Kera had nowhere to run.

  Two dozen flame-crowned soldiers in strange white uniforms fanned out around the underground chamber. Each trained her in the sights of a shouldered firearm, or readied some weapon of vis, as they shouted in their harsh alien tongue. Kera stumbled backward, tripping over cables and machinery, before feeling the hot glass wall of the great machine’s bulb at her back. There she could retreat no further.

  The white-coated soldiers fell into cover behind the rows of telegraphy consoles, mounting their rifles against the metal panels, barking commands she couldn’t understand. Even as she raised her hands above her head in surrender, one leaned into the iron sights of his rifle, ready to fire.

  She flinched away.

  But rather than a gunshot, a new voice next cut above the clamor. The unique tenor of its single-syllable command at once silencing all the others. A single pair of steel-toed bootfalls clacked over cold stone in the subsequent quiet, each step in rhythm with the lilt of that chilling, ethereal melody.

  Finding herself still alive, Kera dared to reopen her eyes.

  A woman approached from the tunnel mouth, crowned by vis of black fire in two sharp, thin curves above her gold-pauldroned uniform. The same fire flickered just as thin as a wirelike rapier in her hand. She shouted again, another curt syllable, and the rifleman who’d made ready to fire lowered his weapon. The strange and terrible music lingered on a bridge, ever without climax.

  The gold-pauldroned woman smiled at Kera. Pointed canines bared in a wretched approximation of a cordial smile.

  “Setet… hullo Setet,” she said. Her accent was near incomprehensible.

  Kera begged her own voice to function.

  With her mouth frozen agape, she pleaded with herself to say something, anything that might advance even the slimmest chance of survival. But words refused to form.

  “You thinker, Setet?” asked the woman. “Machine thinker? You create for catch sjaels? Make this?”

  Kera blinked, struggling to parse the soldier’s meaning.

  “Thinker, no?” continued the woman. “We make deal, Setet. You, me, give machine sjaels. All sjaels me. Then, I say, you stay life. You, me, all happy. No?”

  She wanted her help… manipulating the machine, somehow. She’d let her live, if she helped her.

  For a moment, Kera dared to hope that she might survive that day, after all.

  If she could just figure out how to help that strange woman use the machine, then perhaps she would live.

  She blinked again.

  But that was unthinkable. What power might be granted by ‘transmuting’ just a single person’s vis from one soul to another? Let alone that of a whole city’s worth…

  And it was her enemy that was before her, wreathed in black-horned flame.

  “What say, Setet? You want live?” repeated the gold-pauldroned officer. She raised her arm, miming a handshake, even as still she stood many paces away. “Come then. Show machine.”

  The Patrol Corps would expect her to refuse, Kera knew. And to face whatever fate would befall her instead, if the alternative risked such terrible consequences for the people of Setet. Wasn’t that what any upstanding officer of the Corps would do in her place?

  Two more white-uniformed soldiers entered from the tunnel mouth. Their rifles were slung onto their backs as they carried between themselves with great caution some sort of mechanical device, trailing attachable cables and studded with smaller vacuum tubes of its own.

  And so Kera at last realized her one remaining advantage.

  She looked back at the gold-pauldroned officer. Then she let her hand fall to her revolver’s holster, sure to make the movement tactless and conspicuous.

  At once the encircling soldiers leaned into their rifle sights, ready to pepper her with shot if she tried to draw her pistol. But just as quick, the gold-pauldroned woman shouted them down again.

  She can’t have them break the vacuum.

  Kera felt the great glass enclosure at her back, then. Felt the ever so faint strike-slip give of the wall against itself, along its fracture, as she leaned into it.

  The black-wreathed woman whipped back up, wild-eyed, her blade flaring with power.

  For an instant, Kera felt no more fear. She had but one move to make.

  She forced herself back against the glass hard, shoving her legs like piles into the ground. The enclosure creaked in protest, at first only bending.

  The woman was already sprinting toward her as her music collapsed into discordant noise. But she was too late.

  Kera strained with the last of her strength, and the fracture grew with a tremorous crackle, leaping to the very top of the glass bulb.

  Then, with a great shattering crash, she fell backward into weightlessness.

  * * *

  Light flooded Kera’s vision. White blanketed all in total withering brilliance.

  She was falling, but never seemed to impact the ground. A shower of suspended glass shard prisms scintillated, refracting the brightness into every color.

  Pain coursed through her every nerve. Every muscle in her body burned, locked in a clench, tearing itself apart. Her heart most of all, as if a white hot iron skewered through her chest. She screamed, but didn’t hear herself.

  Beyond that bath of pure white shone a light somehow yet more intense. She could see it without opening her eyes.

  And she knew then that in order to survive, she had to seize it.

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  Through shearing currents of agony, she reached out. She reached for the hilt of a blade like a knife, its grip as if molded to her palm, and grasped it.

  It surged into her. Her arm was its conduit, rushing into her like water breaking through a dam. A white hot jetstream so painful as to be unable to be felt, and it hurt no longer.

  She felt the other presence, then.

  Darkness. Fury and hatred, and pain too, as it reached for the light by its blade, just as Kera had seized the hilt.

  Without hesitation it grabbed the blade, and pulled. Warring with Kera, screaming in agony and terror too while bleeding black fire into the white light. But still it pulled, starting to draw the flow of power to itself, instead.

  And so Kera gathered herself, and held fast, and drew the flow of power back toward her, with her better grip on the hilt. Jolting the light from its place out of time, as she pulled it down and away and back.

  The jetstream broke, as she did. Crystal-perfect laminae broke into froth and foam with a deafening thunderclap, as the power fell in upon itself, and all the rest all at once collapsed into her.

  * * *

  Before she remembered where she was, or what had happened, or why her whole body hurt, Kera knew she had to run. A powder snow of glass shards coated the floor, lacerating her hands as she pushed herself upright.

  Once back on her feet, though, she felt ready to move. As if energized.

  Before she’d quite managed to limp-run to the mouth of the entrance tunnel, she registered in passing scattered bodies, unconscious or barely-stirring, where they lay slumped over pews of telegraphy consoles. Still working through a haze of confusion, she left them behind. She knew she shouldn’t lend them any aid, but couldn’t yet remember why.

  But then she felt a certain vis reappear behind her, ten times more powerful than she’d sensed it last, alongside a grating disharmonic chord. And the return of those tendrils of dread.

  And so at once, she remembered everything.

  Her limp gave way to a full sprint. Alien shouts soon chased after her down the tunnel, making it easy to ignore the anguish of each stride. A flash lit the darkness, and a gunshot’s crack trailed the whistle of a bullet past her ear. But she made it deep into the tunnel before they took careful aim.

  By the time she returned to the five-way crossroads, the constant overlapping echoes of falling jackboots made it impossible to judge the distance of her closest pursuers. She dared not linger there to consider her choice, and instead simply ducked down one of the five connected tunnels almost at random. It wasn’t the way back to the great cavern through which she’d first descended underground, she knew, but that cavern would be no escape. She’d never survive a slow climb back up the steep rubble hill while so exposed to the soldiers’ rifle-fire.

  After less than fifteen seconds in a blind sprint up the slight incline of that other passage, she came to another fork. Placards visible in dim light were affixed at doors barring the way through to each new passage. Auxiliary Palace Safe Room, Augury Holding, and Secure Maintenance Access Tunnel 4A were the first three she made out, before realizing the illumination in which she could read them filtered through a small, barred grate window at head-level on the door labeled Augury Holding. Natural light, she saw through the bars.

  She pulled at the handle, then pushed. It didn’t give either way. Behind, the hammering of steel toed soles grew ever louder.

  She lowered her shoulder and charged the barrier. But the door didn’t disintegrate into gray powder like the one in the first cavern, as she fell against cold iron rather than incinerated hardwood. Instead, there was a muffled pop and a fresh spike of agony as the collision broke her shoulder bone.

  But she heard as well the snap of brittle metal failing under shear across the threshold, then a ringing clatter of iron against stone. The door drifted open, still reverberating from her impact, revealing the two bent halves of the decrepit, half-vaporised iron bar once meant to have barred it shut. She ducked through, then slammed it back shut.

  Bullets ricocheted off the tunnel wall behind her as she tore her saber’s scabbard from her belt and rammed the sheathed blade through the brackets that once held the barring iron. In seconds the metal door clanged and groaned as it was battered by her pursuers, but her makeshift bolt held, even as the saber deformed more and more with each impact. One of the soldiers tried to hold up his rifle to the window-grate, but the angle was too awkward for any half-decent shot as Kera scrambled away from his searching aim.

  On the other end of the chamber, light poured in through a wide hole in the collapsed ceiling. A smaller pile of roof-rubble offered the only route to the surface. Purple evening sky was visible above a climb of not ten feet.

  But Kera struggled for solid purchase on the cliff-face of broken masonry. The unsettled pile offered few handholds that didn’t shift under her weight. Rebar jutting from many of the larger cement boulders provided a few well-anchored grips, enough to climb up halfway to the surface. But when she reached any further, again she only dislodged smaller stones. In her desperation, she slipped, falling back to the bottom in a shower of dust and pebbles.

  The iron door rang and creaked behind her. She dared not look back, throwing herself back onto the pile.

  From the springboard of the reinforced concrete, she managed to reach one more handhold higher than her last attempt. That provided another foot of progress, at the cost of twice-vicious agony in her broken shoulder while she leveraged herself upward.

  She groped for another yet higher hold, and indeed found a new grip above the last. Probing, it felt solid at first, but then slipped free when she tried to raise any more of her weight with it. She almost fell back to the ground once more, before catching herself with an excruciating stretch of her broken arm. She swung flat against the lower half of the pile, saving her meager progress, but still just a few feet off the ground.

  She was stuck, she realized.

  All the other ledges before the surface were too far to reach.

  If she was to live that day, she needed to make that climb. But she couldn’t.

  Steel behind her groaned as it distended, the tang of her saber near snapping. But she could only hug the rock face, unable to move without forfeiting the last of her gains.

  She was stuck, and cornered in that terrible dungeon of a basement. She’d run straight to her doom.

  Any other soldier. Any other cadet from her graduating class would’ve already made it back onto the surface, she thought. They would’ve brought allies to bail them out. Or they would’ve had a vis that was actually useful, that might actually help in a situation like that.

  She imagined leaping to that next higher handhold. A dozen of her former classmates would’ve been agile enough to make that same jump. But she knew she wouldn’t even make it halfway before falling back down onto the uneven concrete boulders below.

  Pallas would’ve already made it to safety. Pallas wouldn’t have spared a second thought as she’d vaulted up that climb.

  At last she felt the approach of other vis, not just from the iron door, but on the surface. So she was surrounded, as well. The rest of the white-coated soldiers had probably gone to the surface some other way, perhaps through the main cavern, then circled around to cut off her escape. It was almost some consolation to know they would’ve caught her even if she had managed to climb her way to the top.

  Wait.

  The new presence she sensed was familiar.

  There was just one vis from the surface, not multiple like a squad of soldiers. And she’d felt it before. An old memory resurfaced, of sparring sessions at the academy.

  The emerald-fire snout of a massive wolf appeared first above her. The silent beast padded weightless down the steep rubble pile, brushing her with the soft warmth of its fire as if lapping at her cheek. Theodora peered down into the ruin a moment later, wreathed in a halo of the same green flame. Dropping flat on her stomach, she extended her arm.

  “Reach!” she cried.

  Kera stretched up with her free hand, as at last her saber’s tang snapped in two behind her, and jackboots stormed through the door.

  Their fingers brushed, before Theo caught her on a second pass with a grip like stone. Leaning back, she leveraged Kera finally up the face of the rubble pile, lifting her into the light. Even before Kera was clear to the surface, Theo’s wolf totem leapt down further below, lunging at the first of their pursuers.

  Horus was waiting untethered yards away. Kera fell onto his saddle behind Theo, just as a gunshot impacted his side with a bloody squelch and a flutter of feathers. Horus bellowed, lurching forward. But the soldiers who’d fired were still climbing onto the surface as he picked up speed away, if anything prodded on by the wound.

  Kera ducked her head against Theo's torso, and held tight to her waist as her comrade whipped the reins. But the white-coated soldiers’ next shots flew wide, and in seconds Horus rounded the corner of a ruined warehouse, shielding them at last from any further gunfire as they fled Atum-Ra.

  "Power is always dangerous. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best."

  Edward Abbey

  Credit to @killjo_q on Twitter for this awesome art.

  P.S. I mentioned in a previous chapter's preface that I made need to take some days off in the future. The first of those days may be tomorrow. If that is indeed the case certainly expect an update the day after. Thank you for understanding.