is that the idea might work, but that he and the other demons aren’t capable of choosing to fight a centipede.”

“What does that mean?” Lannon demanded.

I looked at Michael for a cue. He studied me with a blank parchment expression. I took that to mean he didn’t object to what I’d said so far.

“Radish demons don’t make decisions like we do,” I said.

I considered how the demon had gone berserk at the mention of my mother and how they remained glued to her side even after giving up on this reality. How they’d broken their composure merely at the sight of the centipede and taken off running.

“Instinct, I guess is what I’d call it. They’re bound by instincts. They don’t choose to protect my mother because they want to. They do it because they’re compelled to. They didn’t run away from the centipede because they wanted to, although that was a good idea. They did it because some primal instinct kicked in, telling them to.”

I looked to Michael again, and he tilted his head in the slightest of nods. I was right.

“So, even if fighting the centipede might work,” I postulated. “The demons can’t do it because the drive to run away from centipedes overpowers any free will they have.”

The rest of the table looked to Michael.

“Maybe that’s a way to explain it so your human brains understand. Our behaviors are preprogrammed to a greater extent than yours. We have no choice but to follow them.”

“But I thought you were supposed to be dangerously clever,” Vargo said.

Michael’s human form boasted a face that was innocently boyish, but in that moment, he stared down the military man with a countenance that would’ve wilted flowers.

“I never said we weren’t clever. You seem to confuse instincts that have kept us alive for millennia with stupidity. They evolved because they work.”

Vargo still looked skeptical.

“From our perspective, humans are the idiots – needing to re-learn basic skills over and over again with each generation.”

“Whatever. I apologize.”

Michael dialed back the frost in his eyes.

“So there’s nothing you can do to overpower this…instinct to run away from centipedes?” Lannon asked.

“No.”

My mother chose this moment to break her silence.

“What if I made you fight? I negotiated with you back in Pendervale. I could do it again.”

Michael looked doubtful.

“We only did what you said because you were threatening to leave this reality again. There’s no portal off this Earth now. You don’t have a bargaining chip.”

“You have a strong instinct to protect me. I could pit that instinct against the one that drives you away from the centipede.”

“How?”

“What if I ordered you to fight the centipede? You have do what I say, or…” she paused to come up with a threat. “…or I’ll kill myself.”

Michael smiled the way one smiled at a dog chasing its tail.

“Oh, Sally. I don’t think…”

“Stop talking, or I’ll kill myself.”

Michael’s mouth closed. He stood at attention.

The whole room froze. Everyone at the table gaped, myself included. The other radish demons stared with concern at their leader. Even Violet seemed to sense that something important had just happened. She perked up and studied her grandmother.

“You know what’ll happen if you don’t follow my commands. I want you to accept the shields and other tools from these people,” my mother intoned, addressing all six radish demons. “And then you’re going to help us fight the centipede.”

The demons’ brows furrowed over triple-lidded eyes, betraying their internal conflict.

“Step outside and wait for my orders,” my mother said, injecting a booming assertiveness into her words.

Miraculously, the demons obeyed.

“Only because you say so,” Michael murmured.

The demonic sextet shuffled out of the room like reluctant teenagers, but they followed the commands. The door closed behind the last demon, and everyone released a collective breath.

Somehow, this woman, who’d possessed the backbone and self-discipline of a steamed leek for my entire life had managed to wield the imprinting process against a species of interdimensional demons through sheer force of will.

“This is incredible,” Vargo said. “What you just did, this changes everything we understand about radish demons. We must make it off this reality. We can’t let this information die with us.”

“Yeah, that’s great,” Clifton said, “but let’s focus on the here and now. How quickly can we gather all the demons and get them combat-ready? I don’t want to give them a chance to break free of Sally’s spell.”

“I don’t know how many of my soldiers escaped the nuclear blast,” Lannon said. “Assuming a decent number teleported here, we can probably spare about twenty personal force fields and three or four flight packs.”

“We have more flight packs and some shockwave generators,” Vargo offered. “Plus, better guns than you’ll be able to give them.”

His fears about equipping the demons with human technology seemed to have subsided after witnessing my mother’s control over them. She’d spun around the chessboard, and now the demons were his pawns.

Lannon turned to Clifton.

“Give us a few hours to get them armed and ready. Then we’ll need transportation back to Pendervale. Our teleporter pad was definitely fried in the blast.”

To my mother, he said, “tell Michael to bring all his friends here. I want every radish demon on this Earth fighting for us.”

And to nobody in particular, he murmured, “I really hope this fucking works.”