Quet hugged her cardigan tightly around her chest as she, Mark and Horan came up on the location of her house. Where it had been the evening before, that was.

The scorched remains of already-dead trees formed an extended perimeter around the shattered ruin of the once-mighty ziggurat. Blocks of rubble and bits of furniture cradled the cinders of a home, some of which still smoked by the time the three survivors arrived.

While Mark and Horan stared out at the ruin in silence, Quet noticed a figure pacing around in the middle of the rubble. Or… Possibly multiple figures. Whenever one silhouette vanished behind a chunk of stone, a different one emerged from the other side.

Quet slowly approached the figure, stepping onto a foundation riddled with bullet holes, craters, and puddles of hardened gold. As she approached the center of the ruin, Rachna sighed and turned to face her, twisting into the shape of a white-eyed Omet.

Quet stood in front of the Indian, stony-faced. “Morning.”

“The reckoning could not be postponed indefinitely,” responded Rachna. “That’s what the voices keep saying, at least. Not up to me to say if it’s true or not.”

“So I’ve been told,” said Quet. She looked around at the ruins surrounding her, and spotted Mark and Horan approaching her before she turned back to Rachna. “Well, no use being a bummer over it now. You’re the guy who keeps talking about stuff that nobody knows anything about. Where to now?”

“Rainier. Evergreen. Stars and Stripes. North America. Earth.”

Quet shrugged. “Guess I shouldn’t have expected any better, huh?”

Rachna sighed and pointed northwest. “Precisely three thousand seven hundred kilometers that way, as the vulture flies. Not a solution, but directions towards one, at the bare minimum.”

Mark walked up beside Quet and looked over at the blank-faced copy of Omet in front of him. “So… What? Just start walking? Is that your suggestion for what we do now?”

Rachna nodded and sat cross-legged on the ground. “Unsurprisingly, alternatives aren’t particularly cultivated.” He looked up at Mark. “You’ll be there soon, either way. Might as well get the slight chance of being there on our terms instead of theirs.”

Quet looked around at the surrounding ruins. “I… see gold. Where are the bodies?”

“And, actually…” Horan hesitantly raised his hand and stepped past Mark. “How come you survived? Did anyone else make it?”

“Nope,” stated Rachna, bluntly. “The mooks certainly gave it the old college try, of course. But I only have bones to break and organs to rupture when I feel like it, as is the standard. Eventually one of my ‘family’ ‘members’ heard about me down here and got someone to call things off.”

“Figures,” muttered Quet. “So, I guess that leaves you with us n–”

“Wrong again,” said Rachna, retracting his legs into his chest and growing out a new pair so that he was standing. “Not much point. No safety that isn’t guaranteed, no escape for any save the permitted. We’re all stuck here, what part of the cage we’re in doesn’t matter.”

A fleshy tendril snaked out of Rachna’s ankle and wormed its way into a crack in the foundation. As his form began to liquefy and flow down into the crack, he grew two extra pairs of eyes on his forehead and locked eyes with all three people in front of him at once. “This is our life now. Don’t try to run. It’ll follow.” And the last of him was gone.

Mark was the first to say anything. “…I just realized why the name sounded familiar. Rachna was the name of a hallucinatory manifestation of my own conscience when I was starved of oxygen back in Istanbul… I think I prefer that version of him.”

Quet looked away from the crack that Rachna had slipped into. “Well, he gave us a direction and a distance. That’s most of what we need already! Off we go!” She began striding through the ruins, heading northwest.

Horan nervously watched Quet walk off, eye fixed on the gold-rimmed cut in the back of her cardigan. “Wha… Just immediately? Nothing you need to do here first?”

“It’ll only slow me down!” declared Quet. “No bummers! We’ve got vengeance to carry out, and so help me, I’m not wasting a second doing it!”

“…No loss of hope or anything? You’re just gonna bounce right to the next thing?”

“The hope has already been lost, and so we will have to go on without it!”

Quet took six confident steps away from Mark and Horan. Her pace slowed down and grew unsteady as she took another three. By the ninth, she had come to a stop. She fell to her knees, planted both hands on the ground, and began to shake.

Horan moved as if to approach her, but Mark held his arm out and blocked him. Horan nodded solemnly and stood back.

After a minute or so on the ground, Quet stood up, her face still turned away from Mark and Horan. When she spoke, her voice was shaky and strained. “Make yourselves comfortable, I guess. I’ll see what I can find, and then we’re gone.”

Mark and Horan hesitantly seated themselves on the floor. Quet began to comb through the wreckage, searching for something.

Horan turned his head to the left, obscuring Quet from his view as he looked at Mark. “Well, I… guess we can count this as our third ‘outing’ like this now, huh? Doesn’t really matter what the criteria for that are, we’ve met them by now.”

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Mark nodded. “You know, why does…? No, no. I’ll save that part of the conversation for when Quet’s done.”

“Sure, yeah.” Horan absent-mindedly studied how the dim light of his eye illuminated Mark’s face. “…You know, for a few minutes there, when we were at Deus’ pit, I started to get hopeful. I was thinking a little, ‘Maybe this time we can finally feel like we won more than we lost. Maybe the only thing that gets hurt this time is my pride’. I gotta learn to stop being so optimistic these days.”

“Everyone figures that out sometime,” replied Mark.

“I’m sure you do.”

Horan looked out at the landscape of ruin and destruction around him. “…Is it us? Is it something about you, or me, or both of us together, that makes this happen to people around us? Like, this is twice now that we’ve been abandoned in the wilderness with nothing to our name. My belief in luck can only take so much, and I have to start insisting that someone or something is out to get us.”

Mark’s mind went back to what he had seen in the innermost chamber of Deus’ fake vault. “Yeah, uh… Deus’ whole color deal is white, right?”

“Wh–?” Recognition flashed in Horan’s eye. “Oh, yeah, no, still not hide nor hair of him. I, uh, nobody’s really mentioned this, but when Torch showed up to kill us, before you were able to show up, they were, like… possessed. Whoever was in control was just talking about, I dunno, how much we suck, how we’ll never really find the Seraphium, that kind of thing. Doesn’t really help anyone here understand what’s actually going on, but… I dunno. The idea that there might actually be someone out there causing all this, or at least some of it… I’m actually not sure if it makes me feel better or worse about this.”

“Yeah, uh…” Mark decided to discard his planned chain of questions. “Does it really change things? If there’s someone out there possessing Torch like that and making all this happen, who’re we to stop it, right? They’ve done a pretty stellar job of removing any chance we have of making it very far past this point.”

“Yeah…” Horan folded his arms and stared at the ground. “What did Rachna say? Three thousand something hundred kilometers?”

“Seven hundred.”

“Right. And… For what, even? The guy refuses to tell us anything, and he assumes that we’re gonna go ahead and travel north, into the cold, for months, just because he implied that something helpful might be there?!”

Mark glanced at Quet, who was now well over a hundred feet away from the two of them. “Yeah, okay, I get it, quiet. It’s… I mean, he wasn’t wrong…”

“You’re nuts.”

“Well, if you hav–”

Horan nudged Mark’s arm. “C’mon, dude, you don’t need to try and swing me. We’ve done this a dozen times before. I like nuts.”

“Right, yeah.” Mark hung his head for a moment, then realized something. “But what about…?” He nodded his head in Quet’s direction.

“Seriously? That’s your latest hangup?” Horan shrugged. “She’s in. Don’t even need to ask, she’s basically already signed up.”

“That’s not the thing I was worried about,” said Mark.

Horan snorted. “So, what? Scared she’ll get hurt? That we’re putting her in danger?”

“I just…” Mark sighed and nodded.

“C’mon, Mark, we’re all in danger already. You’re not gonna protect anyone by not asking for help, you’re just gonna die first.”

Mark looked at the ground. “…You were right earlier, huh? There aren’t any good decisions for us to make.”

Horan nodded solemnly. “All that’s left is damage control and leaps of faith… But it’s not like we were swimming in alternatives before all this.”

Mark looked up at Horan. “…All this?”

“All this.” Horan looked up at the clouds filling the sky. “I think I’ve realized something about what I was really doing before I lost an eye and got thrown into the desert: All the… partying, and the staying at home, and everything that everyone’s been doing for the past few years, and maybe even before that, it was just to avoid…”

Mark gave Horan a moment to continue. “Avoid what?”

“…I dunno. I don’t know much of anything.”

-

According to Quet’s timekeeping glyph, it had taken the group all night to find their way back to where the house had once been. By the same metric, it took the entirety of the following day for Quet to gather everything that she had wanted to.

Paraphernalia from all over the ruins had been piled atop a nest of wood, string and whatever other flammable materials Quet could find and carry. The entire monument, almost as tall as Quet, had been piled up as close to the middle of the ruins as Quet could estimate.

Quet knelt in front of the monument, holding two dark rocks in her hands. After failing to find anything useful in her pockets’ day-to-day selection of glyphs, she had had to resort to the only way she had heard of to make fire.

Quet scraped the rocks together with mounting frustration, ineffectually trying to create sparks without any flint. Just when she was becoming agitated enough to start growling in the back of her throat, she saw something be held out next to her.

Mark extended a chrome grill lighter towards Quet, handle held outward.

Quet sighed and took Mark’s shapeshifted gun from him with a curt nod. She leaned forward, squeezed the lighter’s trigger to ignite the tip, and held it against the base of the pyre. The flame began to spread after a moment, and Quet stepped back and watched as it engulfed the base of the pyre.

Most things on the pyre wouldn’t burn, and the fire would probably burn itself out before it had even managed to consume the entire base. Quet didn’t expect it to.

“I don’t even know why I’m doing this,” thought Quet aloud. “If I was Waia, we could’ve already headed out.”

“Well,” said Mark, “look how things turned out for her.”

“I mean, there’s no way she’s dead, it’s not like some hole would kill her, so… Trapped in a pit with a weird flesh-person?”

“Sure.” Mark shrugged. “Guess that’s what I meant.”

After a minute or two of watching the fire slowly spread, Quet turned and headed northwest again. “C’mon. I don’t wanna still be here when the fire stops.”

Horan nodded and followed her, Mark shortly behind him. “You know we’re probably just gonna die without accomplishing anything if we follow a shapeshifting weirdo’s directions, right?”

Quet didn’t look back at Horan. “If you have any alternatives, you’re welcome to tell me so that I can ignore them.”

“No, I’m not.” Horan floated forward in order to walk side-by-side with Quet. “Just laying things out for you.”

“Alright then. But trust me, I understood what’s going to happen to us perfectly well.”

Taking up the rear of the procession, Mark momentarily glanced back at the ruins of yet another place that had taken him in, then turned and followed the two Primoi into the decaying, burnt forest. Nowhere to go but forwards.