We waited outside the hospital in silence, the ringing in my ears lessening only slightly as I listened. Listened for any sign that the female Sweeper was still alive and coming after us, or any other sound from that cursed building.

Nothing. All was silent. The only minds I could feel where those of the girl and the horse.

I let out a great breath of relief all at once, clicked on my flashlight, and set about scavenging what I could from the dead Sweeper.

Like I said, I was not a murderer, but I’d seen plenty of dead bodies, and I didn’t think it was such a Bad thing to take from the dead, especially when those dead had been trying to murder you moments before.

The girl and the horse watched me from a distance. From the way their frayed minds churned, I suspected they were conversing.

The man had his submachine gun (obviously), a pistol, quite a good knife, a spare mask filter, and more ammunition that I could practically carry. I took everything I could. Most importantly, he had a handful of dried meat in one of his many pockets.

I took a deep breath, lifted my mask, and crammed a fistful into my mouth. Probably I should have waited until I could set up the filter tent, but my belly was doing the thinking, and I don’t think that much magic got in before I dropped the mask back in place.

My stomach cramped up around the food, and I almost spit it back up.

I considered not offering any to the girl. Her people had enough spare food to feed horses, so she couldn’t have been starving.

But I knew that wouldn’t be Good.

“Are you hungry?” I asked, repeating the question with my mind.

She replied in her own language but sent me a thought too. {I have my own.}

She patted a little bag that I hadn’t noticed before.

{How much?} I asked. There were three mouths to feed now, until I could find a safe place to leave the two of them. That thought set me wondering about what on earth my plan was. Someone had needed help: I’d helped. Now what? If I left the girl alone, she’d surely fall prey to some Tribe or Loner or Monster soon enough, especially as she didn’t know the area.

{A day or two’s worth. Thunder can eat grass. We just have to rip it out for him. Because of his mask.}

I nodded. We were in a better position than I’d been yesterday, supply wise, but I’d need to keep my eye out for an opportunity to hunt something. With a machine gun, at least I wouldn’t need to run away from every random pack of dogs I happened across. The noise alone would scare them away.

Speaking of noise. My head had cleared somewhat by now, and I it dawned on me there was a good chance the other Sweepers had heard the gunfire and were on their way. For a moment, greed made me consider looting the female Sweeper too, but I didn’t want to go back into the hospital.

I was piecing things together in the aftermath, but the footsteps upstairs that belong to something without a mind, the way the Sweeper had turned and screamed to fire at something else in those last few moments…

I shuddered. What lurked in that place now terrified me more than Sweepers.

{We should go.} I got to my feet, pulling the shoulder strap of the machine gun tight around me.

{Where?} The girl’s mind churned viscous sorrow. She had nowhere left.

{Away from here. Away from these lunatics.}

I expected her to protest, to plead that we go back and search for survivors. But she just nodded. A young age to accept such harsh realities.

I led us around the hospital, thinking to leave in the opposite direction we’d arrived from. The girl followed, leading ‘Thunder’ by the reigns.

{How can I trust you?} the girl asked, after a minute.

“Erm…” {If I was going to kill you, I’d have done it already.} I hoped she could feel my sincerity.

{There are plenty of bad things you can do to someone without killing them.}

I stopped and turned to face her. {Let me ask you this— can I trust you? You’re not going to kill me in my sleep and take all my stuff?}

There wasn’t much conviction in the question as I started the asking, but by the end I had found some. I was assuming she was harmless because of her age. But she’d claimed to have killed before. For all I knew, had tried to kill me.

{Why would I— No! Of course not!} The hot anger pouring off her couldn’t have been a forgery. I’d never been able to perfectly detect lies, but the affront was enough to convince me.

“All right then.” I unstrapped the pistol’s holster from my thigh and offered it to her. {Have you shot one of these before?}

“Um…” she said, taking the bulky gun in both her small hands. “Nay.”

{Me neither.} I turned and kept moving. {We can work it out when we have a moment to rest. After that feel free to shoot me if you think I’m going to hurt you.}

It was perhaps a stupid thing to say to a stranger who’d already attacked me once, but if the girl really did plan to kill me once my guard was down, my permission wasn’t going to change things one way or the other.

We didn’t say anything for a while, me guiding the way with my flashlight. Overgrown hedges marked the boundary of the hospital grounds, but I cut us a path through with my new knife. It was a broad blade, and sharp— very good for chopping stuff. Much better than the rusty old thing I’d been using before.

Before that day, I’d always struggled to understand why so many people attempted to kill any stranger they came across. As I easily hacked the undergrowth aside, the comforting weight of a death-spitting weapon pressed against my side, I began to understand.

I felt Strong for the first time in my life. My father had always gone on about being Strong a lot, back in the library, but ultimately, I think all us Librarians had been quite Weak. Too Weak to defend ourselves, no matter how Good we’d been.

All of this new Strength was the bounty of violence, looted from a vanquished foe. I’m not saying it made me want to go Bad. But the temptation became a whole lot less incomprehensible.

I kept us moving throughout the night, not daring to pick a spot too close to where hundreds of gunshots had erupted. There wasn’t much I could do to avoid leaving some sort of trail, but I kept to streets I knew were well used by travellers and animals, hoping to mask our tracks amongst a sea of fellows.

A few times Thunder snorted at a distant growl or rustle, and we caught yellow eyes watching us from the shadows.

{Wolves,} the beast accused.

The dogs kept their distance from us though. Perhaps they recognized the gun.

After an hour the girl stopped to think at me. {It’ll be faster if we ride Thunder.}

I wondered why she hadn’t suggested that in the first place, but perhaps she didn’t trust me enough to sit on her horse at first.

{Will he carry both of us?}

{He will. You should take the saddle though, you’re heavier.}

{Isn’t a bit dark to be going at any speed?}

{Horses can see in the dark.}

{I don’t know how to… steer him.}

She stared at me for a while. It was still impossible to get any hint of expression from behind that black visor.

{You can talk to animals with your mind,} she thought at me eventually.

“Oh. Right,” I said, feeling a little embarrassed. I was out of excuses.

I wasn’t very graceful mounting up for the first time. But with some mildly annoyed instruction from the girl I got into the saddle eventually, and she clambered up behind me.

Thunder only set off at a canter at first. Looking back it seems a bit ridiculous, but I don’t think I’d ever moved so fast before, and the dark scenery whipping past was terrifying. I bounced in the saddle, the hard leather battering me in unmentionable places. The girl told me I was sitting wrong, and her instruction helped but didn’t quite alleviate the discomfort.

We rode for a few hours, until the first light of dawn began to warm the sky ahead of us. By the time we stopped, my rear was sore, I was exhausted, and I was fairly sure the girl kept passing out against my back. Her mind alternated between the placid, steady rhythm of someone sleeping without dreams, and the sprawling alarm of someone jolting awake.

We were well outside the Sweepers’ usual territory now, closer to the lands of far more mellow Gear Jocks and the far, far, less mellow Pain Princes. My chosen camp site was one of the big warehouses in the industrial park west of the river. I’d stayed there a few times before. It was reasonably sheltered and free of leaks, and despite finding evidence of other Loners using the spot occasionally I’d never bumped into anyone there, just the occasional big rat. There were better spots, but none I could think of where we could hide the horse.

I set up my filter tent in a corner of the warehouse. Thankfully the tent was just big enough for us to share without stepping on each other, but I let the girl rest there while I set some traps around the perimeter of the warehouse—snares in the hope of catching a good-sized rat, janglers to give me a heads up if anything bigger approached.

The girl seemed to be asleep when I got back to the filter tent. She hadn’t removed her mask despite being inside. It was no dreamless sleep now— grief poured out of her like a thick fog. I hesitated a moment, then moved to wake her.

“Let her rest,” a voice whispered. Mother was in the corner of the tent, hunched over, reading a book, her long black hair covering her face. “The poor girls earned it.”

“You were watching us?” I asked, trying to keep my voice soft.

“Of course, dear, you know I’m never far away.”

“How did you even keep up with us?”

“Oh… you know how.” She paused and quietly closed her book. “Magic.”

“I need to wake her. We have important things to talk about.”

“Can it not wait? The girl is grieving, even in her dreams.”

“All the more reason to distract her. You have to keep moving in times like this, or you sink down in the swamp.”

“Is that what you did? Keep moving?” Mother raised her head to look at me, but I turned away, reducing her to a dark shape in my periphery.

“Of course.”

“And that worked out so well?” There was a challenge in her tone, and a chide.

I tried to ignore it, but my face grew hot. “She’ll have time to grieve when she’s safe. It shouldn’t be long.”

“So, you plan to get rid of her?”

“That’s an unfair way to phrase it.”

I’d had some time to think on the ride, and I had formed something of a plan, even if it was a bit vague.

“Look,” I said, “if she stays out here with me, she’s always going to be in danger. And the horse will draw far too much attention, useful as it is. I need to find somewhere the two of them can stay more permanently.”

“Like where?”

“Somewhere out of the way of the more aggressive Tribes, with someone I can trust not to betray them.”

“Ah.” I could hear a smile in Mother’s voice. “You’re going to dump her on the Witch of the Weir, aren’t you?”

“Why not? The witch will be able to help the girl with her… gifts. And no one messes with the witch.”

“And what about your gifts? Or we pretending those don’t exist, still? Are you sure you don’t just want an excuse to smell the sweet incense of the witch’s boudoir again?”

“Mother,” I growled, but I have to admit my cheeks flushed a little.

“Calm down,” she cooed. “I am just teasing. It’s good that you’re excited to see someone.”

I heard her get to her feet. “Well, it sounds like you’ve made up your mind one way or the other. I can’t force you to do what I say, but please at least listen.”

I tilted my head toward her without actually looking at her.

“Don’t keep running away from people. Everyone needs people.”

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“I have you.”

“I don’t count.” She patted my shoulder as she passed. “I’ll be nearby.”

And then she was gone.

“Wake up,” I said to the girl, after a minute, and gave her shoulder a shake.

She didn’t move a muscle. {I wasn’t asleep.}

{Oh. You heard all that?}

{Yes. But I didn’t understand most of what you were saying.}

I thought back over the conversation with Mother. I didn’t think any of it would have been too alarming even if the girl had understood.

{We need to figure out the guns, and then I’m going to take you to the Witch of the Weir. You’ll be safe there.}

“Orkee,” she said, sitting up finally, and gave me a nod. Something about the proposition sent a shiver of electric anticipation through her mind.

I led the girl out of the tent and together we inspected our new weapons. It seemed like both the pistol and the submachine gun used identical bullets, but the magazines were not interchangeable. There was only one spare magazine for the pistol, but I’d taken six for the bigger gun from the Sweeper.

Both guns looked new, but not hand-crafted, which was strange: the Sweepers didn’t seem like the sort who could build a chair, let alone a firearm. Instead of the usual printed text found on artifacts from the Bad Times and Good Times, someone had crudely hand-painted symbols along the side of both weapons. Next to a dial on the side of the machine gun was an unhappy face, a happy face, and what could only be described as a sadistically grinning face.

I knew a little bit about guns. It was hard to avoid them in all the novels I used to read and movies I used to watch, back in the library. I knew there was a safety catch somewhere you had to turn off, and sometimes you needed to wrack a lever to get the gun ready to shoot. So I reasoned, given the Sweepers’ preferences, that the unhappy face was probably the safety, the happy face would allow one shot at a time, and the grinning face represented fully automatic fire.

“We should test them out, just a little bit,” I said, and thought, looking around for something to use as practice.

{Won’t that attract attention?}

{Do you want to wait until we need to shoot to find out we don’t actually know how to make them work?}

She thought that over in silence for a moment.

“Nay,” she admitted.

I selected an old rotten box at the other end of the warehouse to use as a target, twisted the dial to the happy face, took aim, and then slowly squeezed the trigger. The gun jumped in my hand, and I flinched away from the thunderous bark that stabbed at my ears. A small cloud of dust erupted from a section of wall a full meter to the left of my target.

“Hmm,” I said, and adjusted a little.

My next shot hit half a meter to the right.

I frowned, disappointed, and flipped the dial onto the sadistically grinning face.

A few seconds later, my ears were ringing, the far wall had been peppered with holes, and I’d hit the crate perhaps two times. I’ll say this, twenty-eight bullets don’t take as long as you’d think to spray out of the barrel of a machine gun.

{What are you doing?}

I turned to find the girl was pressing her hands into her headscarf, covering her ears. I could tell I was being glared at from behind the impenetrable black visor.

“Oh, um, sorry,” I said, and decided I probably should stray away from the full auto setting for now. I worked the empty magazine out, popped a fresh one in, and then spent the next few minutes trying to figure out how to make the gun shoot again. It turned out I needed to wrack the little lever this time.

The girl went to take her shot, the big pistol looking comically over-sized in her small hands. The gun refused to work at first, until we tried pulling back the slide. Or ‘the top bit’ as we called it then.

She also completely missed her first shot and let out a frustrated noise.

{I think you’re meant to line up the little dots with the target,} I thought, and tried to concentrate on an image of what I meant.

She didn’t respond, but after five seconds of careful aim pulled the trigger again. One corner of the crate blew apart in a cloud of splinters.

“Well done!” I shouted, as bright pride radiated from her.

She fired again after a moment, missed, and that pride turned to hot rage. She fired again after a briefer pause, then again, then again, abandoning any pretence of aiming.

“Hold on,” I said. “Wait.”

She ignored me and kept squeezing the trigger, beginning to let loose a muffled scream from beneath her mask. She kept screaming and pulling the trigger even when the gun was empty.

I just stared, stunned, and waited for her to stop. Thunder trotted over, and a gentle nudge from his nose was what finally snapped her out of it. She deflated, letting the gun hang limply at her side, and turned to pet her horse.

{What was all that about?}

{Sorry. I… just want to be ready. For if we see the Gun People again.}

{If we see them again, we’ll be running or hiding or both first and foremost.}

{Why not just kill them? We have guns now.}

I was a little taken aback by the question, especially coming from a child. {Because killing is Bad and we aren’t Bad people?}

She shrugged. {The Gun People are. They’re murderers. If someone doesn’t kill them then they’ll keep doing what they did to my family. So if I get a chance, I’ll kill as many as I can.}

I couldn’t really refute her simple, disturbing, logic, so I moved on. {Whether they deserve it or not, there’s a lot more of them than us, and they have actually practiced with their weapons. Getting ourselves shot to death won’t bring anyone justice.}

I stared into that seemingly pitch-black visor until finally, she sighed. {How do I reload this?}

We worked it out together.

Afterward, I suggested maybe she rest a while longer whilst I checked on my traps and walked a patrol of the nearby area, but she said she probably couldn’t get to sleep so accompanied me instead. Thunder followed the girl.

“Watt ire ewe narma?” she mumbled suddenly, as we were walking along.

I could work that one out. I pointed a finger at my red mask. “Red.” {That’s what people call me, at least.}

“An watt ewe call ewe?”

“Um, Alan,” I said. I wasn’t sure why I told her so easily.

“Aelan,” she repeated, rolling the word around her mouth. My stomach turned a little. It was so odd hearing someone other than Mother use my name.

“Alan,” I corrected. “And what is your name?”

She hesitated for a moment, unease flowing out of her. “Mari.”

“Um, pleased to meet you, Mari.”

My traps were all empty, but we did see some rats and birds during our patrol, so there was a chance we’d catch something later.

It was just a few hours shy of midday when we got back to the tent. I was almost ready to fall asleep on my feet, but I offered to let her rest first. She accepted this time.

Neither of us took our masks off, even inside. I couldn’t account for why she did not, but I felt somewhat… vulnerable at the prospect of someone seeing my true face, especially when the other person refused to show me theirs.

While she slept, I scrubbed my spare filters, ate the last of the Sweepers’ pocket meat, and pushed loose bullets into the magazines we’d emptied. A few hours later, when Mari announced she had rested long enough, I curled up in the corner and finally managed to close my eyes.

Piercing, inhuman, screeching tore me awake.

I bolted up right, snatched up a spear, remembered I had a gun now and snatched that instead. Mari was huddled in a ball, pistol pointed toward the tent flap.

{What’s happening?} I asked.

That horrible screeching again. I was awake enough now to recognize it as a horse’s squeal. Dogs barked, a lot of dogs.

I charged outside, flipping the safety on the gun off.

Thunder was surrounded by four enormous hounds. They were real Monsters, muscles bulging beneath their hairless skin, golden eyes glowing fiercely. But that wasn’t the strangest thing about them.

The dogs’ bodies were pierced with rings of gold: at the nose, the ears, even the legs. Their skin had been died or painted or tattooed with yellow ink, so that as they moved, they resembled flowing fire.

Somebody owned these dogs.

The golden beasts were snapping at the horse, trying to get past his kicking legs. He already had a nasty gash on his shoulder.

The dogs’ minds chanted in eerie unison. {Prey. Prey. Master. Prey here. Master. Prey here. Master.}

They weren’t paying attention to me yet and were a lot bigger and a lot closer than my practice crate. I raised the gun and fired three shots into the closest one.

Its snarl cut off with a yelp, then a whine, as one of its legs gave way. The other dogs bolted away, tails between their legs. Then, once they’d got some distance they regrouped and start barking at me.

{Danger here. Master. Prey here. Master. Danger here. Master.} They weren’t like any dogs I’d met before. Their thoughts were disciplined, purposeful, more like the thoughts of people than beasts.

{Help. Come back. Help.} Pain and despair washed out of the injured one as it limped toward the rest of its pack. I shot it a few more times to put it out of its misery. The rest of the dogs turned and ran, out of the warehouse and into the daylight, then out of sight.

Thunder kicked the dead dog.

{Are you all right?} I asked him.

{Wolves,} he responded, the word bursting with hatred. {Wolves.}

I took that as a good sign and went to check on Mari. I could still here the dogs barking, and now howling, just outside the warehouse. I had a horrible feeling they were calling for reinforcements.

Mari’s pistol was still pointed toward the tent flap, toward me.

“Just some dogs,” I said. I was out of breath, somehow, and shaking with adrenaline. “I scared them off for now.”

“Nay,” she said, shaking her head. The fear pouring out of her was almost overwhelming. “Nay.” {They’ve found me.}

“What?” {It’s not the Gun People.}

I knew some Tribes kept dogs—the Hound Masters to the far north, for example—but I’d never seen the Sweepers with any.

{Not the Gun People,} she confirmed. {Gold Robes.}

An image passed from her to me, dreamlike and blurry. Silhouettes of sunset gold, striding through black mist, fiery torches glowing in their hands. Horses squealed; their riders shouted. The image reeked of fear, and retreat.

I blinked the image away. {That’s what you were running from.}

Outside, the dogs had stopped barking and howling. The sudden silence chilled my blood.

“Wait here,” I said, and stepped back outside the tent.

Thunder was snorting, tramping back and forth on the spot. He bared his teeth toward the entrance to the warehouse.

A man stood there. He was tall, thin, and wearing hooded, frayed, robes of dirty yellow. Every part of him was covered in dangling artifacts suspended from string, chains, wires: golden jewellery, cracked yellow lightbulbs, dead flowers, and strings of those miniature lights that sprout from wires like flowers on a vine.

Most alarmingly, impossibly, he wasn’t wearing a filter mask. Yellow eyes glowed from within the shadows of his hood, and his pale lips curled back in a sharp-toothed grin as the three remaining dogs filed in behind him and sat obediently on their haunches.

{Master. Master. Master,} their minds chanted.

Their master’s mind was compact and hard, restrained, giving nothing away, but something hummed within. Imagine an orb of dark steel, with the red heat of a furnace peeking through the seams in its construction.

“Greetings,” he rasped, and stared at me expectantly, but I was too unsettled to say anything in response. After a while, his grin broadened, as if he was reveling in my discomfort, and his gaze shifted to the dead dog. “It seems my hounds have… inconvenienced you. Ah, you and your… horse.”

He spoke slowly, pausing longer than was natural, and his accent was strange, speeding up and slowing down mid-word, stuttering occasionally.

“Apologizes if that is the case,” he said. “They can be a little… zealous.”

Finally, some of my wits came back to me.

“Who are you?” I asked. “What do you want?”

‘What are you?’ might have been the more important question. The man was clearly riddled with magic, more than any person I’d seen. Usually they died long before the eyes were fully gold.

“My name is… Peter. Monk of The Church of Golden Light. And I am here… because I am searching for someone.” Peter ran a gray tongue over his jagged teeth, and began to walk towards me.

I raised the gun. He had no weapons that I could see, but this was clearly some sort of Monster, not a real man, and I couldn’t read his intentions from his mind.

“Tell me, friend, where did you find this fine animal?” He pointed at the horse. His nails were long and claw-like, his finger almost fleshless beneath the skin.

Sometimes, the difference between Good and Bad is a little difficult to figure out. There are moments where you have to make a decision, and its impossible to know which cause of action is the right. This was not one of those moments.

Everything about Peter made my skin crawl, and I’d never met someone and been so sure they were Bad so quickly.

“I stole it,” I lied, “from some man. He, erm, talked weirdly, and he was all dressed in fur, with a red scarf around his mask.”

Peter grinned broader than ever before, showing black gums. He continued to close distance with me.

“Stop,” I snapped, and pointed the gun directly at the middle of his torso, flicking the dial onto ‘sadistically grinning face.’

He ignored me. “You’re not a very good liar, friend.”

Which was true. I was out of practice just talking to other people, and I’d never been a particularly deceitful child.

“But… no matter,” he continued in his raspy stop-and-start voice. “I’ll just take what I want the… fun way.”

The lights draped all over him flickered to life as if suddenly plugged in.

Thunder squealed.

My ears began to ring, far worse than they ever had from gunfire. Pressure mounted at my temples, as if my head were in a vice. The warehouse, the dogs, Peter, everything blurred into a dark smear, all except those glowing golden eyes of his. Those were sharp, and huge, and growing bigger and brighter with every thundering heartbeat.

Then, something split my skull, a spike of white hot steel driving through my brain.

I screamed, but no sound came out, everything was drowned under Peter’s deafening voice.

{What secrets do you have for me?}

The knife in my brain twisted, one way, then the other, wrenching my head from side to side.

{Ahhh. Ahhh. You’ve seen her. Yes… No! She’s here! Ahhh. Such fortune.}

I tried to push back, screaming at him with my mind. {Stop. Get out.}

The presence in my mind laughed. {No. I don’t think I will.}

{GET OUT!}

The knife withdrew, just an inch. The golden eyes narrowed.

{Ahhh. Such fortune indeed!} The knife slammed back in, deeper than ever before, splitting me almost in two. {I search for one child of the light and find her in the company of a second. Submit! And I can teach you such wonders.}

{Leave. Me. Alone.} Each thought was a lead anvil, it took all my strength to throw them at him.

{You have potential, but you’re using it all wrong. Here, let me demonstr—}

The blurry world sharpened, the golden eyes shrank, muffled noise broke though— gunshots. Mari.

Peter snarled, his mind lashing out. The gunshots ceased and the blurry fog consumed the world again… though slightly less completely than last time.

I wasn’t alone with the golden eyes this time, someone was with me.

{There you are, little one,} Peter cooed. {I’ve traveled such a long way to meet you, won’t you just sit and listen.}

{DIE!} Mari’s ball of hatred brushed against my consciousness as it tore towards Peter.

Pain pulsed out of him, the mind-knife receded another inch, the world sharpened again.

Then a second later that oppressive pressure had shoved us back down into the depths. {Such power! You will do great things, little one, great things!}

My body was numb beneath the blur, but it was still there. I poured all my concentration into raising my arms, pointing the gun, but my body refused to respond.

“You know what you need to do, Alan,” a voice said. From behind or beside or above or below, I couldn’t tell. Mother was down in hell with us, somehow. “Let me help.”

I could feel her arms around my chest, embracing me and lift me all at once.

{Mari.} My message was weak, like a gasp squeezed from a crushed diaphragm. {On three, together.}

She sent back something that had no form or clear intent, the psychic equivalent of a grunt. I had to assume it was an acknowledgment. Peter must have been applying far more pressure to her than he was to me.

I tried to count myself down, but time had become slippery. I pooled my strength and waited to feel another blast of thought from Mari.

{DIE!} Her scream was louder than last time, Peter stumbled, in the mental realm and the physical one.

{GET OUT!} I followed up Mari’s blow with my own, trying to shove over the already teetering giant. The real world returned, but I could already feel it slipping away again.

I clamped my right hand in a fist around the grip of the gun the muffled report of the gun rocked my wrist. I swept it in Peter’s general direction.

The mental landscape saturated with his pain for a moment, a million cutting razors, then everything snapped back into sharp focus.

I was on my knees, one hand clawing into the concrete floor, the other still pointing the machine gun at Peter. It had stopped firing, the magazine spent, smoke drifting lazily from the barrel.

Three crimson pools were forming on on the front of his golden robe, merging into one huge lake as he bled. He looked down at himself, frowning, as if he didn’t quite understand what he was looking at. In the background, his hounds were howling. The hard shell of that mind was cracked and fractured now, the fire pouring out into the ether like hot wax.

My mind still felt as it were on opposite sides of the room simultaneously, drawing back together very slowly. I had distant plans of reloading the gun, but couldn’t quite find the urgency to do anything other than stare.

Peter laughed, holding a bloody hand up to his face, then fixed his golden eyes on me. {You will suffer for that.}

The world began to blur once more, the head splitting pressure returning.

A gunshot rang out. The pressure disappeared.

Peter took a step back, and then fell to one knee, clutching his chest.

Mari walked towards him, pointing the gun, still a head shorter than the kneeling monster man.

“Well, he coughed, aren’t you full of surp—”

She put the gun against his temple and pulled the trigger. A plume of red erupted from the back of his skull. One moment his eyes were golden and bright and full of cruel focus, the next they were bulging and blank and pointing in different directions.

The dark sphere and it’s fire exploded into a billion motes of bright light and black dust, then vanished.

The hounds began whining and howling before his limp body had even hit the ground, running in circles around each other.

{Master! Master!} They cried.

I started reloading the machine gun. As the new magazine clicked into place, the dogs froze, then bolted away. I had a feeling it wasn’t the last we’d seen of them.

I got to my feet, shaking, nauseous, and walked over to Mari. She was still staring down at the man she’d killed, and approaching her was like stepping up the threshold of a burning building, for how intense her hatred was burned.

I hesitated for a moment, then put a hand on her shoulder. She flinched, physically and in the mental realm as well.

{Are you all right?} I asked. It was a stupid question.

She looked up at me, slowly. Tiny flecks of blood were all over her black visor, adding more red flowers to the painted decoration.

Mari held out her hand. {I need some more bullets.}