The vantage. Awake, Shay’s shoulder was less stiff, her foot still useless. Bleeding slowly through its makeshift bandage. Having learned nothing or beyond her control she fastened the remaining empty syringes back into their leather roll. The pack was nonsensically even heavier than before. Unsure how long she had been sleeping, after taking more sweets for her wounds, she began again with unsteady confidence out of the pillow-webbed ditch to climb along and up the generator’s curving, scaly side. Argus’ voice echoed through the rumbling-rippling factory, and Shay then knew what instincts had stirred her awake, hearing the wet blink of his nonillion eyes inside his helm:

“Stand.” Shay heard him, and imagined the monks were kneeling. “Our enemy does not concern herself with respect and ritual. They all crawl through filth to victory, and we must be as ruthless to save beloved Fate.”

Woozily, dizzily and finally, Shay reached the stairs that winded up or down to either side of the generator. Just a stretch of steel steps further up from her was an arachnid worker - using at least four of their eight limbs to operate the claggy steam with the click of chunky buttons and thick levers, increasing or decreasing as needed. They were watching a conveyor of large hanging sheets ripple smooth from exposure to the heat.

∞

Shay hoped the Argus up there-or-somewhere, was not the one that had chased her through the tunnels of Before and Below, but perhaps a different or earlier version of him. Then she heard him again:

“Amneshay skulks in here, Gargaransyr. She is wounded and alone. Stay your fists and add not her blood to your drenched sleeves. With ink on our side, she can yet be our ally.”

Shay sighed deeply in her head.

“Lessen the steam.” Gargarensyr called upwards, his words hitting Shay through the fog. “Then we shall find cowering this traitor to all life and death.”

“Serenity, Brother Gargarensyr.” Argus warned. “She is a flesh-piece, moved around by Lay’d Payn in her games. As we all have been.”

∞

Shay heard steam across the hissing factory settle instead into whispers. Above her the arachnid worker pulled a certain lever as to achieve the same dampened effect. They continued watching the large hanging sheets with a forlorn reverence - as one would the sunset. Handy-limbs all clasped behind their back then watching as a walker in a park.

∞

Upon the sheets nearest to them, embroidered was a scene similar to this one I now depict, of Shay creeping up on the unsuspecting arachnid. A warning, alas. The startled worker turned and saw nothing, for Shay had umbra-stepped or shadow-limped behind them despite her foot, and through kicking legs with sticky ends she threw the worker shrieking off the stairs, her eyes itching from the spread of their urticating hairs.

“A Shadow up there!” the poor soul yelped as they fell. “An Umbra-stepper!”

Pulling in reverse the same lever, Shay felt the heat around increase stiflingly so, and the lever soon disappeared into fuming steam-fog. Even her own hands were hidden from her, and the starry ceiling vanished into hotter gloom.

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“Where, eh? What? Which one were you at?” The workers were all clambering to inform the monks of her position, as if they were still unaware.

∞

There were commands from below to find the steamer or press that was still billowing on, filling the factory full against Gargarensyr’s command. The clattering of tripped-over toolboxes jumbled loudly.

“Open a scrotty window! Churn the vents!” Shay heard, and the growing fog had an acidic and chemically clean taste.

∞

Through all this - a terrifying thud of footsteps heeled and toed up the steps nearby. Keeping a strained reign on her panic Shay breathed in that dense fog and focused: the steps were one at a time, not those of an arachnid in full crawl. It could be Argus or Gargarensyr, the latter of which she had never seen, only heard. She crouched behind or close to the still-clicking controls. She could umbra-step. Over or under the railings. Gone. Yet goggles emerged stepping from the mist, and a tatter-jacketed soul short in stature whispered:

“You’ve given yourself away with that.” Panzjrah made a downward-spinning motion with the end of his pistol, referencing the poor worker splattered somewhere below.

“I’m actually pleased to see you.” Shay mouthed almost inaudibly.

Panzjrah sat near her, adjusting his pistols into one scoped long-rifle. Shay grimaced with how loud each metallic clank and clicking dial was.

∞

Thankfully, he continued speaking low:

“Likewise. Although if you had come with me, I’m sure your foot would have been fine and you’d be more useful now.”

“You don’t seem all that well, if you’re here to ask for my help.”

“I do concede…” The Killer did not think he was so obvious as that. “It’d help if I knew who you were and what you bring to the fight.”

“What happened since you left The Club?” Shay refused, needing more to know what Panzjrah had experienced, Time being dead and the dimensions strange.

She knew recipes and their ingredients. Materials that follow rules. Surely Timelessness was the same? To better explain she told Panzjrah:

“When me and Serib left the station, Woid left the same way not long after, and experienced a very different set of events… all well and sunny when we left, while he walked into a war.”

Having been ignored, Panjzrah might well have aimed his rifle at Shay were there not such a need to be quiet.

“Serves Woid right.” The Killer grumbled.

∞

“The Shadows and monks were fighting in the tunnels; enough for me to slip through.” Panzjrah stared obsessively at his rifle, while Shay remembered seeing no fighting or dead monks or Shadows at all when she last left The Club. “I’d go through one chamber, turn back to see all those I’d killed or passed were gone. I made it through the warzone to one of the larger tunnels, and there was one of those, what did The Dam’e call them, Boiled Angels? Who knows how it got inside. Thankfully it was just sitting there, exhausted like. Stone black as abyss. It was a statue - but it was breathing. Creeping past I lost my hearing for a while; twice I got spooked and shot at nothing, unable to hear a thing. There were sunrises between, I remember, but no sunsets. I sent out some drones and finally got eyes on Argus - set a trap for the freak but he saw straight through it and fled here. Looking for you.”

∞

Panzjrah stood afterwards and started aiming through the fog with this scoped rifle, speaking softly into it:

“Then I saw blood trailing from one spot to the next through the factory. The wounded aren’t known hopping from place to place without drops between. A wounded Shadow, though…”

“Then an arachnid nearly flattened you from above?” Shay said, feeling a mini-Woid on her shoulder, leaning against her neck.

The fog was thicker by the moment but Shay still could clearly see Panzjrah was not impressed, as he sighed into scope and steam.