Chapter 5 - Chapter Five

"Conrad!" Berangere's shrill shout whistled through the steel struts.

That can't be right. Their bedroom had no struts. Not a thought, but echoes knocking around the hollow left by Chiyo's mind.

Sitting on the side of her bed, Berangere reached underneath, clutched two gray socks darkened by dirt and holes, then threw them in the hall. Conrad's favorite prank was to hide his disgusting socks under their beds, pervading their room with such an appalling sock stench that Chiyo gagged, Berangere held her nose, Akachi fled, and only Loren seemed strangely unphased by the vile odor,

which lingered long after Conrad's rankling foot-rags were tossed into the hall. If anything, knowing they moldered in the darkness all night made the stink fester, groan, and shift under her ribs.

That wasn't right. Socks didn't groan, and they didn't shift under your ribs, especially after being tossed in the hall. As Chiyo pushed herself up, her sheets and blankets bumped and jarred, then smacked, thudded, thumped, and echoed, raising the hackles on her neck. When she raised a fist to rub her blurry eye, it passed through her eye to rest on her neck, as if her temple had a gaping hole.

As her heart gripped up, she looked into the dwarf's face as his tools tugged and tore, laying bare a spasm of fear that fluttered away blind. Then it was Berangere glowering, growling,"he's your boyfriend, Chiyo!" When she closed her eyes, it stripped the flesh from Berangere, so that a skeleton stood where Berangere had stood, her teeth chattering as she hollered, "he's your boyfriend!"

"No, he isn't! " Chiyo shouted back. "Do you think I'm that stupid, Bear?"

"Don't call her Bear!" As the growl made her flinch, she tried to step up, but the blankets surged, crushing her under their folds. Loren hulked to a dark and downy shadow, her sleek foxfur as much like feathers as fur.

"Loren, I can't breathe!" As the blankets clung tighter, Chiyo drew in a breath she couldn't exhale, when a hand seized her fear-tightened hackles, and dragged her up, up, the dream shuddering as it sloughed off, leaving only the dark, doubled by the brutal ache on the left side of her face.

"I've got you." The snarl was strangely familiar. Feminine, but powerful. "You're safe. For the moment." The glum voice was not comforting. "I remember you being a lot less lobster, girl."

"Lobster?" Chiyo weakly raised a hand to her head, but froze half-way, fearing what she would feel. "Am I...Am I..."

"You're fine. Not that you'd agree. And things could be better." When the voice sighed, her tone shifted nearly to kindness. "First things, first, lobster--let's get that armor off, so next time you don't sink all the way down."

"Down?" While Chiyo felt her position to be ungainly and precarious, her dwarven eye was utterly dark as she peered one-eyed into the darkness. While she had never gotten used to her artificial eye, and would never get used to it, it seemed cruel that when she absolutely needed it, it conked out,

setting her adrift in darkness. Worse, the dark sea underneath was jumbled and shifting, sometimes poking the small of her back through her armor, and sometimes subsiding a few inches lower, deeper, darker. If it was a body of water, it was chock-ful of flotsam. If anything, she was the flip side of wet,

burning up in armor and the suffocating, overbearing stench. "Don't---don't take it off," she stammered, but the voice was already undoing the joins of her bracers, unbuckling her helmet, and unhinging the straps of her breastplate.

"Armor may have its uses, but I'll never take a liking to bearing more weight. When you might be buried or burned, armor won't help you."

"Buried! Burned?" As her vision adjusted to the darkness, adrenaline spiked like a flash of lightning, and Chiyo saw the horror traced by the shadows just as the unspeakable echoed in her ears, and the unthinkable echoed in her fears.

Chiyo rested on a heap of bodies, a jumble of arms and legs and necks stiffly protruding from the pile, all frightfully still save for the strange woman, hellbent on peeling her Ephremian armor, and her own arm, still stuck in its wavering path through the personal horror of the darkness that claimed her eye.

"Relax, Chiyo. You're not dead yet, stop being such a stiff!" As the strangely familiar silhouette fought with the armor's joins and ties, however, Chiyo hardened, her cold muscles suddenly flush and warm, shoving back this woman, who, for all Chiyo knew, might be part of the horror; not her rescuer, but her grave-robber, stripping her remains of valuables. "Stop that, Chiyo!"

"Don't call me that! You don't know me!" By adventure-hardened muscle, terror, and rage, Chiyo pitched the much-larger woman back, and instantly regretted it, as the heap shifted, burying the woman in bodies, and sucking Chiyo down to be stiff-armed in the neck by a bony corpse, so that she gagged twice, once from the pain reflex, then again from the nausea of corruption. While her bracers, greaves, and helm had been stripped from her, her breastplate clung clam-tight, until she fought for breath, and dragged her down like an anchor.

Then the woman seemed to shrivel to dark fur and tail, which creeped over the bodies, wedged to the wall behind Chiyo, then expanded again to grasp Chiyo under her armpits, drag her from the heap, then clasp her to her chest, so tight that Chiyo felt air jet from the woman's nostrils, tickling the back of her neck as they slumped against the cold steel wall.

"Do I know you?"

The woman's chest heaved under Chiyo. "And you don't know me? I tended you since you arrived from Alsantia."

"But you're much too small! And Jezera's no shape-shifter!"

"Think farther back, Chiyo."

When she realized just who held her, Chiyo again felt the precariousness of her situation. Until then, she had felt only the queasiness of her perch, having to trust the strange woman who had wrestled her out of her armor not to slip from their uneasy purchase into the mass grave, but now that she knew her grave-rescuer, she couldn't stop shaking.

While Vieno had never singled Chiyo out for special attention, had never been cruel, or even the least unkind, and had fulfilled her obligation to the Animalytes with an eagerness that, if it was not love, could only have been zeal. While Vieno was religious, she had no spiritual grace but an alienating vehemence that shaped unpleasant and caustic opinions. Along with Aito, While Chiyo and Aito had known the secrets of The Mansion of the Shining Prince, and that Vieno was an Alsantian talking animal, she had never caught the intensely secretive Elderlich in her animal form. While Vieno had been more unguarded with Loren, who had caught glimpses of her fox tail, Chiyo had only now spied this shadow of the true Vieno. Somehow, it felt as disturbing as the heap of bodies. She always knew Vieno was a beast, but it was another thing to see the skulking, feral shadowof whatever she was.

"I can barely see!" While she had recognized Vieno, Chiyo feigned otherwise, not wanting the Elderlich to know she feared her. Clutching Chiyo to her chest, Vieno no doubt felt every shudder and shiver that wracked her. Better that she not think those feelings concerned herself, but their horrific situation. "Are those dead people?"

"What do you think?" Vieno sneered. Then she sighed. "You were never the smart one." That stung. "It's Vieno, Chiyo."

Chiyo took a deep breath as she strove to feign relief. Her pulse still raced and her heartbeat pounded, but the breath that fell on Vieno's hands was long and measured. "How did you find me?"

"Have you talked to your friends?"

"A little."

"Who?"

Something nagged at Chiyo's mind. Whatever concered her couldn't rise to the surface in her foggy, shadow-blind, and frightened state of mind, the inner darkness that rivaled the real darkness.

Then it hit her, so hard she couldn't stop a slight shiver from running through her arms. Vieno was Loren's mother!

When she last saw Vieno, this was a secret, but now Chiyo knew. She wished Loren hadn't said anything. While Chiyo's arrival in Alsantia had been a literal nightmare, Loren's must have been hell.

Despite having been the first Animalyte to discover a parent in Alsantia, having arrived on Alsantia's northern shore with Vieno, who would soon prove to be her mother, it was clear Loren wanted no part of her parenting, which preferred torment to compassion. While Lucien and Berangere's parents were insufferably smug, Vieno had gone from a nun on Earth to a sneering villain on Alsantia. If Chiyo pretended not to know, would Vieno play the part she played on Earth? This was Earth, after all, wasn't it?

"Is this Earth?"

"Smells like it." Vieno chuckled. "Actually, it smells like Hell."

"How did we get here?"

"So not the smart one, Chiyo. Also, you don't listen."

"Excuse me?"

"Good. Get angry. Angry Chiyo I can use. We have to get out of here. Five minutes ago would have been better, but now will do it."

"What is this place?"

"Not now," hissed Vieno. "You'll have to climb me, then the wall."

"Hello? How? Climb this wall?"

"It's not a pit. It's a man-made shaft, so it will have maintenance rungs or a ladder."

"I said how. I can't even stand up without sinking, and I can't walk over bodies in fox feet, like you."

"I could leave you here. I'd prefer to take you, for old time's sake."

"For old time's sake," Chiyo repeated. "Well, then, for old time's sake, help me out."

"That is what I was doing. It's not impossible, Chiyo. Make your way along the edge. If you put as much of your weight as possible on the outer wall, and creep along the edge, you could circle the pit to the maintenance rungs."

"I'm still walking over bodies."

"Not with all your weight. That would make you sink, suffocate, and die."

"That's so reassuring."

"I hear you. I know you're squeamish about walking over the dead. But there's no other choice. Not unless you have wings. Or can shape shift, which you've already ruled out."

"Can't you scout around to find the ladder? If there isn't one, I'm wasting my time."

Vieno snickered. "It's the other way around. If there's no way out for you, we're only timing your waste, Chiyo."

"That's not funny."

"It's a little funny. We have to make the best of a bad situation, or at least make it better. Best would have been leaving you behind, but I didn't have the stomach for it. Not that I have a human stomach." Shrinking down again to a fox, Vieno trotted gingerly over the heap, moseying in the direction counter to the way Chiyo crept along the wall.

Creeping along the cold rim of the shaft proved difficult, for even braced against the shaft with all her weight, her feet wanted to slip in the tangled bodies, so she had to walk even more gingerly than Vieno, and stand on heads, backs, and shoulders whenever she could, for the arms and legs, no matter how stiff, flopped messily underfoot.

"Found it. Sort of."

"What do you mean, sort of?"

"It's a door."

"That's even better."

"Not for you. It's at least fifteen feet up."

"What happened to the ladder."

"I don't know. Did you find one?"

"No." Fear and disgust had driven Chiyo this far, until hot tears welled in her good eye,

and the black void in her eye socket gelled, cold and mute. "What do we do now?"

"Follow my voice. No, don't turn around! Keep heading around the shaft, and you might find rungs after all."

"What if there aren't rungs?"

"Let's not think about that."

"You'll leave me here, won't you?"

"If I meant to do that, why mention the door? I would have slipped through and let you wail in the dark."

As Chiyo whimpered, Vieno hissed, "too much noise!"

"Who cares!" Chiyo sobbed, "they won't hear."

"The dead didn't put us here, Chiyo. Be quiet."

"Why should you care what happens to me?"

"I'm coming around to that point of view," Vieno growled. "You're so whiny, er, persuasive."

After making her way around the shaft, Chiyo realized she had held her breath out of pure fright and let herself heave a huge breath.

Click click click click.

"What's that?"

"Hurry! Up on my back!"

Click click click click.

"I'll never reach it!"

"Shut up! You'd have burned to a crisp already if it hadn't misfired."

"What?" While very dark in the shaft, so dark her good eye could only grasp nuances and shades in the blackness, Chiyo would never forget what happened next. Vieno's silhouette blurred, then shook, then burst to a gushing shadow that thrust Chiyo to the door's narrow ledge.

Click click click click ROARRRRR!!! As the fire flowered under the bodies, the shaft flooded with red light, streams of ashes, and a horrendous, choking stench, and Chiyo shoved and pawed at the door, her hand by luck alighting on a jutting switch that cracked the door, so that Chiyo fell forward into a painful torrent of blinding light.

As the flame roared and blasted, it licked and smoldered into the hall inches over Chiyo's head,

so she crawled behind the door, inched her way up the wall, and banged her fingers on the panel of buttons, just as a shining black mass slumped through, then festered and flowered into human shape,

the irruption of flesh ending in a strange, bristly flourish Chiyo could have sworn was a bright red fox tail, before receding into Vieno, clad in Elderlich robes, as if the recent past was only a field trip,

as if Vieno would ever plan something so normal as a field trip, and the Mansion of the Shining Prince wasn't a burned-out ruin. Where the tail had curled, a spark of light smoldered, smelling like a curled-up match. When Vieno turned and waved her hand, the door latched shut, locked in place, and shivered,

bearing the brunt of the roaring flame.

As Vieno glared at her, Chiyo stared at the door, mouthing its lettering incredulously: ORGANIC REFUSE.

Organic she knew very well, having eaten Vieno's organic, gluten-free, and vegan concoctions. But when she prenounced refuse 're-fuse,' rhyming with news or ooze, Vieno laughed.

"It's not 'organic refuse,' like a vegan restaurant refusing a customer service for wearing leather pants, but 'organic ref-use.'" When Vieno's refuse rhymed with 'what's the use.' Chiyo realized what the sign meant, but it still didn't register. It was too unbelievable. Believing required not only accepting the horror of the definition, but accepting a world where some people destroyed others, then disposed of them as trash as they pursued their evil purposes. While Suvani might have disposed of her as a political enemy, for leading armies against Alsantia, Chiyo had glimpsed the Organic Refuse in the split second of the fiery explosion, and too many were straitjacketed humans, or what looked like either experiments gone awry, or beings from other worlds, like the translucent, glassy figure sprawled atop an Ephremian dwarf and the bloodied body of a deer. Perhaps these last two were Alsantian rebels.

But incinerated with so many others, none of whose deaths were dignified by explanation, it was more likely they were simply Marie Kondoed from existence by the doppelganger megalomaniacs.

"They were going to...going to...burn me!"

"In their defense, they thought there was nothing left to you."

"In their defense? You were in there too!"

Vieno laughed. "Once a teacher, always a devil's advocate."

"These devils are too evil to want advocates."

"They'll pay for their presumption, Chiyo. Not only in kind, but in cruel, until I've had my fill.

As this is an institute, I'll conduct my own study on human pain, on the limits of the human body. Only a limited imagination sics its science on the dead. Let's sic science on the living. And a nasty spell. I know a couple." Her brow knit in, if not sincere concern, then sardonic pity, as she cleared her throat. "There's something I should tell you." She sighed and turned her head. "Let's rip that band-aid off later."

Chiyo's good eye rolled, but crushing anxiety and exhaustion suppressed whatever remained of Chiyo's sarcasm,and her curiosity subsided into her dark half, leaving her feeling only half-awake and, for that matter, half-alive. "So tell me where we are."

"What do you remember?"

Chiyo paused and scowled. She had thought to pump Vieno for information, but her former teacher had grasped the pump in turn, as if the information pump was a railway handcar, and Vieno had seized the handles, to turn around the information transfer on Chiyo. But while she hadn't forgotten that Loren considered Vieno less her mother than her hated enemy, she had seen Loren's shadow hand, and the amorphous distortion of her body, as it adapted to her emotions, and knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Loren and Vieno deserved each other, being equally shapeless souls, two peas in a pod, or rather, two black holes in a nebula. She had always resented Loren for clinging to Bear. She had always resented that she couldn't call Berangere Bear, that Loren's clutches ran so deep that Chiyo had never known a childhood girl friend. Even after Chiyo had plunged into the war Berangere's parents kept far from Bear and Loren, Chiyo still wasn't good enough. After all they had been through together, they had abandoned her in this terrifying institute, to be taken for dead and nearly incinerated.

Well, she would be good enough for Vieno. She couldn't let her teacher down, who was only a distraught mother reaching her long, shapeless arm after her equally monstrous daughter. As she mulled it over, her shaking heart settled, and her shivering scowl perked into a smile.

While they had wandered far from the Organic Refuse, they had not entirely left the dark.

The whole floor was dark, dingy, and desolate, and they only found their way by following a trail of dim fluorescent lights, some with cracked tubes, flickering filaments, and dangling caps. Added to this darkness, Chiyo's left side waded through a dark swamp, her dwarven eye still numb, although perhaps it was kicking on now, as the area became hot, irritated, and damp, as tears trickled down that side of her face. The realization flashed through her exhaustion that her dead eye socket had not cried since the vulture boy's claws and the dwarf's tools, but she was too tired to feel more than a twinge of happiness as she trod down cigarette butts, a few newspaper sections, and candy-wrappers.

On coming to stairs, they climbed up from the stale air into an air conditioned chill, until they arrived on the upper landing, where Chiyo took a deep breath of cold, clean air, then froze, staring straight into a security camera, perched like a locust above the stairwell.

"Keep moving," barked Vieno.

Chiyo trudged past the camera. "But they saw us!"

"Whoever watches the cameras might be eating a sandwich or reading a magazine. We don't know. We don't even know if we have enemies here."

"Hello? They tried to burn us."

"If they thought we were dead, they were only tidying up the place."

"On this world, this was a crime whether we were alive or dead. How do you think the others died? They can't all have died from industrial accidents, and even if they did, on this world, you don't throw your accidents in a fire. On Earth, we account for every death and we bury our dead."

"You're a fool, Chiyo."

"What?"

"This isn't your world."

"It's not yours."

"No, it's not. It's hers."

Chiyo shuddered, but did not deny it.

"The more power Suvani is given here, the more your dead will pile up uncounted, and the more your world will resemble my world. I should say our world, for you came from Alsantia. Earth was never your world, remember?"

"Of course I do." As they walked, Chiyo bowed her head as they passed under each of the locust-like security cameras, sometimes crouching so low she had to cling to Vieno.

"I remember the day you arrived. You were so cute, Chiyo."

"I was frightened of you."

"That was my job. Had I tried, I might have charmed even you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"What?" Vieno said innocently.

"Even me."

"Well, I'm sure you noticed..."

"Noticed what?"

"You weren't the easiest one to cozy up to. While the boys were thick as thieves, and Loren and Berangere bugs in a rug, you had a hard time making friends." Vieno turned a sad eye on Chiyo. "Did you ever find one?"

"I had Aito."

"He was your co-conspirator, but Lucien's best friend."

Vieno smiled slyly. "It's funny you don't mention Conrad first..."

"Let's not talk about Conrad!"

"...but Aito was Lucien's best friend, even if he was your co-conspirator. You shared a secret and a homeland, but not a friendship. Co-workers are never friends."

"Co-workers? We were four when we came to the Mansion!"

"Look at that!"

That was a brightly lit gym, with bulky, metal weights, long, shiny bars smudged with chalk, weight machines, exercise bikes, and treadmills, as well as gigantic air conditioner units mounted on either wall. While this enormous gym was large enough for sixty stationary cyclists side by side, and dozens pumping iron, like the rest of this floor and the floor below, it was desolate, its gleaming white and silver surfaces looking not cheery, but bleak, with a faint fur of dust on the benches and seats.

"You want a workout? After all that?"

"It's always the forest for the trees with you. You go to another world, and your mind rolls in the ash, not the wonder."

"How did you know about that?"

As Vieno strode to a bright orange door inset in the far wall of the gym, Chiyo followed. "Perception resembles knowledge, Chiyo. Sometimes, you only have to look hard for the truth. If you look harder than the rest, you'll find the truth first."

"So I look like I went to another world?"

"Before this, I would have said you're nothing special. Don't take it that way. It's just that you seem a perfectly ordinary Alsantian girl."

"Daikonese," Chiyo muttered. "Thanks, I guess."

"Then I saw you there. On a monitor screen." At Chiyo's curious scowl, Vieno continued. "When I wasn't hooked up to a bizarre contraption I couldn't begin to describe, I was in a cell, but when I was walked to and from that quaint, private residence, I was taken past a security desk--no doubt the one that monitors these cameras too, for dozens of screens were tuned to different scenes, and one showed you staggering past fallen, broken buildings blasted by ash and smoke. If it wasn't a world I recognized, I might have thought you elsewhere in Draden."

"A world you recognize?"

"Recognize it? I remember Havala very well." She snorted. "Mean, vicious people. Prime world my tail. If they're the ash you walked through, I like them a little better now." Having fiddled and tinkered with the elevator panel, Vieno vented an exasperated sigh and barked strange, guttural syllables, which somehow greased the stubborn mechanism, so that the door flung open, revealing a brown paneled interior polished to an immaculate brightness.

Vieno stepped in and braced one hand behind her on the back wall. When Chiyo stepped in reluctantly, Vieno smiled, ran a finger down Chiyo's cheek, and pulled it back to inspect the grimy nail. "Unless you've bathed since your capture, you likely have a few ounces of Havalans on you now."

As the elevator lurched, Chiyo slouched against the cool, polished paneling, and did her best to face the orange chrome doors, for the elevator's sides were shining glass. As they shot up and up, and the city fell to the left and right of her, she couldn't resist a glance, and the horror seized her in the glass. While they had only climbed a few stories, it was already high enough for dizziness to snag Chiyo's fear of heights. But her true fright was the monster glaring back from her reflection in the glass.

It was her first good look at herself since waking in ORGANIC REFUSE; her first good thought of herself since Vieno roused her to the living. Not that she hadn't feared precisely this. Having loathed the dwarven eye so long, she couldn't say she didn't deserve this, but she did anyway, having had the short end of the stick since their adventures began. While it was an amazing contraption and a near perfect prosthetic, she resented being the only one who needed one. If she could have shared her misery, like those mythological hags who shared one eye and one tooth, she would have. Now that she had her first clear look at the side which had fallen into darkness, a puckered hole gaped back where her dwarven eye had been, and she wished, with all her heart, that the vile device still dammed up the illusion of her face. The puckered hole was like the portal, an eye into a gray void, as if seeing so many worlds had ravaged her eye. She was tired of plucking herself from ashes, not only Havala's burning embers, but the surging fires of Organic Refuse, and her faded, lying memories of false friends.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"I tried, but didn't have the heart."

When Chiyo fell to her knees and sobbed, Vieno knelt and folded her awkwardly to her chest.

It was a cold embrace, more hold than hug, a mentor's embarassed and obligatory embrace, not that Vieno had ever fostered the illusion of motherhood, not with Chiyo. But even if Vieno was only falling into a role she had played for years, Chiyo was grateful. Having fallen too far, it felt right not to fall alone, to keep these hands close to catch her as she fell from enchantment to disillusionment, from fighting the good fight to grasping at life.

"Stop that!" As Vieno patted Chiyo's head and ran her fingers through her hair, Chiyo shivered at the icy touch of the Elderlich's hands. "It's not like it can't be fixed."

"Not here! We have no dwarven eyesmiths on Earth."

"That's not what I meant. I could fix it now, if you'd like."

"What's the catch?" Chiyo stopped sobbing and glared at Vieno.

"Chiyo, don't look a gift eye in the mouth. Your last eye was a spy, you know."

"A spy? What do you mean?"

"It's a long story."

"We're riding a very long elevator."

"No doubt to the very top of this institute. No doubt to Suvani herself, or her doppleganger. We only have a few moments. Should I fill you in or make you whole?"

"Fine. Do it. I'll pay the price later."

"No charge." Vieno smiled wryly. "I like playing devil's advocate, not the devil himself. But I hope you won't grow to regret my gift." She touched the dark side of Chiyo's head softly, almost tenderly.

"Just do it."

"It's done."

In the heart of the shadow clumped to Chiyo's face, a pinprick of light welled to a crescent moon, then a penciled-in-sphere, as if the world was being built from the ground up by sticks, rods, cylinders, and cones, then the grey washed in, pushed back the black, and let in the seep of white.

While this new world ached and ebbed in and out, it remained colorless, skeletal,as if the world's left side had x-rayed the right. The jarring juxtaposition of color and black and white worlds made Chiyo so dizzy she swooned to the wall, and when Vieno steadied her, Chiyo smacked her leathery, paw-like hand by reflex, her shouting and sobbing raging harder and louder.

"Be quiet! Do you want to warn Suvani to our arrival? You said you wanted it! Do it, you said."

"I should have known. Alsantians! Elderliches! All your gifts are curses when they're not lies."

"You haven't seen how you look!"

"But look at how I see! Half the world's black and white!"

"Boo hoo! Njall wore bifocals, did you know that?

"What do you mean had?" Chiyo hissed back, as if what had seeped in her eye socket made her dark, feral, and part Vieno. "What happened to Njall?"

Just as Chiyo found her footing, the elevator rose to a shaking and rattling halt, then shuddered to a humming quiet. Chiyo stumbled again, caught herself on the elevator rail, and gawked down at Draden's city sprawl an unthinkable drop below. The elevator was yet another impossible thing, for from outside, the Institute didn't look a tenth this size. How did they conceal this tower? If it was magic, Alsantia had been involved for years, at least long enough to oversee construction of the Institute. As Suvani might have been thirteen or fourteen when the construction began, perhaps the Regent had started this pet project.

Vieno sighed. "He hasn't responded to my messages. I tend to assume the worst, for my upbringing was a tad pessimistic even compared to yours."

"Why would he respond? You haven't fought for our side since we left the Mansion."

"Were we ever on their side, Chiyo? Even you were a mole, keeping tabs on your unsuspecting friends."

"I was always on their side! Who cares if I had to report to you? You never did anything with the information."

"How can you know what I did then, if you second guess what I do now?"

"Whatever. Are we staying in this elevator all day?"

Vieno sighed. "I'm strong, but Suvani is stronger still, and her doppleganger has horrors you couldn't begin to dream of, Chiyo."

"So we're staying here." Chiyo snorted. "Suits me. I can't even walk steady after what you did."

"The mind is a tricky thing, Chiyo. One eye must conquer the other. If you don't delude your left eye into seeing in color, it will dominate, persuading you to live, remember, and dream in black and white.

"Delude? I'll tell you who's delusional." But Chiyo began to see what Vieno meant. While the dwarven eye's sepia palette was more nuanced than the black and white eye, she had soon filled the seam of difference by subduing the whole world with these sepia tones, Now Vieno's gift converted the world to black and white. Colors occasionally flashed and crinkled in, only to subside to black and white. Having read that those who dream in color were more intelligent, Chiyo hoped this was no reflection on herself, or worse, that she had chosen to live in black and white. Even living in sepia would have been better. She hissed. "Fine. I'm ready." When Chiyo smacked all the buttons on the pad at once, the door hissed open half-way, then stuck and whined, grinding on its own gears.

"You little idiot!" Vieno's tone was wracked with dismay, but her hands hammered the buttons even faster, making the door sputter, clickety-clack, and clang. Chiyo sucked in her breath as she timed the clanging doors, then wedged herself through by a quick sidestep. When Vieno growled and barged through, being rather more mature and buxom than Chiyo, she got caught on the doors, and as they hissed and pressed in, she clawed for Chiyo, who backed into the dim space, one hand flying to her eyes as she feared to watch Vieno squished by the elevator doors, and the other hand flying to her mouth, to cover her smile.

While she needn't have worried about Vieno's safety, she might have liked some advance warning of what, or rather, who, came up behind her, as a hand rested on the shoulder of her breastplate. "Hey! This is a restricted level!"

As that familiar, bullying tone poured like so much gasoline into the fires of her rage, she didn't even bother turning around, but lashed back one elbow hard as she could, so hard it whanged the funny bone and drowned his yelp in her screech, until her foot kicked savagely back into his kneecap and his holler died in an excruciating sob that brought her wheeling around, readying her other foot for a much harder kick to a much softer spot, when she saw Conrad's tear-streaked cheeks and bloody mouth and lowered her foot gingerly. When his pathetic whimpering fanned her flames of anger higher, she despised herself for relenting, then kicked herself for giving him an inch, as he lunged for her poised foot, yanked, and spilled her hard to the floor, then lurched towards her, bear-walking on his bunched-up, white-knuckled fists.

There was a metallic grinding, then a clang that shook and rattled the glinting ceiling, and just as Conrad lifted one meaty fist, a towering, furry hulk reared, clutched Conrad, and threw him off Chiyo. "Kits and cubs!" Vieno snarled, sparking with energy as she ebbed to human form, even her robes undulating with the electrified shade that clung to her and rippled muscularly. Whatever power infected Vieno, it shook the room.

"Stop it! Stop it!" shouted Conrad. "She hit me!"

"Just because that punch was a long time coming, doesn't mean you couldn't see it coming. You're not that dumb, are you, Conrad?"

"What are you doing here, Vieno?"

"Don't answer him!" shouted Chiyo. "He doesn't get to know!"

"What did I ever do ro you?"

"What did you do to me?" Chiyo's arms swung wide as if to encompass the gigantic penthouse. Even the foyer was enormous, its glittering ceiling hung with three chandeliers so gigantic as to seem to interlock their crystals. "You're in the lap of luxury, Conrad! With the enemy!"

Conrad's brows knit with worry, and his frown dipped low as he brought a hand to his mouth to stem the blood/ "I can explain."

At Chiyo's explosive sigh, he stepped back. "You mean lie, don't you?"

"Why would I lie? I'm here for good reasons. Let me tell you--"

"Shut up, Conrad! Until recently, I had the Albatron." His eyes flashed with alarm. "Yeah, Conrad. I know what you've been up to. You betrayed us all."

"Chiyo." He held his hands up and took another step back. "The last time I saw you, we fought back to back. I thought you were dead."

"No, you didn't," she sneered. "I was in the portal room, Conrad." Having been rattled by waking in ORGANIC REFUSE, then shaken to her core by Vieno slipping a piece of her lying self in her head to serve as an eye, Chiyo had not yet had time to think of how she got there until that very moment, when dim, patchy memories of the portal room trickled in. She must have been slipping iand out of consciousness, for she vaguely remembered Jezera looming over Loren and Berangere, looking like she was going to bite their heads off, then all three vanished, and Suvani's doppleganger was doubled over on the ground. But she had a very good memory of the room, its wall of screens showing strange scenes of Earth, Alsantia, and smoldering Havala, as well as an eerily sepia-tinted screen that doubked whatever Chiyo's groggy head looked at. This was what Vieno meant by calling her dwarven eye a spy. "Was it you?"

"What? Was I what?"

"Was it you? Did you throw me in?"

"Throw you in where? I just got here."

"He's a liar," snorted Vieno.

"Take it back!" Conrad roared.

"I might, if there wasn't a closet here with all sorts of boy clothes."

"Boy clothes?" Those are 'Young Men!'"

"Young men, boy toy, tomayto, tomahto. You've grown, Conrad, however much you haven't grown into the growing." Vieno's fox nails shredded and tore rumpled fistfuls of blazers, jackets, sweaters and button-down shirts.

"Stop that! Those are mine!"

"These?" Vieno snickered. "These aren't yours. These are doll clothes. If your fancy girlfriend buys clothes for her doll, they're only doll clothes, not the doll's clothes. They belong to Suvani, like you do."

"You don't know what you're talking about. We're in love!"

"Love?" As Vieno's head reared back in a thick, gloaty laugh, Chiyo let loose a strangled scream and hurtled upon him, until Conrad's face seemed to melt and slack under pounding fists slick with her sweat and his blood. While his arms were longer, she was on top, and his fists rang hard on her breastplate until he began thumping her arms and cracking her hands.

When Vieno snatched at Chiyo, her claws tore through the breastplate's frayed straps, and it dangled in her fox-furred fists as Chiyo bruised Conrad's left eye with a giant, black ring, less a raccoon mask than a new moon. Once the Elderlich's flesh bubbled down to fox form, a giant fox as hulking as a wolverine, she dragged Chiyo off Conrad with her jaws--but not fast enough, as Conrad let fly a kick that cracked Chiyo's chin, blacked her good eye, iced her blood, and made her limbs jerk, flail, then slacken in the encroaching darkness.

As Chiyo drifted in this void, the gray eye Vieno implanted was an oasis in the blackness, like film rolling after the director yelled 'cut,' sucking in a black and white world Chiyo was helpless to act or color in. While the rest of her clung to and fought for consciousness, it was strangely comforting to have an eye on the waking world. Like an antique television on in the background, her gray eye played its black and white coverage even as she fell into a dream. While the real Conrad came to his feet sputtering with rage and wiping the blood from his mouth and chin, the dream Conrad was now king,

enthroned so near Suvani that they held hands between the thrones, and Chiyo, wearing Isola's tattered gown, sat on a tasseled ottoman. The gray eye's black and white streamed vertically, like an eerie, glittery banner among the tapestries and pennants of the throne room. When her attention flashed to the flickering banner, gray Conrad strutted up and down the penthouse, shouting at Vieno and into her own unconscious face, and the throne room froze into a glacial gray as she realized she was dreaming,

but when her eyes went to the king and queen, color rushed in, her heart pounded, and she forgot herself in her fear of the despots, whose cruel eyes scorched her as they shared whispering laughter.

One thing Dream Chiyo retained, even as her attention wavered from gray reality to the vivid dream, was that the throne room and the penthouse shared the same dimensions. This surreal congruity soon occupied an excluded middle ground, like the fine line between two symmetries, or the corpus collosum in the bicameral brain, then swelled and gorged itself on both worlds, as the 'film real' warped, and the dream faded...

...and she shook her drizzling jaw, spat blood, and glared at Conrad.

"So you're back with the living?"

Chiyo chuckled. "I never left. I just wanted to hear you rant."

"Please! I knocked you out."

"Both of you shut up," said Vieno. "Not that I care what happens to you anymore, Conrad, but Chiyo already took her revenge, and I would spare you any more."

"That's very big of you."

"You don't know how big. I've also had my eye on you as you traipsed around Alsantia, carried and coddled by raccoons, fairies, and deer, until you became the precious princeling they treated you like by falling under Suvani's spell. Did you know you've betrayed everyone you've ever known?" Vieno sighed. "As I've lived up to my obligations, I won't keep an eye on you any more. Besides, I gave that eye to Chiyo." She snickered. "It's her turn."

Chiyo growled. "Take it back! I'd rather be one-eyed than have the tiniest bit of my attention diverted to Conrad." Still shuddering from the dream, Chiyo knew the gray eye would go where it willed, when it willed.

"If we don't kill him, someone has to play warden or lookout."

"You're talking about killing me, now?"

"It's been a long day," sighed Vieno. "If you had the day we had, you might add killing to your options."

"He knows!" Chiyo said hotly. "If he didn't throw us in, he knew we were there!"

"Threw you in?"

"Don't play innocent. Your girlfriend rules the world."

"Two worlds," murmured Vieno.

"She's not my girlfriend!"

"There's no point in denying it." Chiyo scowled and wrinkled her nose in distaste at Conrad's cowardice.

"She's my fiancee!"

"A marriage for the ages!" Vieno chortled, then sat down on a gigantic posh divan.

"You can't sit on that! You're filthy!"

"Who will stop me? Not the Prince? If you don't stand away, you'll get blood all over your bride's suite. And not that little bit of chin blood, either. I'll open a bigger valve."

Grumbling, Chiyo walked behind Conrad and pulled him back.

"Get your hands off me."

"I just saved your life."

"Please."

"She was serious. Don't you know when people hate you, Conrad?"

Conrad brought the back of his hand back to his chin to stem the steady trickle of blood. "You don't leave me any room for doubt."

"But you're here! In her apartment, Conrad."

\ "She has plans for me. Big plans."

"Of that, I have no doubt," said Vieno. "But it doesn't mean she cares whether you live or die."

"Say what you want, I know she loves me."

"Does she? What of your watchdogs?"

"What watchdogs?"

"You can't see them? They're all around us."

"I'll take your word for it."

"Now that's interesting." Vieno smiled her wry smile. "They never budged an inch, not even when Chiyo was after your teeth. If you're nothing to them, Conrad, then what or who are they guarding?"

As Chiyo looked around, faintness washed over her, and she nearly stumbled as she wavered in and out of consciousness. When she blacked out again, the gray eye kept running, and as her conscious mind sunk in darkness, unable to edit what she perceived, Vieno's gift illuminated the hideous creatures, which, as Vieno had claimed, were all around them: one leaning on the far wall, its dark, sloping contours mistaken for shadow; another so hunkered and twisted that it served as the posh divan Vieno sprawled on without a care, her nails drumming on the armrest, which was actually a haunchrest, being its poised haunch; and yet another pasted to the ceiling, its wings and scales tracing what Chiyo had believed a baroque design. As awareness rushed back in, Chiyo regained her footing, took a step back, and pointed them out, one, two, three.

"What...are...those?" Conrad seemed breathless, as if fright blasted the air from his lungs. He took a deep breath. "I've been here all day. How could I not notice?"

"Curious. If you were part of her plans, you would be with her now, right? And if she cared whether you lived or died, she would show you her watchdogs, not let you walk back and forth unawares in front of slavering fangs." Vieno snorted. "He knows nothing, Chiyo."

"So? Ignorant doesn't mean innocent. Not only does he think she loves him, he wants in on her schemes." She turned on Conrad. "You said you had enough of Alsantia, and you're playing house with its queen."

"What do you want?" Conrad's voice quivered, barely reining in his outrage and hurt feelings, but his eyes bored through them angrily.

"Haven't you heard anything? Are you tired of listening to me already?"

"What happened to you?"

"As if you didn't have a front row seat. I'm sure if we look hard enough, we'll find the security screens. What did I ever do to you, Conrad?"

"You never did anything for me," When Chiyo screeched and flung herself at his evil look again, Vieno drew Chiyo back against her, and raised a hand, which stopped Conrad short just as he was about to meet Conrad head on.

Then the elevator whirred.

"Right now, you won't agree on anything, so I'll make it easy for you. From here on out, if either of you do anything I haven't asked or suggested, I'll kill you both."

When Chiyo glared at her, Vieno swept her feet out from under her with a kick of her strangely-jointed leg, so that Chiyo rolled to the elevator door. Just as she pushed herself to her knees, the doors opened.

There she was. The ruler of Alsantia, on Earth. The tall girl looked upon Chiyo...and smiled.

A strange, disinterested smile, as if she scrutinized a new specimen of butterfly. Her brunette hair was streaked with a faint silver stripe, and she clutched a bright white stole of some sleek, glossy animal.

The Alsantian Queen was flanked by brutish and husky guards, their ragged beards swelling to fanged snouts. As two dropped to all fours to stare menacingly into Chiyo's eyes, their sleek tails now curling over their heads, she froze, still on all fours herself, and lifted one hand tenatively, then froze again at their bloodcurdling snarl.

The next one she knew better than Suvani. While she had only glimpsed Suvani from afar or through the Albatron, Chiyo's talking antelope contingent often faced General Cheruk's werewolves on the battlefield. While she had never come in shouting distance, she had so often taken his measure by spyglass that she knew his figure well, well enough to spy its glaring irregularities now: his ears now sprang askew, as if someone had ripped them out and pasted them back; his eyes no longer smoldered with intelligence, but had died to a hollow gray; his magnificent shock of silver-gray hair was shorn to the scalp, where a purple, jagged scar ran from one temple to the other, as if someone made a slot to extract everything meaningful, by hand. This was not the Cheruk she knew, but a Jack-o-lantern Cheruk, not only hollowed out, but his wits darkened, as if they couldn't spare the candle. On seeing Chiyo, some remnant sparked in his eye, but his snout choked on his growl, then melted into a slack, drooling grin.

"Con...Vieno! Help me!" As Chiyo wailed and scooted back on all fours from the hunkered, snarling werewolves, they padded even closer, until their whiskers tickled Chiyo's chin and ears. Vieno looked as indifferent and impassive as a monument, no trace of shadow or fox in her composed expression.

"Your grace." Vieno bowed.

Suvani's eyebrow arched. "Only your grace?"

"Forgive me, your grace. While Alsantia was once my stomping ground, your name has slipped my mind."

"Surely you recognize your queen?"

At the word recognize, Vieno deigned to glance at Chiyo at last, and her eyes glinted with amusement. "You all look the same in my gray eyes."

"What do you mean by that? Are you not human?" Suvani scowled and turned to the burliest werewolf. "Did you miss one?"

Having held Chiyo's eyes for a long, uncomfortable moment, Vieno bowed her head in a curtsy so shallow that the sarcasm overflowed the respect. "As for your claim to the throne, it's very odd I lived here fourteen years and never heard Draden had a queen."

With her eyes freed from Vieno's mirthful stare, the werewolves still squatted so frightfully near that their slavering growl set Chiyo's heart banging and her teeth on edge, but her attention nonetheless was drawn to the strange battle of wills waged by her old teacher and the wicked queen.

Who? Recognition, or rather, the utter lack of it, baffled Chiyo, as her gray eye, clued in by Vieno, now tagged subtle differences, like a few frayed threads in a magnificent ensemble that came unraveled by the slightest tug, which stripped the excitement, layer by layer, from her terror, like one who realized they were not in the company of a celebrity, but a celebrity impersonator, or worse, one who tried to hug their cardboard standee. Chiyo kicked herself--she was one-eyed, but not so nearsighed that she couldn't sidestep this ghastly joke played on her human instinct to fear and worship. Who? Who was this stand-in? She was well-dressed, fashionable and had obviously studied the part, but this was not Suvani. The silvery stripe was not only her roots growing out, but a laziness which in no way reflected the real Suvani, the hardest working despot in Alsantia. Then terror seized her guts again. Why would Vieno play such a dangerous game with an impostor, who might not have the real Suvani's hair or work ethic, but definitely had werewolves, monsters, and something to prove.

"What are you doing? Why are you baiting her? Show the queen the respect she deserves."

Suddenly conscious of being overshadowed, Chiyo looked up at Conrad, who had taken a stance just behind her, arms crossed over his chest.

"What is it, sweetie?" Conrad blanched at Suvani's jarring, almost squeaky tone, as she spun on her heels to show off the blindingly white furs. The furs were so gratuitously showy that they shot past ostentatious to snotty, so that all Chiyo could see was pure snot, the disgusting grossness of undeserved wealth. "Don't you like it? I was only trying something out. When in Rome..."

"You're scaring her."

"Conrad." The false Suvani made a pouty face, then waved a hand to her werewolves, who fell in toward Vieno and Chiyo. "It's a good thing you're so pretty, because you are so dumb! I mean, look at you."

"This wasn't Chiyo. There was a skirmish before I passed through the portal."

"Really?" The impostor's nose wrinkled in a disbelieving sneer, and her tone became nauseatingly patronizing. "I could screen the security tapes. Even easier, I could call the portal room. No--why call when I can text?" Having drawn a smartphone from her tiny purse, the impostor queen began tapping out a text.

Chiyo drew in a deep breath and vented an enormous sigh. "Conrad is dumb. Like you wouldn't believe. Yes, I did that to him, but I'm not proud about it, however happy it made me." Vieno snorted back a laugh, and Chiyo couldn't help a giggle. "I'll still be laughing about it tomorrow, but the next day, I'll be laughing inside, and only after that will I feel so ashamed that I'll struggle to forget about it."

"How delightfully and brutally honest...for a little kid."

"Little kid?" Chiyo's neck and face burned. As she lunged to her feet, the werewolves lunged with her, telescoping from wolf to hybrid, their fur standing on end in giant, agitated tufts, so spelling out their bloodthirstiness that Chiyo might have been frightened if she wasn't so mad. "I've fought in a war! I've spent more time in a battlefield than you ever will."

"I don't doubt it. Why would I ever go to a battlefield? I'd get my clothes dirty or break a nail or heel. And for what? Fighting doesn't make you special. On Earth, you wouldn't want to go where kids are taken for soldiers. Only the nastiest places send children to war."

"The real Suvani would!"

"Oh dear--you found me out!" Her cackle echoed for nearly a minute before dying in a giggle.

"What is she talking about?" said Conrad.

"Shut up!" false Suvani said testily. "This doesn't concern you."

"Of course it concerns me! You're not Suvani?"

"It's all the same to you. You get a room with a view and the best job security."

"Job security? Where's my girlfriend?"

"Don't you mean fiance?" snickered Chiyo.

"Shut up, Chiyo!"

"As if Suvani cares whether you live or die! She was after your father's gold and Gaona's untapped resources." She flexed an evil glare on Conrad. "Remember dear old dad? Killed by your fiance? He would be so disappointed--how long did you grieve? An hour? A minute?"

"Suvani killed your dad and you watched?"

"Chiyo..." Conrad reddened, wiped his eyes with the heels of his palms, then glared so violently at the impostor that Chiyo shrank from the heat. While she had just had the better of Conrad, she had fought dirty, and Conrad had not only fought bravely in Alsantia, but enjoyed getting his hands bloody. In this, they were alike. She was not joking when she said punching Conrad made her happy. Such a short fuse ran between rage and violence in her now that it had taken every effort she could muster not to throw herself on Vieno, and now the false Suvani. Alsantia had broken not only her eye, but her heart, so that now it only felt hatred and anger.

"Look again, Conrad." When the impostor crooked a finger toward the werewolves and beasts circling Vieno and Chiyo, some converged on Conrad. "You have no weapons. What will you do? Die on me?"

Conrad's raw, red-rimmed eyes welled with tears. "Tell me where she is." Seeing Conrad's grief struck a pang inside Chiyo. How could this traitor not be as broken as she was?

"Stop sniveling, Conrad. It's not like I hid her. In fact, she's in plain sight!"

When Conrad sprinted around the penthouse, opening doors and closets, the werewolves scampered after him, japing and growling, and the false Suvani laughed.

"Don't think to find her in such easy places, my prince."

"Don't call me that! You just said you didn't hide her."

"But aren't I a fake? Don't I look like a liar?" She chuckled. "Although in this case, I'm not lying, I'm half-truthing. Is that a word?"

Conrad's fists tightened until the palms were red and the knuckles white.

The impostor sighed. "Check the window."

"The window?" When Conrad rushed frantically to the window, the werewolves capered after him, howling bloodthirsty laughter.

When Chiyo stepped aside, the werewolves sidled with her, but by craning her neck, she glanced through the wall. Through the wall? She did a double take and looked again, and had the disconcerting effect of twice-doubled vision, not only did her black and white shadow eye mirror flesh and blood reality, but her eyesight was sliced down the middle, her right eye seeing through the window, while her shadow eye cut through the wall as if it wasn't there.

Moreover, while her right eye saw only the Continental Finance Building's clock face, the shadow eye brushed aside not only the wall, and the tremendous distance, so that she felt just under it, not a mile away or more. but also brushed away the lie. For time was no longer told by the ancient clock face, time was upon them--the time for a revolution from the disenchantment of science to the enchantment of magic, the chains of which buckled the real Suvani to the clock face. Chiyo winced in sympathy as she took in the true queen, whose body, like Chiyo, now showed the price of her conquests. Not only was she chained to the clock, but her eyes glowed white, her left arm was shredded, and the shadow eye penetrated a much stronger illusion veiling a missing left eye and broken teeth, both filled in by enchanted ice. It was like seeing her own horrific reflection in the elevator glass. While she had never thought anything but hatred and fear for Suvani before this, she could not help feeling a profound sympathy with the parallel injuries of the Alsantian queen.

"I don't see anything," said Conrad.

"'I don't see anything." The false Suvani mimicked, then crooked her fingers to the beasts flanking them and walked to the window.

When they seized Chiyo, she twisted her shoulders and stomped their hairy paws, but when they lifted her from the floor, her feet flailed and her arms were pinched painfully in their grip as they hastened her to the impostor queen's right side.

As they closed in on Vieno, she scorned them with a frosty glance, and they froze in their steps.

"When in Rome, you said. Should I slip into something more appropriate?" In the clutches of werewolves, Chiyo could no longer crane her neck far enough, but she heard the werewolves' doggy whines and Conrad's holler as whatever form Vieno took blotted out the chandeliers and overshadowed the room. The floor crunched and splintered as this rough beast trod to the window, where to the impostor queen's left, a new leathery-winged mutant leaned, this one darker than the shadows.

"Cute. In their early stages, my creatures were even darker, but as I developed them, I bred them for a variety of muted monochrome colors."

"Why do you not fear me?" grumbled Vieno. "Can you not feel that I am the stronger?"

"But you have not laid as many plans or set as many traps as I. While you are endless shadow,

my mind is a web of starlight, infinite and unyielding. Even if you could creep along my web, you would be burned like a moth by the center star. Consider your near-cremation a warning,"

"I could kill you now." But Vieno didn't look or sound hostile at all; if anything this banter felt entirely too friendly.

"Chiyo," Conrad whispered. "What do you see? Where is she?"

Chiyo peered out the window, pretending not to hear him, but when he elbowed her in the ribs,

she shifted in the werewolves' grip and kicked back.

"Ow!" When the wailing werewolf attracted the impostor's disapproving eye, he lowered his eyes and hissed out of the corner of his snout. "Watch it! It would only take a pinch of my claws to kill you, stripling."

"Sorry," she muttered. In fact, shw was a little happy to bruise one of her enemies, even if it would fade in minutes. "That was meant for your prince."

"He's not my prince," chuckled the werewolf.

The false Suvani scowled, a finger on her laced hands twitched, and the couch slid near in one feral lunge, reared its wrinkly head, and engulfed the werewolf's head and chest, gulping, gobbling, then drawing back with a snap, as if its entire motion was the crack of a whip, and it had never really left its station, where it once again served as a divan for anyone so brave as to put their legs up on it. As for the werewolf's legs, they wobbled under the remnants of its guts--everything above the waist gone aside from those tattered gobbets--before crashing and spilling to the floor like a gory spaghetti.

"That was mean," the impostor queen said mildly, as if the werewolf's ears hadn't been gulped down with his top half, "and you had no right. Conrad is mine. He might deserve every meanness you can imagine, but he's mine to demean, is that clear?"

"Why do you hate me?"

"Hate you? Nothing could be further from the truth."

"Then why did you say that?"

"Everyone else seems to hate you, even your so-called friends."

"So?"

"While I'm a fashion leader and a renowned genius, I'm a great follower of trends." She snickered. "Is that too glib?"

"That's it?"

"I suppose I hope it might also bother Suvani, if she ever wakes up."

"What did she ever do to you?" Conrad fumed. "Never mind, you won't give me a straight answer."

"Why should I? You don't care for me at all. It's her you care for."

"Then what did you do to her?"

"Why whatever do you mean? It's just a clock, isn't it?"

"Just ignore him," Chiyo said. "I wish I had listened when Berangere told me to ignore Conrad."

"Yes, I've met your friend. Not Conrad, the smart one."

Chiyo sighed. "Oh, she's so smart."

"She's certainly better at making friends than you. Her ogre punched me! Where's your ogre?"

"That ogre broke her shoulder." Chiyo yawned. "You wouldn't believe my day. Oh wait, you're to blame for my waking up in a mass grave, so you know exactly why I'm too tired to keep this up. Tell me what you want."

"Tell us," snorted Vieno. "She may not have an ogre, but she does have me."

"More of a fair weather friend," sniffed the impostor queen, "but I'll allow it, even though she has no idea how much of a storm you really are."

"Oh, believe me," scoffed Chiyo. "I see what's brewing in Vieno." While Chiyo had tried to keep her right side to Vieno so as to block the incomprehensible terror that was Vieno's true form from her shadow-sight, that dark gift had pervading peripheral vision, not only passing through her face and skull, but even glimpsing behind her if she had the stomach to see through her brains to what lurked in her own trailing shadow. As for her shadow, that lightfooted stalker so clung to her steps that she felt the full creep of the expression, to 'fear one's own shadow.' While it was bizarre to see through her head, as if her eye was a filament in a glass bulb, Vieno was weirder still, \for no matter how much Chiyo grasped in one glance, the true Vieno, or rather, the chaos pretending to be Vieno when it so pleased, was endlessly shifting, above, outside, and beyond definition. And while her good eye accepted the image of Vieno, three dimensional vision meshes what your eyes mingle, and that calm, rational eye was soon so infected by the horror of the shadow eye that Chiyo's bubble of rationality popped, and all her reasonableness leaked into the oozing chaos. Only by constant denial could Chiyo pretend her mind had not caved in to mindlessness; even as they fled the incinerator and wandered the sublevels, she had shown her polite, frozen side to Vieno, while the raging and rude facts roiled on the other side, glittering with stolen glimpses of the terrifying creature who had raised her in The Mansion of the Shining Prince.

"Just tell me what you want," Chiyo repeated. "Better yet, start with something simple. Tell me who you are."

"I'm not unlike you, Chiyo."

"Stop lying, and tell me your name!" Chiyo blurted, but her eyes wavered as she glared at the impostor queen, for she wanted so badly to glance down at those laced, lethal fingers, and see if they twitched with death magic to answer for Chiyo's impertinence.

"Very well." When those crossed fingers unlaced, they tightened into fists, one of which propped under her impostor chin as she leaned on the windowsill. "My name is Ivanu. but my truth is entirely personal, for my facts are few and far between. What's certain is I am a child of two worlds.

Not the ones you're thinking of, the real worlds. The real worlds in this world. While the media says I was born to wealth and fortune, my truth is I was born in obscurity, an orphan who ascended to prestige

by becoming the ultimate influencer. While an enchanted land of unlimited opportunity made you who you are now, no one made me; I made myself."

"Unlimted opportunity? Don't make me laugh. And you're not that much older than me."

"Learn the language of success, Chiyo. 'A wunderkind wise beyond her years,' they say. A golden child. They praise me to the moon and back while saying nothing about me. Even genius only summons up a mythology of intellectual mystery, while saying nothing about me."

"I wish you'd say even less. Boo hoo! Poor misunderstood genius."

"Excuse me? Did I hear you right?"

"Your ears aren't the problem, not that I see any under your piled-up hair. It's your mouth that's broken, because it always tells lies. As if I want to know that trash you tell the news! How did you win? How did you defeat Suvani in one day?"

"One day?" The impostor queen cackled. "You don't remember!"

"I remember the portal. And the screens. I even remember Jezera punching you, but I was too punch-drunk myself to laugh. It's all hazy, as I was slipping in and out, and my brain was a fog."

"That was six weeks ago."

Six weeks. The words resonated like thunder. In The Mansion of the Shining Prince, where days consisted not of seconds, minutes, and hours, but vestments and lies, six weeks would have passed just like that. But six stolen weeks echoed like an immeasurable eon. What had happened? Where was she,

what was she doing, and why couldn't she remember? Was she comatose in a hospital bed? Perhaps this mad scientist had cloned her, and she wasn't really Chiyo at all. While the wicked potential for enchantment seemed vast, mad science now promised endless evil possibilities. Just what had happened to the world she knew, not just Draden and Earth, but Alsantia, or the strange mirror world where Berangere, Loren, and Jezera jumped, or anywhere else the others happened to be. Perhaps Havala's ashes had cooled at last, and the ember world was now an icy mote.

"It's a lot to take in." Chiyo cringed at Ivanu's pitying tone, which seemed to well up from vast reserves of acid cruelty, tears that cut to pieces those steeped in her compassion. "I honestly thought to spare you the details, considering the process usually dries up its subjects."

"You thought I was dead."

"Aren't you the cutest glass half-full? I mean, it's a miracle you're alive!"

"You expected to kill me."

"Way to look on the bright side. If not for that tricky decimal point, you wouldn't be standing here judging me." Ivanu smiled blandly as she shrugged off her embarrassment, not because she had tried to kill Chiyo, but because Chiyo survived due to her laboratory error. "The good news is I don't want anything from you." When Ivanu growled, Chiyo was reminded of a terrier. "The bad news is twisting everything around isn't so cute."

"Excuse me."

"Your question. What I want from you is nothing, nothing at all. My need for you was past tense. In the past. Suvani will fill my need for organic batteries for some time to come."

"You turned Suvani into a battery?" Conrad's stunned tone sounded perfectly neutral, as if he had asked Ivanu to pass the salt.

"Yes, and unlike your other girlfriend..." Ivanu's eyes shone with glee as she looked down her nose at Chiyo.

"She's not my girlfriend!", Conrad roared, a split second before Chiyo could vent her own indignation, leaving her not only furious but humiliated, and with another reason to elbow Conrad,

which she did, provoking a fresh spate of elbows, kicks, and stomps, until the chuckling werewolves dragged Conrad back and hurled him on the snoring couch-creature, from which he jumped up near-instantaneously, sweeping his hands down the back of his cape and his velvet pants. The werewolves hooted and guffawed without a care in the world, as if they had not just seen their comrade half-eaten.

Before, Chiyo had been too groggy and enraged to care what Conrad was wearing, but now she took note of his Gaonan regalia, which lent credence to his story that he had only just arrived by portal.

Who had he seen on the other side? Six weeks was a long time. Had anyone else gone over to Suvani's side--she mentally crossed out Suvani, and replaced it with Ivanu, even though any would-be traitors

wouldn't know to whom they had pledged their allegiance. If Ivanu had won through this clever coup,

usurping Alsantia's enchanted throne through mad science, and making herself queen of two worlds, then anyone might have joined the winning side. It was a chilling realization that, after all their adventures, they had accomplished nothing, for far from freeing themselves from Suvani's machinations, they had fallen under Ivanu's spell. They had been sequestered a world away from their parents for nothing, having escaped the clutches of one mad queen to fall into the clutches of another.

"You almost killed me. and that's your good news?"

"You make it sound like murder, when I was likely playing a game on my phone at the time. My mind couldn't have been further away from what was happening to you."

"You're...you're..."

"Careful," Ivanu said with a snicker. "From here it's five minutes, tops, and you're back in the incinerator, so you had better have a care when speaking to me."

"That's what you do to those who disagree with you?"

"Do we disagree? Do I care? It's all the same to me. Didn't you read the sign?"

"What sign?" Then Chiyo remembered it.

"What sign?" mocked Ivanu. "I see it mirrored in your eyes, and in the case of your strange gray eye, I actually see it mirrored there, as if you're conjuring it in crystal. Quite a neat trick. Of course, in your eye, it's backwards, but that's easy to correct." Reaching into her tiny, cream-colored purse, Ivanu extracted a small black box, and opened it to reveal a compact mirror, which she shone at Chiyo. "See for yourself."

When Chiyo gasped, it was less from the watery reflection of O R G A N I C R E F U S E which wavered in her shining shadow eye than from the rest of her face. Chiyo had avoided mirrors since the vulture boy clawed her eye, having developed a strong aversion to her own reflection, for no matter how fascinating an oddity the dwarven eye was, it created an ever-so-slight asymmetry, a telltale bulge which nudged her from pretty to ugly and from cute to monstrous, until the smiles of others stiffened and lost their shine. Even Berangere's became plastic, her teeth on edge and her chin jutting as if preparing to vomit or start an argument. People couldn't sit beside her without looking like they wanted to bolt far, far away. Helen of Troy had the face that launched a thousand ships, Chiyo had the face that set them on fire.

But now, that irregularity was gone; either by the sincerity of her magic, or the compassion of her memory, Vieno had fixed not only her vision, but her face. The shadow had filled in her face seamlessly, so that while her shadow eye could trace its own implantation, her real eye saw Chiyo as she had been, as she was supposed to be.

"I see what you mean," Chiyo murmured, rubbing her cheek just under the shadow eye, which she could now see, as if the strange substance hardened under observation, that it was not the dark gray of a shadow, but the silvery gray of a vacant mirror. If it was not a shadow eye, but a mirror eye, it made more sense that it could call up memories. Perhaps it only conjured images from the world, much as it dissolved any matter obstructing wherever Chiyo wished to see.

"Good. So unless you have any objections to being alive, and to keeping your freedom, leave my sight."

"Now? Without any explanation?"

"What further explanation do you require? Your worlds are mine. Having tasted the wild magic of Alsantia, and being tainted by the mirror world, you are unsuited for slaves in this world. Be glad."

"Free? On Earth? You're joking." The strange mutant which spoke with Vieno's voice glared down at the streets of Draden.

"You're welcome to use my portal." She huffed. "Well, that's not true. Actually, I would find it very rude if you used my wonderful portal, but I'm willing to look the other way." She tittered. "But if this world is not to your liking, Alsantia is in no better state."

"Where are my friends? I'll go there."

"You might try the mirror world. Seeing that one of you calls it home, and the other will soon, you might even find it hospitable, not that it has much of a future."

At this ominous pronouncement, the hulking mutant leaned right, rolling atop Ivanu until she was pinned under its muscular forequarters. While the beast was disconcerting to look at and hear, alienating Chiyo's senses not only from the beast, but from each other, until confusion descended whenever Chiyo looked at it, the beast's eyes were clearly Vieno. Her old teacher pricked through this inconceivable creature's disharmonious mass.

"Have you zoned it for demolition, then?"

From under the beast, Ivanu flashed a beaming, condescending smile. "No, not yet. I'm not saying it won't be, but as of yet, it's still a fruitful field for research. We learned quite a bit from recent subjects."

"One of which was cooperating with you. Was very cooperative, in fact." The beast grumbled as it rolled back on her haunches, and its massive lips flapped around its gigantic fangs as it snorted an enormous blast of monstrous breath which might have been a sigh.

Chiyo frowned. What was Vieno talking about? Why did her spine freeze over, and her cheeks warm? It was like stumbling on something she had blocked from her mind. Her flash of insight was too bright to leave an impression, dissolving instantaneously into the dark unknown.

"Well, yes. She was." Vieno's smile creeped even higher into a rictus of hilarity, like a frightful clown, until her eyeballs, teetering atop this ghastly smirk, sneered down at Chiyo. "We learned so much."

The butterflies flitting in Chiyo's guts surged to such an intense spasm of fluttering that the bottom seemed to drop out of Chiyo. "You were in on this?" She followed up her accusing glare by punching the monstrous mutant, and while she only scraped and bruised her hand on its unblemished, leathery hide, satisfaction eased her aching knuckles as shame wrinkled its face and crinkled Vieno's eyes. "Was this all an act? Don't tell me..." She whirled on Conrad. "You too?"

"What? She didn't tell me anything! I thought she was Suvani!"

That much, at least, was true. As Vieno chuckled sheepishly and Ivanu rolled her head back and laughed long and hard, peals of smug and insufferable laughter, Conrad's hands tightened to angry claws and grabbed an ornate lamp from an end table.

"What will you do, Conrad? Kill she who has the power of life and death over your beloved?

As if you had the stones to rescue her, when you only now took the brass from my table! While your only friend hates you, I have three mutants, a half-dozen werewolves, and whatever that is." When she disdainfully pointed to Vieno, Vieno's chuckle died in a subdued growl. "Oh yes. And Cheruk." Here she flicked Cheruk's nose hard enough to make it red, and make his eyes flutter.

In hindsight, Chiyo would remember this as the decisive moment. Until Ivanu's egotistical mistake, Chiyo had no chance at all, for she had been alone and surrounded by overwhelming odds before Ivanu, drunk on her own power, pulled the tails of the most dangerous creatures in the room.

Not only did this provide the opportunity for escape, but Chiyo would come to measure her new life from this moment, for Ivanu's violent whim might have expressed itself a thousand other ways, and Chiyo might have died in an instant, tossed out the penthouse window, hurtled down the elevator shaft,

torn to pieces by the werewolves, or devoured by the couch. While Chiyo had realized Ivanu's overwhelming advantage, and her own powerlessness, early on, her willies had only fanned the fires of her anger, which now bellowed ten times higher, as she heard Vieno was working with Ivanu! Everything that happened since waking up in the incinerator tube was put an act put on for her benefit! Or worse, an experiment, with her as the subject.

Had Ivanu not slighted Vieno so off-handedly, Chiyo's old teacher might never have shifted her allegiance, and certainly would never have dared without the opportunity afforded by Ivanu's stupidity.

For Chiyo wasn't the only experimental subject in the room, and was far from the worst off,

when you considered not only the mutants, whose lives were nonstop horror unmitigated by any awareness of their condition, but also Cheruk. What had Ivanu done, that Cheruk's eyes were pinned to the wall by that glassy, vacant stare? Like a computer technician ripping out frayed wires, Ivanu had torn out every trace of mind and personality, and would have torn out more if she could, judging by his crooked ears, which had migrated to completely different and incongruous spots on his shaved scalp. If the soul could be laid bare, Ivanu would have torn that out as well, as well as the underlying zen void, leaving no room at all for a metaphysical self of any kind. Not that the soul or the void were the essential part of Cheruk which escaped Ivanu. As the philosophers of all worlds argued whether the soul was distinct from the body, none would contest a more primal awareness, inextricable from the body. Ivanu could not scratch this fundamental part no matter how deeply she probed Cheruk, for instincts, in many ways, were the body. One could barely conceive of a living body without instincts.

If his mind no longer raced or rested in the world, he stood under his own power, he breathed, and his heart pumped the same blood. Ivanu should have known better. One does not wave one's hand before a lobotomized lion's mouth, let alone flick it in the nose.

Nor a werewolf's.

For in the split second after her fingernail left its welt, fangs flashed fast and sharp, and with a plop, plop, plop, three fingers dropped to the floor, trailing streams of blood.

Three fingers fell from five stumps on Ivanu's twisted, mangled hand, which, Chiyo realized in a flash, meant that Cheruk had wolfed down two.

Who was laughing? As the laughter rushed in free and strong, it was taken up by the beast with Vieno's eyes, then the werewolves one by one joined the chorus, until the laughter drowned out Ivanu's screams, and echoed back to Chiyo's ears. As she heard herself in the echo, she froze, not only at her audacity, but in a shock of alienation, for she no longer recognized her own voice. Where had she found the strength to laugh, not only in this horror-strewn day, but from any part of her recent life, having tasted joy and mirth so infrequently since her gory translation to Alsantia, which was quickly upstaged by her arrival on an apocalypse world, then at the beginning of the end for Earth. How had it taken her so long to see the humor of it? Wherever Chiyo went would bring destruction on herself or the world.

"Stop laughing!" Ivanu managed to screech through her teeth, as she clamped her ruined hand between her knees to stop the bleeding.

She might have succumbed to politeness then, as Chiyo did not, at heart, think herself a rude person, but when she glanced at Vieno, then Conrad, her laugh passed from one to the other, igniting even more flammable laughter in Vieno, and explosive whoops of hilarity in Conrad. As this chain reaction infected the other half of the werewolves, until everything on two legs was laughing, except for Cheruk, who only licked his chops in pure animal contentment, and belched, and the beasts, who looked on in puzzlement, Ivanu raised her hand and clenched it into a fist, which made the ceiling shadow fall on Vieno, the wall shadow fold over half of the werewolves, and the couch curl back for another bite, this time at Cheruk.

But this time it was the couch creature that was ripped to shreds, not stuffing and fabric, but bones, gore, and gobbets of skin, all the bits so scattered and sprayed over the floor that Ivanu now had little hope of finding her fingers. Cheruk idly stuffed his face with the bloody scraps, and while his mouth puckered at the sourness or strangeness of the taste, his mind was too far gone to care, and he simply kept stoking his appetite.

Some werewolves were more equal than others, Chiyo guessed, as the other mutants made short work of the other werewolves, tearing into them with a gusto that was unbelievable, especially considering their comrade creature was being just as quickly torn apart just a few yards away.

As Cheruk kept putting away gob after gob of the couch creature, Chiyo's jaw dropped, as she realized that it wasn't just his healing ability that was legendary and limitless. His appetite was endless as well, so endless that if they stayed, they might end up on the menu. Judging by the speed of the couch creature's consumption--with a flash, Chiyo realized that beast just ate half of a werewolf, adding an enormous amount of stuffing to Cheruk's feast--Cheruk would finish off every one of them in less than an hour.

As the carnage accumulated, the main contestants became clear, each of whom was soon beringed by blood spray and heaps of gore: Cheruk, Vieno, and the two mutants, which, having fallen from wall and ceiling, now revealed the true horror of their nature, which is to say, no nature at all, but their own aberrant dynamic that vied even harder than nature. While the couch creature had become sleek, fat, and lazy, these vicious mutants were still lean and hungry. They went from two legs to four legs as will, and even see-sawed from front to back, as each of their legs ended with a prehensile paw which could just as easily be called a hand, massive, nailed hands that tore through flesh and bone like paper and cardboard. As each snaking tail ended with a tiny head, either end could be called hindquarters or forequarters, and their double-jointed lumbs also pushed and pulled here and there around the room as they snapped and devoured, not only the massive fangs but the tiny teeth of the tail head putting away ravenous mouthfuls of raw flesh, eating the werewolves alive faster than they could regenerate, until their self-healing puttered out and died when there were only a few shreds clinging to the ribs.

As these whirling terrors destroyed the disloyal, Chiyo's mirror eye flickered with another spark of similarity, this time a certain semblance in the raw shadow stuff they really were, a congruity to Vieno. In a flash, Chiyo realized who Ivanu had used as her model for these strange beasts. Not her teacher the Elderlich, and not the talking fox, Loren's purported mother, but the monster more fundamental to Vieno.

Perhaps Vieno had realized this at the same time, for having devoured her share of the werewolves, she began to fall on one of her doubles.

When Conrad placed his hand on Chiyo's shoulder, she did not pull away, but she did turn a furrowed scowl on her former boyfriend.

"We were in a worse spot than this."

"Those were swarms and fairies, Conrad. These aren't rats and crows, but unspeakable things."

"And Vieno."

"As I said, unspeakable things."

"I didn't say we should fight. I only said we were in a worse spot than this. There aren't elevators on a battlefield."

Chiyo could have kicked herself, for of course Conrad was right. While the foyer was being blasted with blood, and inching ever closer, escape was only a few yards away.

"You first," she said. "Slowly."

"No. We'll go together."

"Go save your queen, Conrad."

"I'm not saying we're best friends now, but two have better chances than one." With that, he grasped her hand and began backing up towards the elevator.

"You're an idiot, Conrad. They're going to pounce." But when one of the beasts immobilized Cheruk by the expedient solution of sitting upon him, they backpedaled faster.

"Shh."

"Don't shh me!" When it was Chiyo's sharp hiss that drew the baleful eyes of the mutants, Chiyo groaned, squirmed from Conrad's grip, and raced for the elevator door, where she hammered the buttons even harder than before. Conrad was a step behind, but one mutant nearly cut his lead, and Conrad himself, to ribbons, but the claw that was about to pierce his back, lungs, and heart slashed his cape instead as Vieno pounced onto the mutant's back and drove it into the floor, which thundered with the impact of the beast.

Quickened by fear, Conrad didn't stop at the opening elevator doors, but picked up speed instead, crashing into the back wall and shaking the elevator so hard that the doors began sliding back together. Chiyo might have laughed had she not darted in so fast that she sandwiched him to the wall. The elevator spun about her as she fell a step back, lurched for the glass wall, then stabbed the buttons.

"Wait!" blurted Conrad. "What about her!"

"Your fiance's too busy. She's on the clock." Chiyo was too drained to laugh at her own double-meaning.

"No! Vieno!" Conrad called to their teacher through the closing elevator doors.

"Suck up!" Even as Chiyo breathed in a huge sigh of relief, her heart hammered and her pulse ran an icy trail through her body. It wasn't enough--the elevator door was like tissue paper to those beasts, and the distance wasn't increasing fast enough for her taste. Even so, Chiyo was glad for the peace, even if it was only a moment of peace. A free moment, free of racing, fear, and rage; free of blood, screams, and the stench of beasts; free of magic, mad science, and megalomania.

Scrunch.

"Oh no!" Conrad's face whitened.

Scrape, screep, sheeeeeeeeek.The strange sliding scrape rang out in the elevator, setting Chiyo's teeth, spine, and fingernails quivering.

"I th...think," she said through teeth chattering not from fear, but from the vibration, "s...something's s...sliding down the elev...v...vator cable." Her feet began to numb from the constant rattling.

Bam. Bamp. Skon. Skon. "More than one thing."

SKKEEEEEEE. As the brakes engaged, the elevator rocked side to side, rattling the corners of the shaft, spilling Conrad to the floor, and launching Chiyo to the opposite glass wall, where she clutched the rail.

"Stupid elevator!" shouted Chiyo. "Why would you stop now!"

"Stop shouting! They'll hear!"

"Are you an idiot!" Chiyo hollered even louder. "Of course they know we're in here. They saw us come in here, and there's no way out."

"There has to be! I don't want to die!"

"And I do? Conrad, there are no fairies or talking stags to carry your sorry weight this time!"

Even as she fumed, she realized that he was right. They had gotten out of a much tougher scrape than this. While it had happened on an enchanted world, much of what they had used there was simple muscle and skill they had acquired there. Maybe there was a way.

When Chiyo closed her eyes, it blotted out the bright world of color and doused everything in gray, and now that she saw everything the same, she saw that it was a glinting, mirror gray, a silvery sheen in every surface, so that every shape to be in unending communion with the rest in an eerie geometry. While the cable continued to skeeeee and the shaft continued to kom kom skon the weird angles of the grayed world were calm and placid.

"Are you giving up?"

"Shut up, Conrad!" There it was--as the mirror eye penetrated the elevator, the windows, and the walls of the institute, the entire structure falling back, one layer at a time, as if she was peeling it down to nothing, she saw their only chance. You could almost spy its top rung through the doubled glass of the elevator and its shaft, a service ladder running up to the penthouse, and running down, down, down too far to guess. It was less than fifteen feet away, so near and yet so far. Not only was it though the glass wall of the elevator and the glass wall of the shaft, but if they had any way of passing those barriers, there was no convenient walkway, but only a thousand foot drop between them and the ladder. Some say, thoughtlessly, that god will always provide, but here their only chance was too unreachable even to be tantalizing.

As her good eye brimmed with tears, her hand flew to the corner of her eye to stem the flow, but one slid the other way, down her nose.

"At least we're not alone." Conrad's voice broke as he picked himself from the floor and shuffled beside Chiyo.

She could not bring herself to look at him.

"Stop being so melodramatic."

"Me? Dramatic?"

"This isn't the end for you, Conrad. You're not a disposable battery, you're her ticket to take Gaona's wealth."

Koom koom BRUMP. The elevator roof shook with the impact, then buckled and rippled as the tremendous weight scuffled back and forth. Under the tremendous pressure, the metal ceiling wrinkled like tinfoil, and Chiyo pressed herself harder against the wall. As the O R G A N I C R E F U S E flashed back, she clutched Conrad's hand.

"They're fighting."

"Yes, but who's fighting over us? Maybe Vieno's torn to shreds, and the two remaining beasts are fighting for feeding rights."

"Can I be afraid now then? I doubt a hungry beast will be able to pick us apart."

"Oh no, they'll have no problem picking us to pieces."

At Chiyo's bad joke, they began to laugh together weakly, and Chiyo scuffled closer to Conrad. When he draped an arm across her shoulder, she snatched his sword from its scabbard and stumbled across to the other side of the elevator.

"Hey!"

"You won't need this, pretty boy."

Just then, the ceiling burst into two jagged metal claws, one of which folded down over Conrad, pinning him to that wall, while the other jutted so near Chiyo that it nearly stabbed her, losing momentum just as it tapped her breastplate. Absurdly, at that very moment, the frayed straps snapped, and the last piece of her armor clattered to the floor, just as the beasts slithered in the rattling eelvator, their gyrations and slashing making the whole elevator bustle like a popcorn maker, the sides creaking, stretching, then bursting, sending glass and steel showering through the sky.

While Chiyo's good eye froze in glassy fear, her bad shadow eye saw the mirror unity of the moment, and connected the dots of a path for Chiyo in the fragments and scraps blasted like shrapnel through the rain-misted wind, and she scrambled hand over hand from a window shard--so jagged around the edges that had she touched it anywhere but the pane, she had lost a finger--to a crumpled sheet of steel, to the still-sparking tube of the elevator light, to Conrad's back, to the fire-blackened wall of the institute, where her hand flailed at the rung of the ladder, only to be yanked away when Conrad lurched through the impossible moment, clutched her ankle, tore her from the wall, and shattered the mirror unity.

Chiyo fell speechless, as much from feeling robbed by Conrad's clumsiness as from the rushing wind, too thick and bracing to carry more than her howl of indignation, and from the rattling glass and steel, which fell alongside them, about to shower Draden with a deadly rain. Conrad fell beside her, his cape having flapped in front of him, and streaming absurdly from his neck, straight up, as if it was trying to fly the other way.

This was it.

The moment brought Chiyo a kind of clarity. In that clarifying moment, she realized that if she had stopped complaining, she would have enjoyed her Alsantian adventures. If there were vulture guards, hanged servants, dragon queens, armies of killers, and talking beasts that ate each other, there were also enchanted locust airships, dwarven eyesmiths, magic mirrors, fairies, and the better sort of talking animal, like Jgorga. Like the people of Earth, they were made with as much evil as good. Even those she hated had their moments, like Jezera, Vieno, and Conrad.

Was she made with as much good as evil? Wondering made her feel small and sad, for she didn't know if she had balanced her pettiness with her courage.

The answer came to her with a flash. Hope filled her as wings unfurled. Not metaphorical wings, but literal, leathery wings which, with one gigantic snap, raced down the side of the building like the shadow of a darting falcon, and snagged Chiyo in one claw, then, with a lazy flick of the other, hooked the back of Conrad's regalia.

Slowly, Chiyo raised her head from sprawling Draden--which she had come a few dozen yards from splatting, she now saw--and lifted her eyes even slower to the mutant's face. Vieno's eyes flicked toward her, then it snorted and flapped its wings powerfully, darting just out of reach of the other mutant trailing so near that its claw tore Conrad's cape.

They flew like an eerie fusion of bats and eagles, not only stopping on a dime and barreling the other way, but diving and climbing so sharply that Chiyo nearly blacked out again. as Draden's sprawl dissolved in her dizziness.

It happened so quickly, as this dizzy spell surged over her, that for a moment Chiyo wasn't sure what she had seen. Part of this was from not fully understanding Gaonan regalia, which looked austere and seamless, but really was bundled up around Conrad, not unlike a sari, which now unraveled, sending Conrad streaking down to the street below.

"Conrad!"

As if in answer to her scream, the other mutant screeched and bolted after him with a batlike flicker of its wings.