Ragamuffin

Chapter Twenty-Three

Pepper wrapped his oilskin duster around himself tighter as the wind kicked up through the trees and water cascaded down on his dreadlocks and behind his collar. He shivered.

He needed a new duster. He’d bulked out too much over the last few years. Good food, a free schedule. It sounded good. Nice planet, New Anegada. Or Nanagada, as the Caribbean descendants here had taken to calling it sometime in the last few hundred years. Only, somewhat annoyingly, the locals called their land on the other side of the mountains Nanagada, just like the planet.

He still wanted to get off the damn planet and see if it was possible to get back to the rest of the worlds. The destructive dying spams of the war against the Teotl the Black Starliner Corporation had raged in space had left the planet with no wormholes out anywhere and with the destruction of technology. It was hard to step back from centuries of progress and not miss it, and Pepper found each year grated harder at him.

A branch snapped.

Someone sniffed.

Pepper’s gray eyes flashed back a bit of moonlight, like a cat’s. He flipped back an edge of his coat and pulled out a long hunting knife.

Five days in this dirty, muddy, humid, sticky-leafed outskirts of the Azteca city Tenochtitlanome.

It was something to do.

The warrior-priest he’d been stalking stepped around the large banyan tree and Pepper picked him off the ground by his throat. He tossed the sniper’s rifle the man carried off into the bush.

“Niltze,” Pepper said. Hello. Pepper had been practicing his Nahautl.

He flashed the knife in front of the man, who whispered, “Pepper,” and wet himself.

Word apparently got around.

Pepper shoved the man down onto his back. Mud exploded outward as the flat of the warrior-priest’s back slapped against the sloppy ground.

“I die gladly for my gods,” the priest choked.

“That’s nice.” Pepper leaned forward. “I have a question. Which one of your gods is giving you the orders to try and kill delegates from Nanagada?” The Azteca’s gods, the Teotl, couldn’t leave well enough alone since their defeat and the overthrow of their priests. They still tried to manipulate things here in Tenochtitlanome from the shadows.

“I’ll die a thousand lives before giving you any information,” the priest spat.

“I can do that,” Pepper growled. A twig snapped nearby. “But you’re lucky today.”

“Pepper?”

“You’re late, Xippilli.” Pepper looked over at the Azteca nobleman who stepped off the muddy path toward them. “Told you I’d catch one skulking around here.”

Several Jaguar warriors in yellow-and-red capes stepped forward, rifles aimed at the warrior-priest on the ground.

“Take him for interrogation,” Xippilli ordered. The Jaguar scouts ran forward and bound the warrior-priest’s hands with leather thongs and carried him away.

Xippilli stood with Pepper in the rain, looking through the foliage toward the pyramids rising over the top of the jungle. Tenochtitlanome, the capital of Aztlan, was home to tens of thousands of Azteca. And home to a small delegation of Nanagadans, their housing not too far away from the copse they stood in.

“It’s a good thing I’m here,” Pepper said. “Or some of them would be dead by now.”

“The old priesthood despise the moderates and preach against the new leadership,” Xippilli said. “They can’t accept the outcome of the Great War. They think if we had fought harder, a little bit longer, that we would be the masters of Nanagada. It’s not surprising they’re still out trying to affect things.”

“I should have come out earlier, cracked some heads, sent a message.” Pepper pulled his collar up and shook his head.

“Does the boy mean that much to you?” Xippilli asked.

Pepper looked over. “I asked John deBrun for a favor. In return, he wants me to keep an eye on his son right now. Yeah, it’s babysitting, but who better?” He didn’t agree with the delegation. Opening the Wicked High Mountains, such a perfect barrier to the Azteca, seemed stupid.

But he wasn’t in charge, and no one had asked him. Instead John had come to ask him to keep a close eye on Jerome, as many Azteca would welcome striking back against one of the main people who’d helped end the Great War.

“Indeed,” Xippilli said. “Who better?” Both men stood in the rain for a moment, then Xippilli walked over to the road.

A few moments later a steam-powered car slowly chuffed down toward them. Red-and-yellow-caped Azteca hung from the sides, watching the road. Pepper moved back into the brush and watched it go by.

“How are things going with the delegation?”

Xippilli shrugged. “They’re still touring the city, seeing the sights. The cocoa plantations today were the main event.”

Pepper watched the steam car creak off into the city. “I think I feel worse for the boy in there.”

“Politics do drag on,” Xippilli said. “But they run the world.”

“Flapping mouths.”

“They might bring our two cultures together.” But of course, Xippilli had a strong interest in all this. Since leaving Capitol City politics, Xipilli had turned to trade. His knowledge of Azteca and Capitol City customs and people let him build airships and trade routes over the Wicked High Mountains. And he wanted the two connected more permanently. More profit lay there. “That’s worth all this, don’t you think?”

“I’m just fulfilling my side of a bargain.” Pepper brushed past leaves to step up onto the road. The rain paused, a break in the dark clouds showing the light blue sky.

“What was this favor you asked of John?”

“Checking to see if that damn spaceship of his is healed up yet.”

“Eager to leave us?” Xippilli asked.

“You have no idea.” Pepper looked up into the sky at a small, bulging twinkle. The Spindle. Legend said that it would one day disgorge the Azteca’s gods in vast numbers.

Unlike most legends, Pepper knew this one was true. At some point the energies that leaked out to create the always visible Spindle would force the wormhole back open. When the alien Teotl returned in force, all hell would break lose. Been there, done that, Pepper thought. And he didn’t want to be around for it the second time.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Agaudy airship with a bloated gasbag and peeling red paint floated high over the walls of Capitol City, propellers churning as it fought the sea-breeze headwinds that kicked up in the evening.

An Azteca airship.

Once it would have made John deBrun nervous. Today it was just another trader. A lot had changed in the last decade, particularly in the last seven years since the fall of the old Azteca leadership to more moderate rulers. Airships moved back and forth over the almost impassable mountains that separated the Azteca from the Nanagadans. Trade boomed in Capitol City and the land recovered from the Great War. The Teotl had led the Azteca to the city walls, but had been dealt a blow in that war that toppled the old leadership and sent them back over the mountains.

Nanagada’s masterful specialist fighters, the mongoose-men, had built up their numbers along the Wicked Highs to prevent a repeat anyway. It was a secure, stable, and prosperous time for Nanagada.

The airship slowly dropped into the heart of the city, disappearing behind the massive walls perched on the peninsula’s tip.

John watched the spray drift up from waves constantly smacking into the rocks at the city’s seawall base. It would be a salty day if one stood on the wall walkway.

A larger steamer churned by John’s small fishing skiff, giant nets hanging from long metal arms off either side. The men on the deck waved.

The fishing fleet steamed farther and farther out these days. Water currents changed, the ocean had slightly cooled.

It would keep cooling as Nanagada failed to get enough sun. The orbital mirrors keeping the planet warm had fallen two hundred years ago. Ice had crept over the northern continent, and fishermen reported icebergs hindering the fishing grounds.

The technological proficiency needed to keep a terraformed planet going had been lost in the war with the Teotl. Electromagnetic pulses from nuclear weapons and the destroyed wormhole leading back to the Teotl had left the whole planet shattered, only just now reacquiring the tools it needed. But, John knew, not soon enough to countereffect the cooling of the planet.

Before Pepper got to use the Ma Wi Jung to try to bridge the depths of the stars to the next wormhole, a centuries-long journey, John needed the still-working spaceship to help Nanagada. That would be an interesting conflict when the time came.

John sailed on, letting Capitol City dwindle until it felt as if he were all that sat at sea. A tiny speck of a boat bobbing out in the ocean.

He knew exactly where he was. John could close his eyes and see a map of the area, complete with his exact location, the city, and the spaceship he looked for.

He dropped the sails and threw the anchor over. He walked back to the bench by the mast and sat down.

Beneath his boat John could feel the presence of the spaceship Ma Wi Jung. Deep beneath the waves, sucking nutrients and metals out of the water, it slowly repaired itself. One day it would fly again, lift itself into the air and spring for space.

Maybe.

John queried the ship, feeling his mind connect with it like a snake burrowing down into a hole. Images floated over his eyes as he accessed the ship’s datasphere.

Status?

The answer impressed itself somewhere deep in the back of his head. Another fifteen years. The starship’s self-repair mechanisms were working at double the speed they’d been designed for, a little hack thanks to John.

He glanced overhead. The Spindle hung in the sky. Its geosynchronous orbit kept it at the same spot, day or night. An omen for many, a worry for the few who knew what it really was.

John sighed. The Spindle was the remains of a wormhole, and when that wormhole reopened, something he hadn’t known was even possible when he’d helped try to destroy it, there was going to be a world of hurt. Nanagada’s old enemies would come through.

And the other wormhole in orbit around Nanagada, the one that had once led out to allies and that John had come through to get to Nanagada, that one didn’t seem to be reopening. It was invisible.

They were alone.

He pulled a lure out of the tackle box beneath him, rigged a pole, and cast over the side of the boat.

As the sun slipped beneath the horizon, John ran a light up the mast. He’d stay the night; he enjoyed the fishing.

He didn’t have any obligations, and he had no worries as Pepper was keeping an eye on Jerome off in Tenochtitlanome. He missed the sea, salt drifting over him, night sky packed with stars. He’d stay. He’d nap. It would be refreshing.

The old wooden boat rocked an easy rhythm, mast swaying, as John leaned back, closed his eyes, and smiled. Almost four hundred years old, and fishing still hadn’t lost its appeal.

But he kept glancing back up at the sky.

As the sun rose, John tied the small fishing boat to one of the low wooden piers in Capitol City’s harbor. Capitol City jutted up out of the peninsula’s tip, a great amphitheater with one edge slouched in the water.

Several hundred years ago the entire city had been grown from scratch, using an experimental and highly illegal form of nanotechnology powered by microwave radiation focused down on the spot from orbit.

Well before humans had come down to settle Nanagada. Well before the Ancient Wars hundreds of years ago, when they were reduced to no technology, scrabbling around on the surface trying to get by.

“Good catch?” someone in a long fishing skiff asked.

John stretched out the several fish whose gills he’d run wire through and held by a foot-long wooden stick. “Not bad.” His accent sounded flat, as even after all his years among the Caribbean descendants of Nanagada he had never picked up the dialect as fully as he would have liked.

“You catch them good, John.”

He smiled. A good catch, but only because the Ma Wi Jung heated up the water below, attracting fish and activity. He’d fry this batch up and enjoy a good breakfast.

John shifted the catch to his right hand and climbed the steps up to the stone cobble of the main waterfront. He waved at a few fishermen scaling fish on stone tables.

The apartment he lived in lay half a mile through the tight alleys and shortcuts John had internalized easily enough. A ghostly series of compasses and lines hung in the air before him that only he could see. It was a talent wired into his brain hundreds of years ago to allow him to plunge ships through wormholes in haste.

John closed his eyes and relied on the internal map still visible to him. He took thirty-seven steps forward, stopped, turned right, and started walking.

A dumb trick. He opened his eyes to avoid tripping on alley trash.

A Toltecan walked toward John, one of the moderate Azteca who spurned human sacrifice and lived in Capitol City. Many had returned and reformed the city of Tenochtitlanome when the government had fallen apart, bankrupt due to the costs of its invasion of Nanagada. Quite a few remained in the city, though. The Toltecan’s fringed hair was brushed down almost over his eyes.

“Morning.” John nodded as they approached one another. With barely room for each to pass, John turned aside to let the man through.

The man, a true Azteca, drew a knife and struck John’s shoulder. It hit bone, and the pain drifted down John’s arm. “Your time is over,” the man hissed, pushing the knife farther in. Waves of dizziness grabbed John. “You now pay for defying the gods.”

John dropped to his knees. A second man grabbed him from behind. John twisted just far enough so that the knife bit into his left lung instead of a kidney.

He tried to scream, despite one punctured lung, and despite the fingers jammed down his mouth as they pushed him down to the ground. The first man yanked the knife free from his shoulder, slick with blood, and John grabbed the next stab with his left hand. The knife impaled the meat of his hand.

All three of them struggled on the dirty, wet alleyway ground.

Deep inside, old technology struggled to maintain his consciousness, suppress pain, and keep him standing. John hadn’t been in combat shape in a long while, though, and only his body’s natural shock prevented him from passing out.

More footsteps. John kicked a kneecap in and struggled to get free, but he just couldn’t draw a breath.

“Hey!” Someone yelled into the alley. “Somebody get help, is a mugging going on!”

John pulled the knife out of his left hand as his attackers looked up. He stabbed it deep into the belly of the man who sat on his chest. The man screamed and stumbled back.

The remaining assassin spun and took off running. John pushed himself onto his hands and knees and looked over at the corner of the alleyway. Something glinted back at him.

A homemade bomb.

John struggled forward out of the alley.

The world roared, shifted, and John flew forward. His back exploded in pain from shards of rock and metal embedded in it.

Face, shoulders, and back streaming blood, nose broken, eyes too bloodshot to see, his head ringing, John crawled out. He felt the larger cobblestones of the road under his hands.

He collapsed into the dirty water of a gutter. Strong arms grabbed him to pull him up. “We need get you to a hospital.” The faces of several Ragamuffins, the city’s policemen, looked down at him.

“No,” John croaked. “Boat.” The men who’d tried to kill him, Azteca spies posing as Tolteca, had done a good job. He was as good as dead unless he got back to the ship.

He pushed them away and dropped to his knees.

“He hit he head too hard,” someone offered.

John turned toward the sound of the voice. He focused down into himself to try to manage the pain. “I’m perfectly clear of mind. If I don’t get out to where I need to go, I’ll die, there’s nothing any doctor here can do for me.”

“But…”

He coughed blood. “Do not argue with me.”

They argued about it, each taking a minute too long, but someone had recognized him and commandeered a small boat with a steam engine still hot. John could smell fish everywhere as they gently moved him into a hammock.

“This ain’t no good,” the captain of the small vessel protested. “You go die if you don’t get help.”

“Will you just trust that I know what I’m doing?” John asked him.

With his eyes closed he could see exactly where they had moved. Each step remained in his mind since they had left the edge of the alley to walk down the docks.

Now at sea he gave them orders, moving them out toward the Ma Wi Jung.

His heart rate dropped, close to failure. “Hurry,” John told them. “Hurry.” The small boiler next to the hammock radiated heat, which made him drowsy. The door clanged as someone fed it wood.

By steamboat it took only a couple hours, though by then John’s eyes started to glaze.

“Stop!” John whispered, and the captain coasted to a stop.

The waves tossed them back and forth, rocking steadily.

John fumbled out of the hammock and felt his way to the rail. His legs protested, but he used every last ounce of strength to walk over and grab hold.

“What you doing?”

Before they could stop him John pitched forward into the cold water. The world fell silent, the distant crash of waves against the hull of the boat nearby becoming the entire world.

He sank, expelling air to speed up.

Ma Wi Jung?

The ship lay hundreds of feet below him. It had the medicinal technology to heal him.

The ship responded as John queried it, asking it to rise and meet him. He swallowed hard as the reply came to him. The ship did not have the ability to rise from the seabed. The water had grown cold.

Far beneath John an air lock slide open and belched massive bubbles.

Already he had fallen a hundred feet, his ears popping as he equalized them. If he could see, the ocean would be inky blackness.

He hadn’t taken in enough air with a collapsed lung to do this.

The pockets of air released from the air lock buffeted him.

He fell faster now, arrowing down, long seconds passing, the water getting even colder. John started shivering as his body’s core temperature dropped.

Behind his eyelids he could see the last fifty feet through the ship’s datasphere. The ship had spotted him. It lit the area up, and what it saw, John also saw. He could see himself, trailing blood, shivering, falling down toward the ship.

Just a little left, and John struck the hull headfirst. He dragged himself the last few feet into the air lock.

The lock shut. It slowly drained away the water until John floated faceup in air he could breathe. The pumps failed at that point, unused to the strain of pumping in enough air to force the water out.

John burst inside the ship along with hundreds of gallons of water as the inner lock opened.

He lay on the floor as it absorbed the water.

The medical pod lay inside a room ten feet away, and for John, gasping like a fish, it may have been twenty miles away.

He closed his eyes and curled up in a ball of pain on the floor, then straightened out. Foot by foot he crawled until he could pull himself into the medical pod and close it.

Chapter Twenty-Five

John woke up with a pounding headache, aches, and scars all over. A meal sounded good, but there was nothing on the ship but the nutrient drip the medical pod had retracted from his arm several hours ago. He checked the time. Three days. Three days ensconced in here. The boat above had left, no doubt assuming he was dead.

The inside of the ship looked a lot better since the last time he’d visited, when it still bore smoke and fire damage.

An alert pinged patiently from the cockpit, as well as in the back of his head. The Ma Wi Jung needed him to take care of something.

John sat down and tapped a panel, looked down at the series of readouts that appeared in the air.

Radio signals.

They’d started while he was in the medical pod, coming from the vicinity of the Spindle, and moving their way from the geosynchronous orbit of that wormhole into a low orbit.

John felt as if he’d been punched in the stomach. The wormhole had reopened. Which meant that the energies pouring through what had once been a tiny hole in the sky to create the always visible Spindle and force the hole back open would soon fade away, and the whole world would know it.

Teotl would be coming through. Tenochtitlanome was going to become the most dangerous place to be on the whole planet.

John checked the ship’s inventory, looking for an escape raft. None, and it would take too long for the ship to create one for him. But it did have an inflatable vest and a flare gun.

That would have to do.

That evening, as the fishing steamers were returning toward Capitol City, John burst out of the air lock toward the surface.

After his first deep breath of salty, cold air, he fired a flare. Three flares later a bewildered fishing crew hauled John up onto their deck.

“You dead,” they said.

John ignored them as they wrapped him up with blankets and took him into the engine room near the giant boiler to keep him warm. He lay in the warmth thinking of his son in the heart of Azteca land unaware that everything was on the cusp of changing for the worse.

Before he left the fishing boat, he borrowed some heavy-weather gear, flipping the hood up to obscure his face.

He fought his way back through the crowds of Capitol City. Everything seemed normal in the fading light and inside the great walls of the city. Crowds of people, from dark to light brown and even a few white, filled the streets. All manner of accents filled the air. It was a bit packed for this late. Although the city’s electric lights would be on, most people in the city had candles. They left for home at sunset. But now vendors shouted at each other as John got on one of the street buses running down the center of the city. Several people stood over large bundles.

The whip antenna sparked and slapped the metal grid overhead. The bus accelerated toward the next stop.

John had been happy to move out from Brungstun, the town he’d lived in almost thirty years and raised his son in. Too many memories there, most of them of Shanta, his wife.

Capitol City felt safer than the small town right beside the Wicked High Mountains, the first place overrun during the Great War. He still had nightmares about waking up to find Azteca rooting through his house, binding his wrists, and dragging him off to be a sacrifice.

Better to remain in Capitol City, behind the solid walls, with hundreds of miles between the mountains and him.

The bus stopped near the red-painted stone building John lived in. He got out and jogged up the outer steps to his apartment, almost knocking himself out on a clothesline as he couldn’t see much above eye level with the hood up.

The door was unlocked. It swung open and a pair of mongoose-men stepped out from the shadows to grab him and pull him in.

“Who you is?” they demanded. One yanked the hood down, and they both froze. “John deBrun?”

John nodded.

“Yes. What are you doing in here?” he demanded.

The two soldiers looked abashed. “We was sent to guard the place, see if anyone showed up. General Haidan hear you was dead.”

“He angry,” the other mongoose-man said.

“After all the years we’ve known each other, I’m glad to hear that.” John walked over to a chest under the small table in his cramped kitchen. “Someone did try to kill me. Azteca spies here in the city.”

He pulled out a handful of gold coins, a change of clothes, and a pistol.

“You in a hurry to leave, Mr. deBrun, but where you going, sir, Haidan go want to know.”

“Tenochtitlanome.”

“Is dangerous for you. The Azteca go want catch you and torture you, they want to know where to find you ship, how to get into it.”

“I know, it doesn’t matter now. Now look, time is short.” John stood up and looked at the two mongoose-men in their beige uniforms. “You need to tell Haidan the Teotl have come from the Spindle, and that the wormhole is open again. He needs to make preparations. Tell him as soon as possible.”

The two men glanced at each other. “We already know.”

John stopped. “How?”

They threw open the wooden shutters on the north side of his apartment. “Look up, above the jungle.”

John walked over. Above the clotheslines outside, the alleyway and bubble of conversation and street noise, above the great wall of Capitol City, was a band that stood over it all. And a large black dot hovered in place in the distance, visible just over the lip of the wall. Hood up, lost in his own worries, he hadn’t looked up to see what everyone else in the city had already seen.

That was why so many people were out this late.

“A ship?” John asked.

“Just hanging there,” they confirmed. “Although rumors is that one of them drop off Azteca near the center of the city, near the gardens. We ain’t see it, but things getting crazy already.”

There would be no outgoing airships, or probably even trains. John grabbed the peeling windowsill with both hands and hung his head.

In the distance a siren sounded. The city’s air shelters would be filling up, civil defense officials moving out onto the street, and the whole population getting ready for a new war.

Only this one would feature attackers from above.

They could not win it, John knew.

Outside the door, when John walked out with the two mongoose-men, an old lady with her hair in a bun held up a hand.

They all paused. “Mother Elene?”

“No, I am Sister Agathy,” the lady whispered. “But Mother Elene sent me. John deBrun, the Loa need to see you.”

Capitol City’s so-called gods were worried. The Teotl had struggled to wipe them out as well, now their more powerful brothers from space had arrived. The Loa had every reason to fear what would come next.

Their human delegates would be moving all throughout the city to prepare for this. And they’d sent a Vodun acolyte to get John.

“There is little time,” Sister Agathy said, looking at John.

The prospect of speaking to the alien creatures in their dens made John sick to his stomach. Hundreds of years of death and manipulation lay at the feet of the Teotl and Loa. It never went away, except for the few brief decades when John had lived in Brungstun as a fisherman, his memories erased.

That felt like a second childhood.

He really missed fishing.

Sister Agathy took John’s hand, and he sighed and followed her away from his apartment and deeper into the panicking city.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Jerome deBrun watched as the Azteca priest prepared his squealing sacrifice. The priest stank, his hair matted into long clumps of black, foul-smelling snarls due to the blood that remained on him. Two younger acolytes held the sacrifice down, its limbs tied with rope.

“Thank God it a pig,” Thomas, from Grammalton, whispered to Jerome. Jerome nodded back.

The pig squealed loudly, the priest held up his stone knife, and Jerome looked down at the muddy floor. This would have been how they killed his mother ten years ago. He bit his lip until he tasted his own salty blood.

When he looked back up, the priest held a beating heart up toward the sun, blood streaming down his hands into his face.

“We give this gift,” said the priest haltingly, unused to translating the words for his audience. “To the sun.”

To make sure it came up again. Right. Jerome sighed.

Behind the priest a large pen with barbed wire held eighteen more pigs, rooting in the dirt, scuffling around. Jerome wondered if they heard their companion’s squeals and could understand their fate.

“They going kill all eighteen?” Thomas asked.

“Yes.” Thomas needed to quit asking questions he should already know the answer to.

The pen’s wall stretched too high to hold in just pigs. Jerome’s mother, as well as other people from Brungstun, must have been locked in a pen like that once.

But that was past. Jerome let out a deep breath.

“They having a reception for all the delegate them after all this.” Thomas leaned in. “You go come, or lock youself in you room early again?”

Jerome took a deep breath and almost gagged on the scent of blood. “Maybe.”

“They say we go meet the pipiltin there,” Thomas said. “You know what they is?”

“Noblemen, businessmen, the people that run the place other than the priests.”

Jerome stared past the priest at the city of Tenochtitlanome and the tips of all its buildings. The delegation, all twenty in stiff-starched black suits soaking up the heat, stood on the flattened-out apex of a pyramid five stories tall at the center of a plaza.

The city ran outward from the pyramid, city streets like spokes from a hub, layers of Tenochtitlanome radiating outward from the core. Thousands of Azteca milled about around the pyramid, staring up at the apex.

Smoke curled up from several marketplaces out near the rim, and from house yards. And people packed the streets everywhere, moving quickly about their business.

“Remind me of Capitol City,” David said from Jerome’s left. He hailed from a small settlement near Batalun.

Jerome shook his head. “Only pigs for eating get killed in Capitol City.”

David shook his head. “At least it ain’t us.”

People kept repeating that. “As if that cancel out all that had go on before,” Jerome spat. Probably a bit too loud; an acolyte looked at him.

“You know Tolteca good people,” David said. “Lot of them never believe in human sacrifice, all this time. Lot of them had to get over the mountains to come to Capitol City to escape all that, and others could never escape, had to stay here. Now they in charge. Now they rule. It all good.”

“Sure,” Jerome said. “Sure.”

He spat on the ground. The mongoose-men who had traveled with the delegates from Capitol City stood at rigid attention, their faces glistening with sweat and khaki uniforms sopping with it. Nanagada’s best bush warriors, wasting their time in the heat.

A local chief of the new pipiltin held the reception in a tented platform on the edge of Tenochtitlanome. Here the roads petered out into jungle, and lower-class Azteca followed donkey carts into the city or carried large bales of wheat on their backs.

Newly acquired electric lamps swung from poles, lighting the interior now that the sunlight faded.

Chiefs stood around in traditional padded-cotton armor, their hair carefully combed forward and fringed, with feathers twined throughout.

“Hi-lo.” An Azteca woman with lightly tanned skin and bangs over her eyes smiled at Jerome. He held a glass of fermented something, too strong for him, and considered her plain white cotton dress. She chewed something rubbery in her mouth. A prostitute for the delegates’ pleasure.

Jerome looked down at the drink and walked back over to the bar. “You have any beer?”

The man stared at him, then held up another mug of the foul-smelling fermented stuff.

“Clot it.” Jerome took a breath and drained it. He almost gagged, but it warmed him up. He grabbed another and downed it. And then another.

“Take it easy.” Xippilli sat next to him and intercepted the next mug. “This goes straight to your head.”

Jerome glared at him. Xippilli looked a bit fuzzy in the strong electric light. “What you all about?”

“This is a place to be seen, Jerome, not to get drunk.” Xippilli pointed out a series of Azteca chiefs. “Those are very powerful, and rich, men.”

“The worse kind.” Jerome looked back at Xippilli. “You know how many of them rip through Brungstun?”

“Yes.”

Jerome grabbed Xippilli’s arm. “Which one of them over there was in Brungstun? Tell me.”

“Let it rest.” Xippilli shook his head. “You can’t kill them, they’re a part of all this.” He raised his cup and waved it all around. “They’re at least willing to help move us to moderation, they see the direction things go. Without their support we wouldn’t even have this.”

“We don’t need it.”

“You agreed to represent the town of Brungstun in these negotiations, Jerome.”

“You know I can’t say no. What they go say if I don’t? John deBrun, look, he son refuse to stand for the town. No, I know what they all expect.” Jerome grabbed another mug before Xippilli could intercept.

“If we open a road through Mafolie Pass in the Wicked Highs, trade will triple as we’re able to easily cross from Aztlan to Nanagada, both civilizations will be able to know each other. You were given a great honor by your town, a tribute to what your father did.”

“I ain’t John!”

“On that”—Xippilli pulled away from Jerome—“we both strongly agree.”

“I representing Brungstun, trust me.” Jerome watched him leave. Xippilli, despite his protests, was really no different from the people he’d run from. He’d crossed the Wicked High Mountains and trekked all the way to Capitol City for a new life. Yet here he stood, walking over to a nearby chief, and laughing. Talking to murderers.

Brungstun, first town on the other side of the Wicked High Mountains, had been the first overrun when the Teotl launched the invasion of Nanagada. They’d poured over the mountains into his town. Why should Jerome help make it easier for the Azteca to do it again?

He’d make sure any way over the Wicked Highs remained closed.

Jerome stood up and walked over to Thomas.

Thomas turned. “Yes?”

“I’m going to leave before it get too dark.”

“Damn it Jerome, already?”

“Thomas…” I ain’t you friend, he wanted to say. But stopped. They were both in their twenties. Jerome here because of his father’s heroic status. Thomas because he was the oldest government man in Grammalton after the Azteca passed through. Neither of them would live up to the responsibilities put on them. John’s father was an old-father, one of the original settlers of Nanagada hundreds of years ago, near immortal due to strange, tiny machines in him from before the wars that destroyed all such things and left them stranded on this planet.

And Jerome was just Jerome.

“Don’t worry. I understand, you know. I understand.” Thomas looked out across the crowd and jerked his head. Two mongoose-men in gray uniforms walked over. They carried holstered guns at their waists, but not their famed rifles.

“Bed already?” one of them chuckled.

Jerome nodded. They took their positions at either side and walked him up the road along the flickering torches that were just being started up by runners along the many roads. The torchlight flickered by their faces, and they stared at him as they ran by.

He didn’t belong here.

Jerome tossed and turned in his bed, skimming just over the edge of a deeper sleep. He sat up finally, disturbed by some noise outside, and mopped sweat from his forehead with his sheet.

In the still air a steady thunder shook the windows.

The mongoose-man by his door came in. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah.” Jerome walked forward and opened the heavy wooden windows.

“You need leave them shut, in case,” the mongoose-man warned him.

Jerome looked out across the tiny flickering lights of lit torches at the sky, trying to see if there were any clouds.

None.

But the thundering increased. A trail of fire glowed white-hot in the sky as it crossed the far horizon and approached.

“What that?”

Jerome shook his head. “I don’t know.”

They watched it grow closer, the white-hot glow lighting up the night sky as it approached.

It couldn’t be a sign of anything good.

Jerome snagged mongoose-men khaki from one of the men his own size, his movements hurried.

“We all know what things returning from the sky go mean to the Azteca,” he said as he dressed. “Some of them go think Teotl returning to the earth from the sky.”

“But is it true?”

“Who know?” Jerome looked around the small house they all had shared for the last week. Eight mongoose-men, four of them dressed and at guard, the other four he’d woken up. “But that no meteor, coming in too slow, burning too long.”

“Clot,” someone swore.

“I know.” Jerome pointed at the dressed and armed men. “Get back to the party, bring all of everyone back, quick now. The rest of you, get ready and get you rifles ready.”

They stood still. “We think—”

“How many you all know what come out the sky just then?” Jerome asked. “None of you? Okay then, until any of we all know better, you best had move!”

“Okay, Jerome.” The four turned and took off.

“The rest of you all, get dress. Then we getting ready to board this place all up.”

“With what wood?”

Jerome looked down at the floor. “This nice hardwood plank right under we feet.”

The house was a small island in an ocean of danger. Jerome looked out of the windows into the flickering gas lamps of the Azteca city, then moved a bit until he could see the flattened top of the massive stone pyramid at the heart of the city.

Torches leapt to fire at the pyramid’s top. An ordinary but still chilling omen. Jerome walked over to one of the chests the mongoose-men had dragged all the way from Capitol City. Several rifles lay nestled in a bed of straw.

He picked one up, checked the bolt, and grabbed a box of ammunition.

“Careful with that,” a mongoose-man with a close-shaved head said, buttoning up his shirt and coming down the stairs.

“I know how to use this.”

“You jumpy.”

“I got reason. We go need to board up the window them, and then the door. If Teotl come from the sky, we go be ready.”

The mongoose-man laughed. “That an old bush legend.”

“You saw my father land from the sky in Capitol City in he flying machine, right?” Jerome spat. “You were in the city, right?”

The mongoose-man nodded. “Yeah.”

“Then don’t be no chucklehead. When the Teotl land, it go be in machine just like my father flew.”

Footsteps outside. Jerome walked backward to the side of the door. He loaded the rifle and waved the mongoose-man to the kitchen.

A man burst in. Jerome swung the rifle up and almost shot him before recognizing Thomas.

“Clot! Man, I almost shoot you.”

“Jerome.” Thomas reached over and pushed the gun barrel away.

“What going on?” Jerome asked.

“The fire just hanging over the city. A whole lot of bright lights.” Thomas wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “I ran all the way here, people saying the chariot of the gods landing in the city.”

“The Teotl.” Jerome looked around the house.

“They saying that.” Thomas grabbed him. “Xippilli say to stay put, he go send help.”

“Maybe, but even Xippilli go be in fight to save he own skin,” Jerome said. “The old priests, they go come out the walls now.”

After some thuds and the sound of ripping, the mongoose-man in the kitchen came back out holding several planks of wood. “Board it all up?”

“What you name?” Jerome asked him.

“Bruce Passey.”

“Mr. Passey, get every way into this house nail shut.” Jerome looked back at the tiny pricks of fire dancing over the rim of the sacrificial pyramid. He’d go down fighting rather than get dragged up those bloodied steps.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Xippilli had sat with the pipiltin and listened to the chatter of conversation flow around the table. The older pipiltin, such as the thin, scarred Ahexotl, had ignored the Nanagadans. Xippilli made a point by sitting near the man.

Since running for election in Capitol City and losing, Xippilli had turned to trade and business. His airships crossed the Wicked High Mountains to build a healthy flow of trade between Aztlan and Nanagada, but it was a trickle compared to the trade that could happen.

“That young nopuluca,” Ahexotl said, leaning over and grabbing Xippilli’s shoulder. Xippilli had mastered his distaste at the older pipiltin using derogatory terms for Nanagadans. “The one that left in such a hurry.”

“Jerome deBrun, the son of the great hero John.”

“Hero to Capitol City, not here.” Ahexotl snorted. “Is he still opposed to opening Mafolie Pass?”

“I think so.”

“He will take no bribes?” Ahexotl owned almost every chicle-producing plant in Tenochtilanome, and he kept his monopoly secret. But most knew about his wealth. And though Ahexotl did not hold a high opinion of Nanagadans, he held a much higher opinion of wealth.

“I doubt it.”

“It would be shameful if he were to have an accident.”

That was a bit much. Xippilli turned. “It would, because Capitol City would riot if the son of one of their greatest heroes died. We’d hardly make things easier.”

Ahexotl had smiled at that. “It’s a good thing that you’re keeping a close eye on the boy then. He will not come to harm.”

Exactly. That was why Jerome and the mongoose-men with him remained in a house that Xippilli owned, and few knew about. “Yes.”

Ahexotl made Xippilli feel dirty every night he returned home. But Ahexotl and his friends had reformed most of Aztlan, outlawing human sacrifice and the continuous attacks on the Nanagadans. Almost bankrupted by the last war, Ahexotl wanted no more of massive wars. And most in the city felt as he did.

But he had no true love of Nanagada, not like Xippilli, who had been taken in by them and lived in Capitol City.

Xippilli ground his teeth. Jerome alone could cause a lot of trouble. He was young, young enough to be flighty. Young enough to still hate the Azteca so much he couldn’t look beyond his past toward the great things that could be done.

Jerome might yet stop Mafolie Pass from being opened. Xippilli gritted his teeth. Jerome could stop the further liberalization of everything this side of the mountains, particularly if he traded on his father’s status to make the Nanagadans refuse to open the one place in the Wicked Highs a road could be built.

But Xippilli hadn’t wanted to think any further about that because the sky thundered and people outside the decorative tents craned their heads to stare up at the sky.

Now Xippilli got up with Ahexotl and they walked outside to look up as well.

Lights hung over the city, slowly descending to turn into a gleaming, fiery, bird-shaped machine. It dropped out of the gloom and toward one of the giant public squares near the main sacrificial pyramid.

“What is that thing?” Ahexotl asked.

“I think,” Xippilli said in horror, “the gods have returned.”

Ahexotl sniffed. “This is problematic.”

Xippilli frowned. “For you?”

“The priests will come back out from the bushes. They’ll refuse to keep using pigs and chickens. They’ll want human blood on the temple grounds. We’ll fight with the Nanagadans. My interests will suffer.”

Xippilli closed his eyes. “Not if we act first, to keep the pipiltin that exist now in power. You have warriors under your control.”

“As do you.”

Both men looked back into the tent at the rest of the powerful men inside. “Then we must meet the new gods and find out what they need. And we need to control what comes next, even if it does include human sacrifice to placate the old priests and the Teotl that will come back in from the bush to meet their kin here.”

In his life Xippilli had walked across the Wicked Highs on foot, almost dying of the cold, to reach the safety of Nanagada. There it had been free of the alien Teotl, who claimed they were gods and demanded blood on their account.

“I’ll take a delegation of the pipiltin to the square,” Ahexotl said. “You make sure our warehouses are well protected from the priesthood. We’ll need to do a lot of bribing yet tonight.”

Xippilli nodded. He’d fought Azteca from the walls of Capitol City to remain free, knowing that if they could hold them off, Nanagada could continue being a safe place. And he had come to Tenochtitlanome in Aztlan again to help reform his people, knowing that if it didn’t work, he could return to Capitol City.

But now, there was nowhere to run. Not if the Teotl dropped in numbers from the sky.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Xippilli sat in the small stone office building he’d rented not too far from the airship warehouses on the edge of the city.

“Do you believe the sun needs blood in order to rise?” he asked Ahexotl. “Particularly since human sacrifice hasn’t been fueling it for the past several years?”

“There have been ceremonies out in the bush,” Ahexotl said. “The old priests would say it is hardly conclusive.”

“But you?”

Ahexotl waved a hand. “I pay both sides gold and what they need to be satisfied. Maybe it’s true, maybe not.”

“The new gods haven’t demanded human sacrifice,” Xippilli said. “What happens if they do not approve?”

“They haven’t not demanded it,” Ahexotl said, brushing aside his bangs and straightening a gold necklace. “Our leaders fall back on old habits and tradition. They’re making an offering. You’d do well to attend.”

“It’s hard,” Xippilli said as Ahexotl pulled a formal cape around his shoulders. Outside the door a steam car waited, a driver picking his nails in the front seat.

“There is a machine that came from the sky sitting in the square, new Teotl walk the ground, and we are caught in the middle. If you would like control of your destiny, right now, Xippilli, you will come with me.”

“Okay.” Xippilli followed him out in the hot early-morning sun and shut the door behind him.

He sat in the back of the car, posture stiff, as it drove toward the center of Tenochtitlanome. A crowd milled around the central pyramid, and Xippilli followed Ahexotl as he pushed through the crowd to stand at the base of the pyramid. The tiny steps stretched up, hundreds of feet into the air.

The small figures at the apex of the pyramid moved around with deadly certainty, pulling roped victims forward to lay on the stone altar.

Xippilli looked down at the dark stone as the jade-hilted knife stabbed downward and someone screamed. He looked back up to see the priest, blood-soaked hair dark against his skin, hold the red heart up to the orange early-morning sun.

The priest’s acolytes threw the body off the pyramid. As limp as a doll it rolled, limbs flailing, all the way down the steps to land before the crowd.

They erupted in cheers, and Xippilli looked at the body. A young girl.

Ahexotl grabbed his shoulder. “They’re saying the sacrifice has been well received and that the gods are coming out of their machine. Come with me.”

They cut their way around the pyramid toward the square where the alien flying machine sat. Xippilli walked, staring up at the upswept wings and curved lines that seemed to blend into the great hull of the machine, a seed-like pod with legs that splayed out on the cobblestones.

Pipiltin milled about near the shade of one of the wings. Sullen moderate and smug old-order priests ringed the edge of the square, but the pipiltin were the ones who approached the strange craft.

“The wonderful thing about all this,” Ahexotl said as they moved past the ring of priests toward a collection of shaded divans, “is that you, me, and the pipiltin know that our gods are just creatures. More advanced, perhaps, as we once were before the cataclysm that left us in the ashes of our forefathers, but just creatures.”

“You see good things in the oddest places,” Xippilli said.

“The gods cannot read our minds, and we can bargain with them,” Ahexotl said.

“What makes you think we can bargain with them?”

Ahexotl waved his hand at the great machine. “They’re here in Tenochtitlanome, are they not? They must need something from us, or they wouldn’t be speaking with us.”

“You have a point.” Xippilli paused as a pair of Jaguar scouts stopped him.

“I’m sorry Xippilli. You must remain here. I will be using you in these days ahead, but the pipiltin, they only tolerate you.” Ahexotl looked apologetic.

Xippilli nodded. Another pair of scouts set up a stool for him, gave him a cup of sweetened fruit juice, then stood on either side of him as Ahexotl continued on.

Their new masters stirred from inside the shadows of the divans, grublike skin visible from the distance. They were surrounded by the pipiltin. Ahexotl joined them, and Xippilli watched the crowd readjust to Ahexotl’s presence.

The meeting lasted a mere fifteen minutes, then Ahexotl strode back out.

“I kept you on for this very reason,” Ahexotl said, smiling, and Xippilli suddenly felt like a rodent under the gaze of a jungle cat. He had no illusions that Ahexotl would dispose of him if he did not serve some function in the man’s calculations.

“And that is?”

“The gods want Capitol City next. They will use us as the front line in the occupation.” Ahexotl brushed past the stool. Xippilli hopped off to follow him.

“We are their chaff?” Xippilli asked.

“They are searching for one thing: any ancients that might be alive still from the days when our world used to be connected to the other worlds. They were most insistent.” Ahexotl had a spring in his step. “They have to be captured and brought to them alive.”

“That seems to excite you.” Xippilli struggled to keep up.

“They need something, they are not omnipotent, and they will be giving us Capitol City in exchange for what they want.” Ahexotl, his eyes gleaming, looked at Xippilli. “And we have the first tool, a piece of leverage to use to gain all that, don’t we? Jerome deBrun. You have him in a safe location, correct?”

Xippilli stopped with him at the steam car. The driver had spotted them and begun warming it up; the boiler hissed as Ahexotl opened the door. “Yes, I do.”

“They want these people alive, Xippilli. That doesn’t offend your sensibilities, does it?”

Xippilli stared at the dirt underneath the car. “No, no, it doesn’t. But I view my promises as ironclad, and even in a situation like this, breaking a promise I made to protect the son of a close friend is hard to do.”

Ahexotl grabbed his shoulder. “Your loyalty is why I trust you, Xippilli. Not many here struggle to remain true to their word. So I tell you this, deliver Jerome to me. Deliver his father to me. I’ll make you the ruler of Capitol City, you know it best of all the people here, and I know what you promise me will stand, so I can trust you over in Capitol City more than any of the pipiltin back there.”

“Capitol City?” Xippilli looked up. “In charge how?”

“Deliver me the men the gods want and I will not bother you there. Sacrifice thousands, or none, I don’t care. Just keep my goods coming, keep the order, and you will rule that city for as long as you wish.”

Xippilli held on to the door of the car. If this was indeed the age of the Teotl, they could do nothing against them, could they? What better way to protect Capitol City and the people he loved that lived there? As a powerful ruler for the rapidly rising Ahexotl, he could protect many who would otherwise have their hearts cut out.

“Don’t delay your answer to this offer too long,” Ahexotl said, “or I’ll find someone else to do it.”

Xippilli grabbed his arm. “The others would kill the very people the gods want,” he growled. Then with a deep breath, he said, “I’ll do it.”

He had to.

Ahexotl grinned. “Where are they?”

Xippilli swalled the acid at the back of his throat and told Ahexotl where to find Jerome and the delegates who lived with him.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Jerome nailed the edge of plank across the window of his room. The morning light filtered through cracks between the wood. No one had returned for them. All night had passed in nervous silence.

Screaming and shouting came from down the street. Jerome peeked out through a tiny crack to see two priests pull a seven-year-old girl away from her mother. One of them clubbed a man down as he struggled to hold on to the girl.

Her foot slipped out of his fist. With one last kick the priests walked off down the street with the kicking girl.

Jerome dropped the hammer and ran down the stairs, across the foyer, toward the main door.

He grabbed the edge of the massive dresser they’d shoved up against the door, but Bruce held him back. “Ain’t nothing you can do.”

“That a child they taking,” Jerome shouted, straining to get free. The bush warriors pushed him down into a chair.

“I know.” Bruce let him go. “We all know. Now hush, we don’t want them hearing no foreign voice out of here.”

Jerome walked over and looked through the shutters. The mother held her husband’s bloodied head in her lap.

“You think maybe we should run for jungle?” Jerome asked. He’d assumed Xippilli’s men would already have arrived to take them away and that they had only needed to last the night with some caution.

“It light now. This place crawling with warrior-priest,” Bruce said. “Got to wait until dark again.”

“They got to know we sitting here,” Jerome muttered.

“Mainly diplomat and Xippilli, and some people around this house. It go take a little while.”

Jerome walked a circle. “We go tonight, make we way through the jungle and back over the Wicked Highs.”

“The Wicked Highs going through storm season,” one of the other men pointed out.

“Crossing the mountains never easy.” Jerome had lived in their shadow most of his life. People died on the slopes more often than not. “Pack warm. Get all the food in this house pack up as well, we go need it.”

A suicidal trek. Weeks of jungle, and they couldn’t stop at villages or use the roads.

“Heard. Better moving than sitting still here.”

Someone rapped at the door and shouted at them.

“What do they want?” Jerome asked. He didn’t understand Nahuatl. “Who’s out there?”

“For we open the door now.” Bruce walked up and looked through the crack. “A whole bunch of Azteca with guns out there. A couple priest them. I don’t see Xippilli anywhere. Open the door?”

Jerome shook his head. “I think we all know better.”

Guns were taken out. Bruce took a hunting knife out and handed it to Jerome. He hefted it in his hand. “Think we should run for it?”

Bruce looked at him. “They like locusts out there.”

“I don’t want die in this house,” Jerome said. “We run for it if they break in.”

“We by your side.”

Jerome shook his head. “Don’t stick with me. Scatter.” He raised his voice. “You ain’t here for protecting me. We need get word back to Nanagada, hear? Scatter fast if they break in. Find a way to get the message back, somehow, anyhow.”

Bruce stood still, saying nothing.

The Azteca on the other side kept shouting, then stopped. They’d given up on asking for what they wanted.

A bullet splintered the main door. Two mongoose-men walked to either side of the doorway.

“Come on.” Bruce walked up the stairway to join the other mongoose-man perched along the railing, aiming down at the door and able to see throughout most of the house.

More commotion outside, then a thick chunk of log punched through the door. No one inside moved.

“Jerome,” Bruce said. “Get up here, now.”

Another hit from the heavy log and the door caved inward. Feathered Jaguar warriors clambered over the dresser. Jerome stood still and stared at them.

“Cut them down!” Bruce shouted, and the mongoose-men fired. Six Jaguar scouts lurched forward and screamed, their blood staining the wooden planks of the floor. One of them pulled himself forward, one hand holding his own guts in while bleeding out, the other hand reaching for a dropped rifle.

Jerome aimed his rifle at the man’s head, hands shaking.

The Jaguar scout paused, looked back at him, and Jerome closed his eyes and pulled the trigger. The rifle bucked, the acrid smell of gunshot wafted up, and Jerome flicked up and looked at the mess of brains and blood and shivered.

He wanted to throw up, but Bruce ran down the stairs and pulled him up. “Don’t make it so hard for we to protect you now.”

More screaming Jaguar scouts tried to force through the door.

Jerome’s heart pounded at triple speed as Bruce pushed him back into his own room. “Hey, I said we was going to run.”

“Jerome, you done well, but we can’t run. And we orders was to stay with you and protect you. We surrounded. Look out the window.”

They grimly guarded the door. Jerome looked out at the street below. Azteca filled the street, fifty of them.

He was going to die here.

“They coming up.” The mongoose-men downstairs had stopped firing. The stairs flexed as Jaguar scouts pounded up them, then the crack of rifles from the last two mongoose-men stopped them.

Jerome slowly reloaded his rifle and loosened the knife, each gun crack making him jump slightly.

“Hold the door,” Bruce said, and stepped into the room with Jerome. He shut the door and flipped the wooden cradle of Jerome’s bed up to shove it against the door’s handle.

“Bruce—”

“Shut up and get ready.”

Jerome stepped back and stood by the window.

The Azteca outside shouted in Nahuatl again, and Jerome looked at Bruce. “What they say?”

“They say they don’t want kill you. If you surrender, you go live as a prisoner.”

Jerome shook his head. “So they can sacrifice all of we later? No.”

Bruce shouted back, and the downstairs door burst open, two Jaguar warriors pushing through. Jerome shot the first one in the head.

Gunsmoke filled the room. Jerome recocked the hammer and fired at the second man and missed.

Damn. He cocked and fired again, gun jerking, and hit the man in the shoulder, but he kept coming. Bruce stepped in front and knifed the warrior, but another Jaguar warrior pushing through fired. Bruce fell.

“Bruce!” Jerome shouted as. He pulled the gun up to aim at the warrior-priest that leapt into the air at him with a net, then stopped. His hair swayed, his mask slipped, and he gurgled. The priest hung in the air, a long speartip sticking through his chest.

The priest moved aside to reveal a tall man in a long trench coat and dreads. Jerome couldn’t believe it.

“Pepper?”

Pepper tossed the priest aside. His coat dripped blood, as did his dreads. Dirt smeared his brown face, and he looked around the room. “A last stand, Jerome? I was expecting you to run for the forest.”

“What you doing here?” Jerome walked forward to the door as Pepper moved over to the window to peer out at their surroundings.

“Saving your ass. I promised John I’d keep an eye on you. Bad timing to promise that, don’t you think?”

Jerome could see a trail of bodies on the stairs. He hadn’t even heard the slaughter Pepper had perpetrated. “What now?”

“Well, we’re surrounded,” Pepper said. “So let’s move quickly.” Pepper stepped backed to the doorframe, a shotgun poking out of the trench coat. He fired it, twice, then reloaded.

“Down the hall to the window.” Pepper shoved Jerome toward it and covered him like a shield as he fired again down at the entryway to the building.

At the end Pepper smashed the wooden shutters out with a fist. Jerome looked down at the street. “What now?”

“Jump.”

“That’s cobblestone.”

Pepper fired the shotgun again. “You want to wait for them to come back up the stairs?”

Jerome clambered out onto the sill and took a deep breath. He lowered himself by his hands awkwardly, then let go. He hit the stones with a jarring thump that knocked the breath out of him.

A stone-cracking thump behind him. Pepper landed on his feet, shotgun in each hand aimed down each side of the road. “Move.”

They turned the corner, and Pepper stopped. Twenty Azteca with rifles clustered around a car. Pepper pushed Jerome behind him.

“Gentlemen,” Pepper said in a calm voice.

“Hello,” said the man in the car, standing up to look at them. He wore a feathered cape. His pronunciation sounded odd, not like Xippilli’s but more halting and unused to the language. “My name is Ahexotl. Xippilli said you were here.”

Jerome bit his lip. Xippilli. That traitor. They might have had a chance if he had kept their location secret just a little bit longer.

Pepper looked behind them as more Azteca moved into the streets, surrounding them. “What do you want?”

“Originally the boy, but now, just you will do. Drop your weapons. You can’t get out of this.”

Jerome felt Pepper twist, tense, then stop. “You’ve seen how many I can kill if I choose back there?”

Ahexotl nodded. “Maybe you could escape. But then the boy will die, and I think you don’t want that. But to the reason I’m here: You are one of the Nanagadan immortals? Like this boy’s father?”

“Maybe.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Ahexotl said. “I’ll let the boy live if you come with us and talk to the gods.”

“The Teotl wish to speak to me? Why?”

Ahexotl made a face. “They have not deigned tell me yet. But they are most insistent that they talk to someone of your kind.”

The two men stared at each other, two predators sizing each other up.

“I’ll come,” Pepper finally said. He dropped the pair of shotguns. “The boy comes with. Harm him and, Ahexotl, I will not just kill you, but kill you very, very slowly.”

Ahexotl smiled. “May I offer you a ride?”

“You may.” Pepper walked forward and pulled Jerome with him. He muttered, “Stay fresh, stay sharp.”

“I’ve got a pistol,” Jerome muttered.

Pepper laughed, and the two clambered into the steam car with their new enemy.

Chapter Thirty

Mother Elene waited for John in the basement of an unassuming three-story house. From there she took over, leaving Sister Agathy behind and opening a door in the wall into a tiny, cramped room.

It was an elavator, which hissed and slowly sank down through the earth once Mother Elene shut the door.

She said nothing until the elevator finally shuddered to a halt. “This way.”

John followed her into a large rocky chamber. They were deep beneath the city now. The walls dripped strips of bioluminescent slime that lit the chamber in a faint green glow, helped along by large flaming torches planted every few feet.

Large eggs sat at the far end.

“You welcome to a privileged sight,” Mother Elene said. “The Metamorphosis.”

John walked toward the eggs.

“Stay back,” Mother Elene snapped. “Show some respect, man. Them the Loa.”

“They are turning themselves into something different, a different physical form?” John asked.

Mother Elene nodded. “Yes, but it ain’t for fighting, like you thinking.”

“For what then?”

A hissing set of syllables from behind John startled him.

“The escaping,” the Vodun priestess said, translating for him. She sat down in a wicker chair by the doors they’d just come in. On the other side of her lay a Loa, its body looking like a pearly seashell. Halfway to becoming an egg like the others. The head had become absorbed into the shell-like area, but the face remained. Large eyes, beaked nose, and a slit mouth etched onto the shell’s surface.

In the last war the Loa had disappeared into the bowels of the city to ride out the invasion. They were not repeating that, but doing something else now. They also knew how dangerous things had become this time around.

“You know the Teotl are coming from orbit?” John asked it.

It wheezed back. “Yes. We hear them calling for all of we. But we don’t respond,” Mother Elene translated.

“So you’re running from the fight,” John said. “What do you want with me?”

The Loa spoke for itself. “Information, assistance.”

“Your ulterior motives disturb me.” John folded his arms. “You’ve caused us so much grief, and death, the Teotl and you.”

For a few seconds the Loa hissed furiously, while Mother Elene looked down at the ground. Then it gathered itself. “You of all people know the damages your kind did as well. You yourself destroyed an entire lineage of my sisters in a nuclear attack. Do not presume yourself innocent of such vile things.”

John blinked and then nodded. The creature was truthful, though he’d only had ten years to readjust to those memories and figure out who they meant he was.

Not always someone he liked.

“What am I here for?” he repeated.

“Well, once, a long time ago, I would have liked to have killed you,” it said. “When you destroyed my sisters in a ship attack, I begged to come all the way out here and fight to wipe your kind out. We could not share a planet. Your DNA, right-handed, ours left. Our terraforming plans clashed, only one of us could live on a planet created by the other.”

John looked over at Mother Helene. Had he been lured here to be killed? She gave no sign of what was about to come.

“I was sent away to study where your kind came from,” the Loa continued, as if unaware of John’s nervousness. “We were a young race, so proud and sure of ourselves. I have shared memories from this time, and, oh, how we sing with determination.”

“Your DNA is left-handed?” John asked, trying to move the alien’s attention well past memories of its dead siblings. “How have you survived all this time?”

“We were wrong to think only one of us could hold the planet. We both could, if we drastically changed ourselves physically, just as we are doing now. In the beginning this was to be a base, a new beginning, and the start of an exodus for us. Unfortunately, in the end, all of our assumptions were wrong. We found we could share a planet, if we suffered deep changes to ourselves. We also found out that we could not run from our problems.”

“Why not?”

“We were supremely disappointed to find that the area beyond this planet was also infected. There was nowhere to really run to.”

“Infected?” By what? John knew of no infections.

The Loa shifted painfully, rocking the shell of its lower body. “When we strode into space, there were… things waiting for us. Creatures that grew up in the dark of interstellar space. We were not the top of the natural order, there were predators and ecologies out in the greater expanse of space. Within a generation of spreading out beyond our world, we were found by creatures that took control of our bodies and used our minds as a resource. In short time we were their limbs, minds, and eyes.

“We fought back. We stored our memories chemically in backups, reshaped ourselves, and tried to escape. That was why we came here and fought you so desperately. Only your kind was under the same yoke.”

“I’ve never heard of any such thing,” John said. “The Maatan and the Gahe occupied Earth, but they are their own races.”

“Behind them lie another force,” the Loa said. “But it does not matter now. We have come to believe that the truth is, intelligence puts us in competition directly with these, and other species. Our new metamorphosis will take us to the sea here in a new, safe form. Just as we adapted ourselves when we realized occupation of this world was pointless, that there were no clean stretches of space for us to live in. When we decided to try and help your kind against those of ours who dreamt in vain that holding this world, so far from ours, would be the right thing.”

“What will you become?”

“Giant deep-sea fish,” the Loa said. “Deep in the dark of the ocean.”

“And if we can’t keep this world from freezing, and the environment changes?” John asked.

“There are triggers programmed into us for such a thing. Listen, John, we have a gift for you.”

Mother Elene leaned forward and handed John a small wooden flask. John made to open it, but she shook her head. “What is it?” he asked.

“We are masters of the biological,” the Loa said. Its words were getting more strained, as if its mouth was hardening. “Now that we will be changed beyond recognition, we can leave you a dangerous gift. A plague. An infection that will destroy the Teotl. We have no need of this, we can move on. You are the ones stuck with this now, you are the young race. Do with it what you will, John, and we wish the city the best of luck.”

And that was it. The Loa’s eyes glazed over and it settled back into waiting to change into something different.

“Come.” Mother Elene led John back toward the elevator.

As it headed up, John looked over. “How will they reach the sea?”

“We go help them.”

“Even though it means they are leaving you,” John said.

Mother Elene did not respond. When the elevator jerked to a stop, she pointed him at the basement. “Be safe with that thing and don’t get kill. Is a powerful weapon.”

John tucked it into a pocket, gingerly. “Good day, Mother Elene, and good luck.”

She shut the door.

Outside, John blinked several times. Lines of Azteca soldiers marched down the street at the end of the block, making their way toward the walls of the city.

In the distance the sound of rifle fire popped and cracked, while several explosive booms echoed all across the city.

The occupation had begun. A large-bellied aircraft flew in over the walls and paused over the center of the city, then lowered itself into the large garden clearing by the Ministerial Mansion.

Fires burned, smoke columns reaching high into the sky.

“Hey, hey!” A woman peered through a crack in a nearby door and waved at John.

“What do you want?”

“Ain’t no one allowed out on the street. You go get shot. Get in here before any of them notice you.”

John ducked in, and they slammed the door shut behind him. Two women in long, gray dresses stood inside the small room, lit by a single candle. Chairs and tables lay scattered around; it had once been a restaurant. The smell of fried fish dripped out of the clammy inside air.

The woman who’d called John over wore a handkerchief over her mouth. “I’m Pam. This my sister, Violet. You know it dangerous out there. You John deBrun, right? I seen you once at the waterfront.”

John nodded. “Thanks. Yes.” So many in the city knew him it was useless to pretend otherwise.

“They looking for you, as well as any of the other councilmen who trying to hide.”

“Any idea why?” John walked over to the window. They all shrank back from it as a pair of men in bright red capes and rifles at the ready walked down the street.

“Here. They had rain these down on the city not too long ago.” Violet thrust a piece of paper in his hands.

It was a letter to anyone who had settled this planet several hundred years ago and still lived. The new Teotl needed their help and would pay well for it and guaranteed their safety.

John crumpled it and threw it on the concrete floor.

“You don’t believe them?” Pam asked.

“Never had any reason to trust the Teotl yet,” John said. “I’d rather not walk myself into my own death.”

“What you go do next?”

“I don’t know. What happened to the minister, was there any fighting back?”

“Not sure, but mongoose and ragamuffin fighting some. Mainly looking to get organize, it all happen so quick. Ship coming from the sky, Azteca pouring out,” Pam said.

“Most of the shooting you hear is people like we shooting from the window at them,” Violet said.

John patted his coat. Hide, or put himself in a position to strike back? Could he release a biological weapon against the Teotl? Would it be enough to turn the tide? “Can I get close to the Ministerial Mansion? That way I can watch who goes in, and maybe figure out what is happening in there?”

If they were really looking for people like him, they must need something. There were ways into the Mansion as well, and if he hooked up with mongoose-men, he could gain some help.

“We’ll help you,” Pam promised. “But for right now, we have to sit tight. Curfew is on for the next day, no one in the street. More feather-clot coming.”

“Door by door,” Violet said from the window. “They coming door by door to search we street.”

“They’re looking for us door by door?” John walked toward the window, but Pam grabbed his shirt.

“They looking for guns,” she said.

“And?”

“That go be a problem if they look a bit too close in here.” Pam pulled him toward the back of the room toward the kitchen. “Stacking plenty of rifle.”

They turned the corner and she opened a heavy iron lid of a massive coal stove with a grunt. Rows of rifles gleamed underneath.

Pam pulled a pair out. “Head out through the kitchen to the back closet. That go take you to the basement, and from there you can get out through the window to the back street.” She let the top of the stove drop. She took the lid off a large pot, pulled out a pistol, and handed it to John. “Get under the street using the grate, head north until you bump into someone. Let them know what happen. They’ll help you get where you need.”

Azteca started knocking at the door. “Just a minute,” Violet shouted. Pam raised her dress to reveal a holster fashioned out of leather for the rifle. Another for the pistol on the left thigh.

She dropped the dress back down. “Hopefully they go be real polite.”

“You think you can fight back against all this?” John asked. “They’re dropping from the sky, better technology, better weapons, more people.”

“This house been in my family since my granddad. I ain’t go be running around in no sewer and giving all this over to them,” Pam said.

“They looking like they go break the door in now,” Voilet said.

“Chances is they won’t spot nothing.” Pam pushed back. “Now go quick.”

John turned and followed her directions down into the basement. He barely fit out the window, looking around for the Azteca. Knowing there was no back door, they hadn’t posted any guards.

As he scrabbled out, he heard pans and pots thrown to the floor and feet thudding around. Pam or Violet shouted angrily back at someone.

John tensed, waiting for the shooting. It didn’t come.

Letting out a relieved breath, he moved toward the nearest grate and pulled it free. With one last breath of fresh air he dropped down under the streets, pulling the grate back over him.

Chapter Thirty-One

Had Pepper taken any longer to reach Jerome, he might have been too late. That bugged him. Was he getting soft? Comfortable in his ways? Nanagada might look like a tropical vacation, but Pepper wondered if he’d grown accustomed to it.

The steam car stopped on the edge of a plaza dominated by Tenochtilanome’s main sacrificial pyramid. Already today blood ran down the sides of it. A Teotl spacecraft had landed in the plaza.

“The boy stays,” Ahexotl said.

Pepper looked over and considered killing him. “Why?”

“So you don’t try anything strange, like attacking our gods.”

“Fair enough.” Pepper smiled. They had each other figured out all too well. He looked over at Jerome. “Remain calm. I’ll be back shortly.”

He stepped out of the car. Every muscle tensed, ready to spring at any second, Pepper walked forward with the several armed Azteca at either side. The wide-winged craft crouched above the stones, the pyramid rising up behind it.

Azteca warriors made a wall of bodies on either side of Pepper, feathered capes flapping slightly in the soft wind, rifles at the ready.

At the far end of the honor guard two Teotl stood. Warrior Teotl. Vaguely bipedal, they turned and faced Pepper. He noted the black, razorlike forearms, spiked fingers, and mirrored eyeplates. The creatures’ thick, chitinous skin would be almost impervious to low-caliber gunfire and edged objects.

Hard nuts to crack.

And behind the warrior-grown Teotl sat the divans on which the Teotl leaders sat, watching him from the shadows with their beady eyes.

The Azteca guided him to the shaded pavilion under the protection of one of the swooping wings. Throngs of Azteca honor guards stood in the background, looking over the proceedings.

The Teotl had returned from the skies and adapted to the local conditions quite quickly.

“Proceed to within five paces. No more. No less.” The voice came out of the air. The two warrior Teotl, polished and armored skins gleaming in the sun, moved to either side of him.

The three creatures in the couches stirred to stare at Pepper. Highly modified Teotl for thinking and planning, their bodies were crafted to support superfast brains. Radiator fans crested their skulls, the air above them rippling from dumped heat.

“Your body is laced with devices.” The center Teotl spoke Anglic. “Your physical abilities are amplified. You are not a part of this fallow world here.” A stubby, pale flipper flapped, as if it to indicate the city around them. “You come from beyond the outleading wormhole?”

“Yes.” He saw no reason to lie to them. Yet. Pepper looked up at the smooth underbelly of the craft. It looked like metal from the distance, but up close he wasn’t so sure.

“Did you come recently? The wormhole out to other worlds of your kind is closed.”

“I came before it closed.”

“And that was hundreds of years ago,” they said in a chorus.

“Yes.”

Three simultaneous sighs filled the air between the couches. They seemed disappointed. Or at least, were choosing to project it to him. A sigh was just as much a language marker as anything else.

Pepper regarded the mounds of flesh before him. “Why?”

A single measured tick of time passed as they conferred with each other with quick glances. “We have a deep need for emissaries.” More shifting. “We can reopen the wormhole to the next system by shoring open the mouth with exotic matter. But our species has a history of antagonism with yours, and presumably a reputation out there. We need help and advice to cross over.”

“Why?” Pepper folded his arms. Even though he didn’t trust them, if they were really going back to the other worlds, it might be a way to get back out to civilization decades earlier than planned. The Ma Wi Jung still languished on the bottom somewhere near Capitol City, useless to him. And even if fixed, it would require hundreds of years to cross the space required to get to a working wormhole.

If the wormhole back could just be fired up again, that was appealing to him.

“Your kind manipulates.” He spread his arms out. “We fell for your lies once.”

“We are now refugees. We have no time for deceptions and deceit,” the Teotl said.

Pepper stared at them. “Yes?”

“Our worlds have been destroyed for technological violations.” The words dripped out of the air and continued. “We have been deemed dangerous, our lease on existence terminated. We orbit this planet because we flee those who would destroy us. The wormhole we came through is temporarily closed again, but we will eventually need help keeping it closed. We seek to open and travel through the other wormhole to the worlds you once knew, but we need ambassadors and assistance.”

The beady eyes regarded him.

Pepper looked up at the craft. A working spaceship. Unlike the Ma Wi Jung. “I’m still listening,” he said.

“There are others like you. Ahexotl and Xippilli will be working to find more of them in the other large city. We’ll take you there to join up with these others, and there we will discuss terms and needs. Eventually we’ll take you to our home.”

“A whole other planet?”

“Our home orbits here right now.”

Pepper looked around at the Azteca. The original Teotl had manipulated humanity enough. This new set of lies would probably mean even more danger. But a quick ride back to Capitol City to get Jerome reunited with his father, that was worth a quick flirt.

“Okay,” Pepper said. “I’ll take the shuttle ride to Capitol City.”

The aliens hissed their satisfaction, and Pepper looked up at the giant wing overhead. Complex plots were not his thing, he preferred direct approaches.

But he would remain checked for now.

Chapter Thirty-Two

Xippilli followed Ahexotl toward the giant flying machine, looking at the Teotl with trepidation. He might know they were just creatures, as Ahexotl said, but somewhere deep inside he still retained the belief that these were gods.

He watched as a second flying machine climbed up into the air over the city. More than one had landed, and they had all filled their holds with Azteca warriors bound for Capitol City.

The strange creatures in their divans didn’t so much as glance his way as he walked toward the machine and the crowd of twenty warriors standing around Jerome and Pepper.

“Pepper is what they seek,” Ahexotl told him. “Eventually you can do what you want with the boy, but for now, I want him chained and guarded. Encouragement for Pepper. He’s dangerous. I don’t want him causing trouble.”

Xippilli looked over. “Are you sure that’s a good idea?”

“He needs controlled.” Ahexotl looked over at the man. “He’s dangerous. We know there are other immortal Nanagadans that have been here from the beginning, but these people are always hard to ferret out, and we already have what we need to please the gods. My thanks to you. Our task is already over, and we are in the gods’ favor.”

Xippilli nodded and continued to stare at the machine. Ahexotl waved at the warriors and they circled Jerome, cutting him off from Pepper.

“Hey,” Pepper snapped. Xippilli flinched. “What are you doing?”

“We need to make sure you fulfill your end of the bargain.” Ahexotl waved again, and the warriors clapped a collar on the boy’s neck. “It is a prong collar. He’ll be fine, as long as he doesn’t struggle.”

Nasty tips dug into Jerome’s neck. Xippilli avoided both their eyes. No doubt they viewed him as the worst kind of traitor right now.

Maybe they were right.

“Please,” Xippilli said. “Don’t struggle against this.”

He wanted to crawl into a hole and not come out as the warriors pulled Jerome with them, and they followed a spiked, gleaming Teotl into the great machine.

Ahexotl waited until Pepper followed, then spoke to Xippilli. “The attack will be over by the time you arrive to take control. You make sure to give the gods what they need and send me what I need, and all will be well.”

“And the outlying areas?” Xippilli asked.

“We’ll start with the city. I will decide what to do with the rest of Nanagada.”

Xippilli nodded, then followed the warriors into the heart of the machine. Faint light glimmered and Xippilli waited for his eyes to adjust as the hull behind him sealed itself shut. The machine started to shake as it rose into the sky.

Xippilli swallowed.

The thundering pitched higher, and inside everything shook. Xippilli grabbed the wall.

Pepper balanced easily enough while crouched on the floor, staring at him. He was also poking at the wall, using a fingernail to probe at it.

Xippilli stared at the tiny crenellations all along the domelike chamber whose smooth floor they sat on. At the front, a tiny niche hooked off from the chamber. Fibrous strands draped from the walls of it to swaddle the yellowed, fat Teotl as he leaned back with eyes closed to control the ship.

A glass of some sort separated the niche from them, and on their side of it an inky black and spiked Teotl stared back at them. Xippilli had no doubt it would kill them if they tried anything. That and the packed crowd of warriors in here made this a very, very secure space.

Yet still he felt like frayed rope about to snap. Pepper did things, he did not sit around waiting unless it ended in something. But the Teotl didn’t really know what Pepper was truly capable of or they wouldn’t have let him aboard. Would they?

Pepper versus the spiked Teotl. Xippilli wasn’t sure who would win.

“Relax,” Pepper told Jerome, folding his arms and leaning back against the wall. He closed his eyes. “Now’s the time you need to take a nap. Even in this thing it’s going to take another hour.”

Xippilli stared at the man, then at Jerome. Jerome leaned closer. “I will kill you one day, traitor,” the young man hissed.

Xippilli turned his back and moved toward the warriors, who reverently whispered among each other in awe about being so close to the Teotl.

Pepper shifted just as Xippilli felt his ears start to hurt. The ship settled down, thudded, and the vibrating slowly wound down.

“And here we come,” Pepper said, and stretched slowly, while keeping an eye on the twenty warriors packed in with them. “Xippilli, do me a favor? Step to your left two paces, and remain calm.”

“Calm?” Xippilli frowned. But he stepped over. Teotl or not, he would not trifle with the man.

“You have a collar on Jerome, who I promised John nothing would happen to. I’m getting off, and I’m going my own way for a while.”

“Your promise to assist the gods?”

“I might yet. But I disdain being told what to do.” Pepper reached over to the nearest warrior and pulled his rifle away in a smooth, relaxed movement. Then kicked the man back into the tightly packed crowd.

The Teotl behind him leapt. Pepper rolled forward with the impact and threw it into the group. Its head bounced off to the side and clear fluid pooled quickly at the warriors’ feet. Pepper raised the rifle and Xippilli grabbed the barrel.

“Wait.” He had do something to avoid the bloodshed.

Pepper hesitated.

Xippilli pointed the barrel of Pepper’s gun at the side of his own head and said in Nahautl, “You know who this man is and what he is capable of?”

They nodded.

“Then he’s taking me prisoner for now,” Xippilli said. “He does not want to currently go with us, and by fighting in here we endanger the god at the front.” By offering himself as a temporary hostage he could calm Pepper and get the man out of the ship without causing more damage. And Pepper would owe him. That would be valuable in the future.

The warriors nodded in agreement, and Xippilli let out the tight knot of fear in his stomach. He faced forward to the Teotl at the front. “Great sir, please open the hull for us so that no one further is killed.”

The hull cracked open and light spilled in. Judging by the carefully trimmed shrubs outside, Xippilli guessed they were in the gardens near the very center of Capitol City.

“I want that man’s clothes.” Pepper pointed at a jaguar-masked warrior with a long cape.

He handed the gun to Jerome once the items were handed over and changed, adjusting his dreadlocks. It was, Xippilli thought, convincing enough. Pepper as a Jaguar warrior.

Pepper looked forward at the Teotl in its niche, then walked over to where the hull had puckered, pushing Xippilli and Jerome in front of him. “You all wait for two minutes before following us out, or I’ll kill Xippilli.”

The hull opened further, more light stabbing into the dim interior. Xippilli walked out, and Pepper kept the rifle pointed at him. Ten Azteca waited outside in the bright sun, arrayed in a half circle.

Xippilli kept a cool expression as the Azteca stared at him. Pepper continued to push them forward.

“Where are our headquarters?” Xippilli asked the group, switching to Nahautl to talk to them. He looked around. The carefully kept grounds of the central gardens lay between the Ministerial Mansion and the docks. The mansion was behind them, and the closest Azteca in the welcoming reception pointed back at it.

Xippilli, Pepper, and Jerome moved toward it, and the Azteca fell in beside them.

“I am Atlahuah,” the nearest man said. “I command the men for Ahexotl, and for the gods. What is going here?” They were obviously not sure whether they should be trying to shoot Pepper, but Xippilli seemed quite calm and okay.

“I’m temporarily being used as a hostage to get to that road.” Xippilli handed Atlahuah a piece of parchment with Ahexhotl’s instructions on it. “There is nothing we can do right now, so I’m going to walk with them, and then return. I know the mansion. Come find me in the lobby, but don’t endanger your life by trying to rescue me right now, or shoot these two men. The gods want them for some reason.”

Atlahuah looked slightly offended, but obeyed and left with his men for the mansion.

The three of them continued through the high shrubs and walkways until they came to the street, and Xippilli stopped.

Pepper leaned in. “You jumped quickly to becoming the Azteca ruler of the city.”

“Better me than some warrior-priest, Pepper. What else can I do? It is either me or a far worse leader who will spill far more blood.”

“He lying to save he life,” Jerome said. “Kill him and let’s run now.”

Xippilli turned to face them both. “You move to anger too quickly. Both of you. Why was that necessary, why not talk to the gods?”

“You shackle his neck and expect calm?” Pepper said.

“That was Ahexotl’s idea,” Xippilli snapped. “Would you have killed everyone in there over his mistake?”

Pepper nodded. Xippilli fought frustration.

Xippilli looked over at Jerome. “Get to safety, or hiding. I’ll find another ancient. And I’ll bear Ahexotl’s wrath. And I’ll try to manage the city in this new time and save as many lives as I can.”

“Be careful,” Pepper said with a slight smile. “It’s a slippery slope out there to becoming the dictator of the city.”

“And what will you be doing?”

“Research,” Pepper said.

“Research?”

“Yes.” Pepper broke the ring off Jerome’s neck with his bare hands and handed it to Xippilli. “The Teotl want to get through the other wormhole back to the rest of the worlds. But the question is, why?”

“They told you why.”

“That may or may not be true,” Pepper said. “And therefore, I’d like to do some research to figure out if they are telling the truth.”

“How will you do that?” Xippilli asked.

“I’m sure there are Teotl that will be available to answer my questions, eventually,” Pepper said. “For now, we’re going to disappear.”

He started to walk away with Jerome.

“Pepper, what were you going to do if I hadn’t pointed that gun at myself?” Xippilli asked.

“Kill them all,” Pepper said, and turned the corner.

Chapter Thirty-Three

Jerome hurried to keep up with Pepper. Capitol City was not the bustling world he remembered. The city remained clutched in dark, quiet, under some sort of curfew. Jerome thought he saw faces in windows, which retreated quickly into the shadows. Electric lights flickered as the power randomly failed throughout the once brightly lit inner walls of the city.

“You would have killed all those Azteca in there?” Jerome asked Pepper.

“Yes.”

“And Xippilli too?” Jerome could hardly contain his anger just by mentioning the name.

“Maybe.”

“If you didn’t, I would.” Xippilli had just turned him over. All those mongoose-men back in Tenochtitlanome had died because of him. They had died trying to protect Jerome, he wouldn’t forget who had done the right thing anytime soon.

A few Azteca warriors patrolled the intersections, occasionally eyeing them. They challenged Pepper, who walked past them with a dismissive wave of the Jaguar warrior he was dressed up as and a snapped set of orders in Nahautl.

They let them walk on.

Jerome kept quiet until they turned a corner away from the Azteca. “What are we doing?”

He couldn’t see past the mask Pepper wore, the stylized grinning jaguar face. Pepper paused, and Jerome froze. Something rustled, they were being followed.

Pepper reached under the cape he wore.

“Don’t. Fucking. Move.” The command was repeated in Nahautl. Five mongoose-men rounded a corner, rifles aimed at Pepper. “Let the boy go.”

Jerome raised his hands, moving between them and Pepper. “Wait, don’t shoot him, you don’t understand.”

“Get my son away from him now!” a familiar voice snapped. Jerome looked around and saw John push through the mongoose-men.

“Dad!” Relief vibrated through Jerome.

“Come over here, Jerome.” John kept a rifle aimed at Pepper’s head as he waved Jerome over. Jerome didn’t move.

Pepper shook his masked head. “John, don’t point that thing at me.”

Jerome watched his father pause.

“Pepper?” John frowned.

“Who the hell else?” Pepper said, voice unhurried.

Jerome watched his father break into a grin and lower his rifle. John grabbed Pepper’s shoulder. “You’re alive as well!”

Pepper looked down at the arm. John stopped smiling and let go of him.

“Yes,” Pepper said. He removed the Azteca mask and dropped it to the ground. His dreads fell down around his shoulders. “We made it back. I told you I would keep an eye on Jerome. I, for one, am good at promises.”

“Let’s get off the street,” John said. “There’ll be a patrol through soon.”

The mongoose-men lead them down into the sewers. At this level it was stale runoff. Smelly, but nothing too bad. They sludged through the water.

“They’re hunting for any of us who settled the planet, councilmen, me, maybe you,” John said. “They’re offering big rewards and promising no harm. You have any idea what that’s about?”

Jerome and the mongoose-men around him struggled to keep up with Pepper and John. But having both men here made Jerome feel that things were happening.

“They approached me in Tenochtitlanome,” Pepper said. “They seem to think they’re also going to reopen the wormhole back out, and they need human help to deal with humans on the other side.”

“And you said?”

Pepper paused at a junction. A pool of wastewater rimmed by railings. “Said I’d think about it. How’s our starship doing, John?”

“The Ma Wi Jung is not going to fly us out of here.”

Water trickled out of a storm drain. Jerome listened to his dad and Pepper and felt like half a man. Like all the other little people that gathered around those two and looked up. Here were the heroes of the last war with the Azteca.

And he’d been saved by Pepper back then as well.

John hadn’t even looked back at him. Or touched his arm like Pepper’s.

Pepper sniffed. “Here’s the thing. They’re still using the Azteca as pawns.”

“They always have.”

“The Teotl arrive in orbit, with advanced technology and superiority, and they’re using Jaguar warriors with rifles to subdue the city? They’re using a bunch of shuttles to ferry men with rifles around?” Pepper leaned back against the rail.

“They don’t want to get their hands dirty.”

“It’s more than that.” Pepper looked at the mongoose-men. “I think there are only a handful of them in orbit. They might actually be somewhat honest in needing our help.”

“Help?” John looked disgusted.

“They claim they’re refugees.”

“But they’re Teotl,” Jerome hissed.

Pepper shrugged. “They want our help. I see advantages. I see me getting off this damn planet.”

Damn planet? Jerome looked at Pepper. “So you go get off this ‘damn planet’ by joining them murderers!”

“They say something worse is coming through the wormhole after them.”

“And you believe them?” Jerome replied. “You believe them?”

Pepper removed something from under the feathered cape. “I stole this from the Teotl that jumped me in the shuttle.” Pepper held a fuzzy-looking, green necklace with a solid-silver section in the middle. In his other hand he held an oval. Jerome reached for it, but John grabbed his wrist.

“Don’t. It’s an aerogel necklace with a nanofilament, it’ll slice your hand off it you tug on it wrong.” John looked at Pepper. “It’s a slave collar. And the oval is to trigger it?”

“Yes. Deceptions behind deceptions.” Pepper gently tossed the necklace to John, who snagged it out of the air with a grunt. “I think they may need us. But they’re not interested in being partners, ultimately. Things might be a little bit more one-sided once they have us where they need us.”

“So what next?” John carefully pocketed the necklace.

“What are these mongoose-men up to?” Pepper asked.

“Heading on with explosives to cause the Azteca some trouble. They were helping me get near the mansion. They have to move on.”

“Why?” Pepper frowned.

“Been watching to see if Jerome or you got captured.” John turned to the mongoose-men. “Thanks.”

They shook hands, glanced at Pepper one last time, then melted back off into the shadows.

“Can you remember how to get to the Crosswise bunker?” Pepper asked.

John nodded. “That memory is back, yes.”

“Go there. You’ll be safe. So will Jerome.”

“What you doing?” Jerome asked Pepper.

“I need to go ask some questions.” Pepper let go of the rail and walked off, brightly colored cape swaying until it was swallowed by the darkness.

“You been friend for a long, long time, right?” Jerome observed. “Know what he up to?”

“Whatever it is, someone’s going to be unhappy tonight. I think Pepper’s in a bit of a mood. Come on, we need to get to that sewer, it’s dangerous here.” Then John grabbed Jerome. “I’m glad to see you again, Son.”

Despite feeling that he’d grown out of it years ago, Jerome hugged him. “It was bad there. It was really bad.”

“I know.”

The water continued gurgling, and the moment passed. The city wasn’t theirs anymore, they had a lot more skulking around to do to get to this new bunker.

Chapter Thirty-Four

Xippilli watched the lights of Capitol City flicker from his office’s balcony on the Ministry building. The new, and quite hastily erected, wooden sacrificial pyramid flickered in the light of bonfires on the far edge of the gardens. It sat just past one of the strange flying machines.

He’d stood here, with dignitaries and leaders, coming to the office to seek their help. He’d done his best to try to get elected to the position, but had failed. Nanagadans weren’t ready to elect someone from over the mountains just yet.

Now it was his at last. An ashen victory.

Someone behind cleared his throat. Xippilli turned. A warrior-priest stood by the curtains, and Xippilli’s stomach flipped when the man walked forward. “There are thousands of people in our pens out there. Our gods blessed us. Shouldn’t we return the honor?”

Xippilli walked past the man, brushing aside the diaphanous curtains. He sat behind his desk and tapped the document Ahexotl had given him. “There could be ancient humans in those pens, the ‘old-fathers’ they call them here. The gods are outspoken about needing these people. Disobeying that is unwise.” He’d already met a Teotl by himself today. A strange-looking thing that was carried around, as it had tentacles.

It had been very upset.

It had reiterated how important it was that they capture, alive and well, any human beings who had lived three centuries ago when this planet had been settled. At that moment Xippilli had realized that he wasn’t really in charge of anything in the city.

The warrior-priest stared at Xippilli. “You are right. But do remember, before long, our men will want blood. Is the holy thing to do. It is the right thing.”

He left with a rustle, and Xippilli now sat alone in the office. That scared him more than anything else.

The burden of trying to save lives while maintaining his duties as the Azteca leader weighed heavily enough that he looked over at a heavily decorated pistol in a glass box on his desk.

But even suicide would be too horrible, as Xippilli knew that the lives of those in the pens would disappear along with his.

He sank into the chair and curled up in it.

Chapter Thirty-Five

The night air stank of fear.

Pepper sat on the corner of a railing at the top of a four-story apartment complex and watched the city. A massive wooden pyramid now dominated the end of the large gardens at the center of the city. Nanagadans milled around in large pens covered in razor wire.

But they weren’t being sacrificed.

He’d found himself a raincoat with big inner pockets to keep his gear in. The Azteca disguise made for better camouflage, but damn, he just wanted to be comfortable.

He sighed and walked over to a pipe and slid down to street level.

Two Hawk men standing by the corner of the street turned, slightly confused, and dropped to the cobblestones before even opening their mouths to shout a warning.

Pepper moved on.

In orbit the new Teotl were trying to stabilize and force open the wormhole that led back to humanity. He wanted that. Whatever he was going to do would encourage that. Pepper wanted to return home more than anything.

But after seeing the pens, he also wanted to make sure they paid a price for what they were doing here. If they helped destroy lives as they once had, Pepper would make them pay in kind.

But he had to wait, and it frustrated him. His plans had to be reset, on the fly, and that always led to mistakes.

Pepper sighed again, tired, and started zigzagging his way down the street, sniffing for something new, something a little sweeter, decayed, and familiar.

He found a Teotl half an hour later, ensconced deep in a basement room surrounded by warriors who had to be silently killed, one by one.

Pepper pulled out a knife in each hand and took several deep breaths, then kicked the solid-oak door in.

A handful of Azteca bodyguards turned around, grabbing weapons.

None of the mercifully brief struggles and choked silences drew much attention.

Chapter Thirty-Six

John turned to the thick stone door as it creaked open. No one but Pepper would know how to get here. Still, he reached into a small canvas bag one of the mongoose-men had given him and pulled a pistol out.

Jerome had fallen asleep against one of the walls. The few hours they’d had alone waiting for Pepper had been enough to catch him up on what had happened in Tenochtitlanome, as well as to snack on some fruit and dried meat John had found in the bag.

“Give me a hand.” Pepper dragged a large wicker basket in with him. Three pale tentacles with gold tips dangled out of its side.

Jerome woke up, blinking, and jumped up to help pull it in. He shut the well-weighted door with a slow thud.

Pepper sat down, out of breath. “I almost got caught by the tide coming through.” The Crosswise bunker lay deep under the city, hundreds of feet below Crosswise Street. Getting there took one through flooded storm drains and city tide-management sewers. It made it safe to hole up in.

A tentacle stirred. Pepper raised a hand. “Give me the collar.”

“Here.” John handed it over and Pepper snapped the ring of material on the creature in the basket.

Pepper leaned back, as if admiring his handiwork. “It was meant for whoever they talking into being an emissary. Now we put it on one of them.”

The creature stirred and coughed up phlegm. Pepper grabbed the rim of the basket and flipped it to dump the Teotl out onto the ground. It tumbled and flailed until Pepper stopped it with a swift kick.

It looked like something that belonged underwater, John thought. More octopus than biped. Its skin shone in the low light of the ceiling’s bioluminescent rock glow. Capitol City had been designed using some incredible tricks, most of them taught to the Nanagadans by aliens like this three hundred years ago.

Lidded eyes blinked, and it spat a series of syllables at them in a whistle.

“You can do better,” Pepper said in a soft voice. “I know you understand, I know you speak Anglic.”

It stared at them. Then from within the beaklike mouth it said, “You are insane.”

“Excellent. It speaks.” Pepper crouched in front of the creature and pulled a simple leather belt from inside the raincoat he now wore. “Come here, John.”

John walked over.

“I’m thinking that collar is certainly evidence of bad faith.” Pepper sniffed. “A sign that, even if they may speak the truth about needing our help, we’d be stupid to trust them.”

“We have fifteen years to wait before our own ship could get us out there.” John looked around at the green-stoned room. “We could lay low, wait for the Ma Wi Jung to heal. We don’t have to get mixed up with all this.”

“I’m not waiting fifteen years for anything.” Pepper gave John the belt. It felt rough in his hands. The buckle made a tink sound. “They’re Teotl. They can fix the Ma Wi Jung in exchange for our help. We just need to make sure we’re not pushed around.”

“The jungle would be almost impossible for even the Teotl to penetrate. We could hide well outside Capitol City.” John looked at Jerome. His son had left his house a few years ago, but he couldn’t help but want to choose the safest option for Jerome.

“We can’t erase ourselves like that.” Pepper pointed at the Teotl with a long knife that he pulled from his boots. “Besides, we already have this one now. I’ve committed us to a course.”

“This Teotl, it’s from orbit?” John asked. He felt weary.

Pepper turned and looked at it. “Oh, yes. This Teotl seems to be an important one. It had lots of guards.”

This was Pepper’s way. Direct. And John owed him for his son’s life. He turned to Jerome. “Jerome, what we’re going to do will be extremely dangerous.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“We could help you get out into the jungle. You could stay out there and stay low.”

Jerome shook his head. “Anything you two doing, I want be there.”

“It’ll get ugly.”

“Ugly like loosing people you had love to the Azteca? Like losing Mother?” Jerome snapped. “I seen ugly. I ready for ugly.”

John nodded, reached over, and tied the belt around the middle of the Teotl’s nearest tentacle. “I take it we’re showing them we’re quite serious? No messing around with us?”

He cinched it tight over the smooth, rubbery skin. It felt familiar to be falling into this pattern with Pepper.

“It’ll be your turn to talk to the Teotl when this is done,” Pepper said.

John nodded. “I figured.”

“What are you doing?” the Teotl asked.

“Proving we have you captive.” Pepper ran a thumb over the knife’s edge. “And making a point about what I’m capable of doing when I suspect people might be lying to me.”

John flinched as the Teotl screamed.

Over the night more Azteca had come into the city. They filled the streets, breaking down doors and rushing into houses.

“Please be calm. Please do as they say and you will not be hurt.” A small man in beige pants and a red shirt stood with the Azteca, translating for them. “They want information about one of their own that is missing. A god. They say a god is missing.”

John walked down the street, watching whole families forced out onto the street with their hands tied behind them by rope.

The Azteca were pissed.

“If you know anything, please tell us.” The translator’s voice quavered.

The translator was a man in a hard place, John thought as he shifted the canvas bag slung over his shoulder into a more comfortable position. The man had probably fled the Azteca years ago to settle in Capitol City. Fled the sacrifices and blood because he didn’t believe in it. But he didn’t fit in well in the city. He might have struggled to live and suffered some injustices based on who and what he was, except for when he was in Tolteca-town, where all the other Azteca refugees settled in the city. And now he faced his worst nightmare. The Azteca had caught back up to him.

A child burst into tears and his mother shushed him.

A Jaguar scout walked over to John. He pointed at the ground. John looked at the translator, who turned to see what the commotion was.

“Sir, please get to your knees,” the translator said.

John reached into his bag. The scout shouted, then screamed when John dropped a whole foot-long piece of tentacle on the cobblestones between them.

“Tell him their missing god is not dead, and only I know where he is,” John said to the translator.

The Toltecan shivered and did as John asked.

Silence fell across the entire street. Warriors walked away from their prisoners toward John. John looked up reflexively, for the rooftops. He caught the quick flutter of a raincoat and smiled. Pepper was waiting. He’d come down off the rooftops once John got the Teotl to agree to a meeting.

“Stay with me, translator,” John said. “I’m scared too. But tell him I need to talk to the new gods. I have an offer for them.”

The man nodded, then broke into a shy smile. “You’re John deBrun, aren’t you? You’re back.”

“It would seem so.” John held up the bag. “Tell them I’d like to go now.”

Behind him he could hear muttering as the word spread. For some reason it seemed to have changed the mood.

Not John’s mood. It felt as if a great weight had been shackled to him again. He’d rescued them all once before from the hell of the Azteca; no doubt they found hope in seeing him again.

But some holes were deep enough there wasn’t even a ray of light, and John felt as if he’d fallen farther into one than ever before.

Fifty Azteca warriors surrounded him, rifles and macuahuitl held ready, as Capitol City watched him be marched down the road toward the city’s gardens.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Before Pepper left, he slipped a small oval disk into Jerome’s hand. Jerome turned it over. A red button glowed in the center of it.

“Trigger the button, the noose tightens.” Jerome looked over at the Teotl, which had grunted and flopped its way across the room to the far corner, dripping clear ichor all the way.

“The necklace?”

“It’ll slice the alien’s head from its trunk. So don’t press it unless you really, really need to.”

Then Pepper slipped out of the door after John.

Jerome sat holding his knees now, just watching the creature.

It remained in the corner, cradling the cut tentacle with its others, keening. Clear ichor still dribbled from the stump, a steady dripping that alarmed Jerome. Pepper had made it clear that they needed the Teotl alive as a bargaining chip. Would the slow-leaking wound kill it?

Pepper wouldn’t have left it to die if that was the case.

Still.

“You understand me, right?” Jerome walked over. He kept the disk in his hand and his thumb ready to trigger the noose in case the living god attacked him.

It hissed. Jerome tightened his grip on the disk.

“Is there anything I can do to stop the bleeding?” His voice quavered, and he hated himself for being scared of it.

Just a brain on tentacles. His dad had explained it once. Highly developed and modified to plan, and think, a Teotl ruler.

Jerome stepped closer; a tentacle stirred. The creature backed away from him, scrunching itself into the corner.

It was scared.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Jerome said, slow and clear. “I promise.”

The Teotl regarded him with its large eyes and blinked. “Bandage. Something to wrap…”

Jerome turned to the mess his dad had left behind when he’d dumped the canvas bag out and put the alien’s tentacle in it. Jerome found several changes of clothes and food.

“Here.” He walked back and tossed the shirt over. It puffed out, floated slowly down, and the Teotl caught it with a grunt. Jerome watched the Teotl carefully wrap the shirt around its stump.

“Thank you.” It leaned against the wall again and looked up at the ceiling.

Jerome sat down and pulled an apple out of the pile. He used a penknife to cut it into sections and core out the seeds.

“What is your name?” the Teotl asked.

“Why?” Jerome bit into a quarter of an apple. It tasted sweet. He hadn’t eaten all night.

“Every bit of civility in such situations is needed,” it gasped.

The creature was, Jerome decided, too calm despite all this. It made him more suspicious. “I prefer you scared.”

“My name is Metztli.”

“I don’t care.” He cut another piece of apple, removed the skin with three careful jabs of the knife.

The Teotl continued, “You are called Jerome.”

Jerome looked over at it. “So?”

“So now we know who we are.” The Teotl had stopped bleeding. It looked down at its bandaged stump.

“You heal quick.” Jerome pocketed the knife.

“One of our many gifts. And weaknesses.” It sighed again.

Jerome cocked his head to the left. “Weakness?” Unusual that it would admit to anything like that.

“Maybe.” Two sets of eyelids, the inner moist and transparent, flicked. “We specialize. Specialization offers many benefits, but during cataclysmic events renders a species vulnerable, and we are vulnerable, Jerome. Very vulnerable.”

“You specialize in what?” Despite himself Jerome was curious.

The Teotl stirred. “Look at my current form. I’m useless, captured so easily, utterly unable to defend myself.”

“If you had had a gun you could have shoot back.”

“My only useful function is an ability to communicate.”

“That it?”

The Teotl twisted the fat mass of its translucent head. Jerome saw small metal plugs glint. “That is all.”

A life plugged into machines to feed itself, working only to learn languages and how they worked.

Then Jerome nodded. “You the most dangerous.” This one in particular, talking to them. Its words were its weapons. Just because it could not physically attack him didn’t mean it couldn’t cause harm in other manners.

It cradled its arm and shrank. “What do you mean?”

“You manipulate me. Try to get me understanding you side of the story, get inside me head.” Jerome held up the remote to the necklace on the creature’s neck. “You go shut up now.”

“But—”

Jerome threw the pocketknife at it. The Teotl flinched as the knife struck the side of the wall and clattered back toward Jerome.

“Shut up.” Jerome stood up. “You poisoning me head with you ‘communication.’ Language you weapon. I see you now, Metztli, I see you now.”

He paced the room. Working up that deep anger, thinking about his mother’s bones lying in an anonymous Azteca mass grave somewhere outside Brungstun.

Here he was standing next to the very thing that had commanded the Azteca. “From now,” he shouted, “I go ask the questions, you tell me the answer. That all.”

Deep breaths, he told himself. Pepper needed him. Needed him to keep his calm and pull this all off. For Pepper.

“What you doing here?” Jerome asked the Metztli.

“You need the history if you are to understand,” it complained. “You need grounded.”

“Get on with it all,” Jerome warned.

Metztli looked at him, eyelids flickering up, breathing heavily. “This was supposed to be where we gained our independence. Instead, your kind came as well.”

“Why again?” Jerome crouched and stared across at it with fire in his eyes. “What you doing this time?”

“We run from our parasitic masters. We run from destruction of our entire race. We need your help. If we did strange things before, it was because we were arrogant enough to assume this planet would be ours. We no longer want it, we’re refugees, running for our lives. If we do anything strange now, it is out of desperation.”

They stared at each other.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

John watched the fluid lines of the Teotls’ shuttle with an outwardly disinterested eye. He’d been taken there almost straightaway.

The curves reminded him of the Ma Wi Jung, still lying under the water, resting easy on the rocky bottom several miles from the city’s walls.

They shared a history. Somewhere, long ago, maybe even a line of design. The Ma Wi Jung had been a collaborative project between the Loa and the brightest minds in Nanagada’s orbit so many hundreds of years past.

A chance, John had thought at that time, for humanity to leapfrog itself into a strong technological position.

A Teotl, bred for military prowess, cartilage-ribbed and edged razor sharp, stared him down. Fifty Azteca warriors with rifles casually cradled in their arms stood by, waiting for any trouble.

“We absolutely refuse.” The pilot, plugged into a massive life-support sedan, ichor dripping around the edges of tubes that pulsed liquid life into its body, regarded him with milky eyecaps. It spit as it spoke. “You cannot expect a position of trust to be formed by kidnappers and terrorists like yourselves.” The words, as usual, issued from somewhere deep in the Teotl’s throat, but not from its mouth. A mechanical voice box.

Five warrior Teotl formed a guard between the pilot and John. All of them held long, large, deadly looking weapons aimed unerringly at him.

John held out one of the pamphlets from the Teotl that claimed they needed human emissaries. “You do not need us anymore?”

“We choose how this conversation flies on, not you,” the pilot said after a long pause.

John would bet anything by the way it waited so long before each sentence that something, somewhere in orbit, was whispering translations into the pilot’s head. He had someone else in on the conversation. And that suggested that translators were in short supply.

Pepper had chosen his prey well.

“That’s true, but have you looked at the DNA of the specimen I carried with me?” John leaned forward. The hologram over the pilot’s belly fluttered slightly. Loss of concentration on its part?

It hissed at him. John felt something flicker in the back of his mind. The Teotl was testing to see if his personal implants could be hacked. His navigation senses tapped directly into the cortex. They could have themselves a zombie to play with.

If they were good enough. John’s ability to tie into lamina had been hand-rolled by Nanagadans in orbit; it was unfamiliar enough that the Teotl should have trouble. The Teotl, much to everyone’s amazement, used the same protocols for mind-computer interfaces as the Gahe, and Maatan. It seemed as if a standard piece of technology got passed around. And only the humans were usually obstinate enough to try to reinvent the wheel.

“So you know we have a valuable resource of yours.” John ignored the chills going up and down his spine, the tiny tremors.

“Yes. Does it remain alive?”

“Yes.”

More waiting. “What is your price?”

“We want you to repair a ship of our own.”

“It will be considered.”

“Thank you.” John folded his arms and stared straight ahead. The attempts to hack into his very mind finally stopped, frustrated by the nonstandard equipment in John’s head.

The pilot labored itself into a semi-sitting postion. “You are accepted within us. Your role will be laid out in contract. That is your preferred form?”

“Yes.”

The pilot shifted and the divan slowly raised itself on a single flowing leg that oozed out from under the rim and turned toward the flowing-teardrop-shaped shuttle.

“We make for orbit in one hour,” the pilot boomed back at him. “Bring the translator to us with yourselves by then.”

That soon?

“We’ll all be ready,” John said. The divan squeaked to a halt and the warrior Teotl shifted. John bit his lip and his fingers itched to dance across an imaginary control set to blast him the hell out of this situation.

“All?” the pilot repeated after several heaved breaths.

“My son and Pepper. They will come with the translator.”

An explosion of random geometry flowed out of the divan’s holographic display. The pilot almost disappeared under a hail of blue cubes, then the display shut down.

“That one called Pepper will not attend you. We forbid it. We have seen it attack, it is dangerous.”

“You have your own protections. I need mine. If you do anything stupid, so will Pepper.” John stood up in front of the advancing divan, daring the pilot to run him down. It was waiting for orders. Then the divan began to inch forward again.

“Yes. Yes, do so. Do bring the aggressive one.”

The pilot moved the divan slowly up to the shuttle. John walked forward and closed his eyes as a warrior Teotl stepped out from underneath, obviously warning him to stop.

He did.

Somewhere deep in John’s mind a single point of light blossomed, then unpacked itself further into a sliver of paper with a question mark on it.

John opened his eyes, the ghostly question mark fading from the air, and turned back around. Lithe Teotl closed in around him and herded him out of the gardens toward the street.

He walked on for several minutes.

Pepper hopped to his feet. “Well?”

“You were right.” John fell into step behind him. They were free to go, but still being escorted out of range of the shuttle by Azteca. “Their interfaces are standard, I’m allowed access to them.”

“Good.” Pepper clenched a fist and smiled.

John could communicate with the shuttle. Still, it was a far cry from being able to fly it. Or even take it over. He hoped Pepper realized that.

But they were in and negotiating with the enemy.

Pepper led him randomly throughout the streets to lose anyone or anything following them.

“What do you think we’re going to find up there?” John asked.

Pepper shrugged. “We’re going to need something. Something other than a hostage to keep our edge.”

John tapped the tiny flask in his coat. Pepper was the kind of man who wouldn’t think twice about releasing something like that against his enemies, while John tried to forget he even had it as he let the dilemma simmer in the back of his mind.

Of course, the Loa could be manipulating him as well.

“I may have something,” John said, and pulled it out.

But after he explained what it was, even Pepper turned it over carefully, then handed it back.

John refused. “You keep it.”

“Why?”

“If we need to use it, you will be in a better position to trigger it.”

Pepper kept turning it over in his hands. Then he looked up at the sky and pocketed it. “It shouldn’t come to that.”

John nodded. He hoped to hell not.

“You’re slowing me down,” Pepper said, “and we’re still being followed. I’m going to go fetch Jerome and the Teotl. I’ll met you back here in an hour.”

Pepper disappeared off into an alley, and John kept walking, wondering what was following him.

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Metztli hiccuped, and after the long stretches of silence, Jerome finally broke and asked, “Why you all running?”

“Ah, ah.” Metztli scraped around and looked at Jerome in the dim green light. It coughed, a tiny hacking, and spit. “Our overlords have decided we are a threat for investigating advanced technologies. They destroy our nests, our ships, our supporters. It is genocide.”

Genocide. That was something, Jerome thought, that Metztli and its ilk knew well.

“Old things,” Metztli continued. “Very old. They control much: communications, and technologies. Very powerful, we are all their subjects.” Metztli wrapped its tentacles around itself. “You are too, even in this place that your kind tried to hide itself in.”

“Never heard of them.”

“But they are out there, and coming for all of us. Coming here is our last chance for survival, we have been forced away elsewhere. We tried to take this world so long ago in anticipation of the coming wars, but we failed. Now we come again, with differing strategies.”

“So you fighting them?”

“No. We run, now. Run and look to hide. We need your help.”

“Help? Help you?” Jerome shook his head. “We know about the kind of help you bring, we don’t want no part of it.”

“Well,” the Teotl said. “You really don’t have a choice.”

The door scraped open.

“We have no choice. Really?” Pepper slipped through. “People always have choices,” he said.

“A wormhole never truly closes,” Metztli said. “The expensive exotic matter is merely mostly removed, leaving a passageway impossibly small and therefore closed.”

“Or you use really large nuclear weapons to blow the exotic matter out and destabilize the hole,” Pepper said.

Metztli blinked and looked over. “Crude, and effective. But even after that with replacement matter, and enough energy, it can be forced back into shape.”

“We saw.” Pepper walked over to the Teotl and stood over it. “Detritus from the replacement matter and waste energy pouring out of it. An incredible project.”

“The Spindle,” Jerome said. “You talking about the Spindle, right?”

Pepper nodded. “Do you have the resources to open the next one, the one leading back towards our systems?”

“Barely. We exhausted much to reclose the wormhole.”

“We don’t have such tools at our disposal,” Pepper said.

“We will teach you. We need to teach you.”

“Because the bad guys are coming through after you, right?” Pepper smiled.

“Yes, yes,” the Teotl hissed. “With your help, with resources we do not have now, we can keep the wormhole closed. Together.”

“Toss me the remote,” Pepper ordered Jerome. Jerome did so, and Pepper pocketed it. “How many ships and warriors do you have?”

“One ship. Fifteen warriors. Seventeen specialized units, five masters of the gene, seven masters of the metals and chemistries. Some shuttles. I do not know how many. Four hundred reproductive units. A thousand eggs incubating.”

The thought of a thousand Teotl waiting to be born made Jerome shiver.

“We wish to bargain for any world, any world that no one wishes, and we will shape our eggs to thrive in it. We will sign any nonaggression pact. We will accept most terms. We will share any technology.”

Jerome had imagined clouds of Teotl hanging over their world, ready to darken the skies. Instead, they had a desperate few dirty refugees, vulnerable and begging for their lives.

Pepper spread his arms. “Well, friend, you’re well and truly up that creek, aren’t you? And you are bringing down a great danger onto us. There are few reasons we should help you.”

“What creek?” the Teotl asked, a concerned note in its voice.

“The same one humanity’s been in for the last few hundred years. The same one you tried to send us up. Shit creek.” Pepper snapped his fingers. “One ship, that’s it?”

“That is it. We are the last of our kind. Many millions died after you shut the wormhole down that led to us. They died to protect us, to get us through and this far.”

Millions.

“One ship to get me back out on the other side of the wormhole to civilization. One freaking ship,” Pepper repeated. “I like those odds.”

“They are not good odds,” Metztli said.

Pepper smiled. “Not for you they aren’t, no.” He turned around and pushed the door open. “Time to leave.” He pushed the Teotl into the wicker basket.

As Pepper dragged the alien out, Jerome waited until they passed, then picked up his pocketknife and followed them.

Chapter Forty

The wind kicked at them, stirring Pepper’s locks slightly as the odd trio waited before the Teotl shuttle. Pepper tasted salt, and a myriad of other things on the wind. He ignored it all and remained still as a pair of Teotl opened his coat.

One by one they removed items. The two shotguns first. Pepper kept the small flask John had given him in his hands, slightly obscured by the remote to the collar.

The irony of the creatures’ own devices being used on them like this was Pepper’s kind of irony.

“They’re actually taking us up,” John said. Pepper nodded. Jerome stood between them.

The disarming continued. Next came the brace of pistols by unbuckling a belt. The Teotl snorted as the smooth-handled hunting knife came out of its case, and the machete with the oak handle tugged out along with it. They found the two pistols by his ankles, stiletto strapped to his calf, and finally the handmade sword on his back.

Pepper stepped over the pile they’d made. “You’re staring,” he said to Jerome.

Jerome looked down at the ground. John grabbed his son’s shoulder. “You sure you don’t want to stay? You don’t have to get involved in all this.”

“I already in.” Jerome shook free. “Far enough in it don’t matter where I go now.” Pepper agreed silently. The boy had as much a right to get off the planet as John or he.

They grouped up and stood at the shuttle’s side. A split appeared in the shiny skin, a man-sized entrance growing to accept them. Pepper walked through.

Across the grass, from the edge of the city, Pepper heard a scream. The Teotl had what they wanted now. Someone was being sacrificed somewhere on the edge of the city.

John looked back at him. “You okay?”

“Keep moving, let’s get this over with.”

The shuttle’s inhabitants swung from cocoons as it gained altitude, while the humans remained warily at the back, shuffled into a corner.

The Teotl were insane to let them into their lair. What new minds were controlling them? They’d lost a certain edge Pepper expected. Maybe the Teotl who had managed to land on Nanagada in the old days had been a particularly nasty sort.

He sighed to himself. Too much gray, not enough black and white for his taste.

They hadn’t tried to kill him yet, though. That was a plus. He began to let the right hemisphere of his brain slip into sleep while he watched the bundles of Teotl inside the craft bounce around, dangling from the current top of the shuttle.

Then he noticed something, like the aftertaste of orange rind on the back of his tongue. Jerome and John leaned against each other, asleep. Peaceful. Out. Something in the air, targeted at them.

Pepper smiled. That was more like it. He closed his opened eye, slowed his breathing, and slipped into an apparent sleep.

Chapter Forty-One

Pepper shook John awake. He looked around and gagged on the taste of orange rind.

“Jerome?” John staggered up and looked at Pepper. “What the hell happened? Where’s Jerome?” They weren’t aboard a shuttle.

“Easy, man, we’re okay.” Pepper steadied him. John swayed for a second, unfocused his eyes, and checked the time. It glowed fuzzily in his field of view, laid overtop everything he could see. He’d lost five hours. “Jerome is outside keeping an eye on our hostage.”

“I’ve lost five hours?”

Pepper sighed. “I know.” He wiped his hands off. “They gassed us on the way up and tried to separate us. Would have made for some nice negotiating on their part, having Jerome.”

“What’d you do?”

“Grabbed the first warrior’s arm when he came in to pick us up. I don’t think they’ll try again. Spooked them.” Pepper’s lips quirked, a grin, gone before John even realized it.

“Okay.” John took a deep breath. A whole world trickled in through the edges of his vision. The walls, a polished gray rock of some sort, faded into swirls of bright, gaudy orange and blue. A clear patch glowed hot white, with squiggles of wavy lines through it.

Alien text.

John squinted, then held up a hand and cleared a section of his viewpoint, a window into the real. The drab wall returned. “The data overlays. They’re the same that the Gahe and Maatan use. Standard.” Everywhere John looked he could see and access data tied into the real physical location. It was a breath of fresh air. He hadn’t been in an environment like this for a long time. It felt like coming home.

“Standard?” Pepper asked.

“Very.”

Pepper nodded. “You start querying all this crap and learning it. I want you to be able to fly one of their shuttles.”

“You think we’ll be able to steal one?”

“The moment we get close enough to something we recognize we can run to, a ship, habitat, or a planet, yes.”

Pepper walked out, and Jerome handed him the necklace remote for their hostage. John uncleared his vision and began looking around the room. Did it speak Anglic? It should, the Teotl had encountered them enough. He pinged it. The colors shifted and the wiggles turned into text.

Utility room B50. He could translate their text and access their public information. And why not? They were standard public data overlays, available to all.

Jerome walked in. “You okay?”

John nodded. “You?”

“Tired. Mouth tasting funny.”

“Orange peels?” John asked.

Jerome frowned and looked at him. “Orange?”

Nanagada didn’t have oranges. John had forgotten. He put a finger to his lips. He hadn’t had an orange in so long he wondered if he even really remembered what oranges tasted like. “A fruit, can’t find it on Nanagada.”

Jerome shifted a bit, indecisive. “You scared, being here in the middle of the Teotl?”

“Of course.” John summoned up a map of the Teotl starship from the public data overlay. It looked like giant, rocky potato. The thing was barely small enough to fit through a wormhole.

Right now it rotated for gravity.

John looked over and smiled. “I’d be insane not to be.”

“I feel sorry for the Teotl, a little bit,” Jerome said. “They ain’t no more. They the last of they kind.”

John looked at his son. As a boy he’d been told bogeyman tales of the Teotl descending from space in the great wars at the start of Nanagadan history. And told that some still stalked around Aztlan, causing trouble for Nanagadans. And particularly, little boys who didn’t behave.

And yet he was still willing to try to wrap his mind around the various facets of the situation.

“You have sympathy for them?” John asked.

“No. But I think I coming to understand them,” Jerome snapped. He looked directly at John, then grinned. “They running from something dangerous too. They scared. They ain’t no gods, they just like all of we.”

A pair of Teotl appeared at the door and pointed at John.

“Jerome…” John stopped at the doorjamb. Bit his lip. “Don’t believe all that just yet. This wouldn’t be the first time we played into their hands.”

He turned around and Jerome shrugged.

“Listen…” Two Teotl flanked John.

“Need move,” they grated at him in simplified Anglic. They smelled of rotting meat, and John grimaced when he noticed the glisten of pus on their joints.

“I want my son to come with us.”

“Now. Move.”

John looked back. “We’ll talk later, Jerome.”

The Teotl led him out into the corridor, and the door slid shut, sealing them off from each other.

They descended deeper into the ship, John’s eyes getting accustomed to the faint dripping, the slippery floors, until they abruptly stepped out into a vast cavern.

Like standing on the inside of a giant world. But no grass or forests like a human habitat. Every available inch of the space dotted with glistening cocoons. Eggs. Teotl. Massive polyps sprung from a ground saturated with a nutrient web. John dug at this with a foot. Faint white wires that broke in a gush of fluid.

This was a colony ship festooned with the creatures waiting to molt into their various forms. An invasion force. John swallowed. Each of those things was capable of turning into a creature adapted for competing with humans for any environment they happened to be in. Or just shoving them aside.

The stump of Metztli’s missing tentacle had been covered in an amoebalike substance. Metztli inched toward John in a sedan festooned with spiny bones. The foot part of the sedan picked up speed, slipping down a smooth track toward them. Pepper followed close behind.

They both stopped in front of John.

The Teotl twisted and regarded John with lidded eyes. “We are the last of our kind, aboard this ship. We are in desperate need of your help. This is the truth. Can you convince your friend to take the collar off me?”

“You have lied before. I’d rather see it on,” John said. “You talk as if reformed, but you let the Azteca take Capitol City, you rule it with fear.”

“I know.” The Teotl waved one of its healthy metal-tipped tentacles. “It was dirty, and quick, and uncivilized. But imagine that any moment now our devices holding the wormhole closed will be overcome. When our masters pour out from it to destroy us, they will destroy you too. It is in your interest to assist us.”

John leaned toward the sedan and grabbed one of the spikes. He bent it under his hand. “You are designed to understand us and talk to us. I’ve met your type before. You’re dangerous.”

“We both are.” It held up the stub of the tentacle John and Pepper had cut off. Then it tapped the collar. “As Pepper noted, if I try to remove this, I’ll die. An effective device, we made. And on a bigger scale, no one won the mess we were orbiting. But despite all that hostility, even we are capable of learning from mistakes.”

“Learning to put that behind us isn’t easy.”

“We did not pretend it to be. But we have a higher goal now. Survival. We do not want your world, it is yours to do with what you will. It’s in too dangerous a position for us. We want to follow the other wormhole out to the human worlds. We want to find a place to hide there, and allies to help us keep the wormhole back where we came from closed. It will require a lot of energy.” The Teotl’s sedan began to ooze down the shallow trough, and John walked with it.

John looked around at the soft, wet corners of the world he walked inside. Suppose this was it for humanity and he had the remains of his entire race in this craft. What would he do with the weight of an entire species on his shoulders?

And what if this was just one big snow job?

“Where are we going now?” he asked.

“We will show you the reopening of the wormhole back to the human worlds. We are about to break orbit.”

John paused. “Bring my son with us.” He folded his arms and stared at the Teotl as it slowly slid past him. “I demand he stand with me. There is no reason to separate us.”

“It will be done.” The sedan lurched to a halt. The Teotl turned to John. “You are possessive.”

“I want him to see this.” Wanted him to see their return to the rest of the worlds, something John had dreamed of for far too many years. And he didn’t want to be pulled apart. They’d been through enough. And if Pepper had something up his sleeve, better Jerome stayed close to John.

The sedan slithered its way along the track again.

“My son,” John snapped.

“Will join us in the viewing, yes. You are very protective of your offspring. We go to join him.” The Teotl wiggled a tentacle. “Come.”

John unfolded his hands and followed the alien. Pepper leisurely strolled behind them both.

Chapter Forty-Two

Ahexotl had flown from Tenochtitlanome by one of the alien airships, and now his entire personal guard marched up the steps into the Minsterial Mansion. Xippilli watched them flow past his own warriors into the building.

He moved from the balcony, sat down at his desk, and waited.

Ahexotl walked in, his gold-threaded cape flowing behind him. He stood before the desk. The door shut behind him, and it was just the two of them.

Xippilli stared up at him.

“The gods are now leaving this world. They want another two hundred warriors to load into their machines, and then they leave.”

Xippilli frowned. “We’re no longer looking for the councilmen?” He had hunted down a handful of them for the Teotl, immortals like John and Pepper who founded Nanagada all those years ago.

“No, the Teotl are happy with the two we found them. They seem to be on a fast schedule.” Ahexotl grinned. “Your work is done.”

“I’m to step down?”

“Yes. The lenience disturbs the pipiltin back in Tenochtitlanome. And, Xippilli, I think it would be best for you to keep to the shadows for now. Your feelings are well-known, and your usefulness for finding immortals isn’t needed.”

“And you will take control of the city?” Xippilli said.

“Warriors are flowing over Mafolie Pass and into Brungstun, and from there they’ll move along the coast towards this city. We are taking the whole land again. I am the new pipiltin of Nanagada.”

Ahexotl’s dreams of business had grown into desire for an empire. Xippilli wondered if the pipiltin back in Tenochtitlanome realized just how dangerous Ahexotl could be.

“What is to become of me?” Xippilli asked.

“A small, but well-paid, position as a clerk. You will be well looked after, my friend, despite your peculiar beliefs and love of this city.” Ahexotl walked toward the window. “And as one land, trade will be ever so profitable. And don’t worry, Xippilli, the blood will be spilled to our gods carefully. I am no more interested in giving the priests the power they once had than you are.”

Xippilli looked at the new ruler of Nanagada and thought about his own future as a clerk, hiding and in fear of his life. He would see friends give their lives, no doubt, as sacrifices.

And then Xippilli listened to the sound of the warriors lining up to board the Teotl airship. The last one up.

He looked over at the pistol. Killing Ahexotl would bring another just like him and end Xippilli’s life that much sooner. There was no way he could outfight Ahexotl either, not by sword or by hand.

Xippilli looked out across the town and thought about the pens of Nanagadans awaiting their fate.

“Ahexotl, I have a better idea,” Xippilli said.

Ahexotl turned. “Yes?”

“Send me up to lead the warriors. Get rid of me and any trouble I might bring right now.”

He’d caught Ahexotl off guard. “You really want to join them, in the sky?”

“Yes.” Xippilli stepped forward and looked at the alien airship on the bright green grass lawn. “If I’m of no use down here, maybe I can make something of myself up there, with the gods.”

He refused to look over. Let Ahexotl calculate for himself how convenient it would be to get rid of Xippilli, a well-known and loved leader here.

And up there maybe Xippilli could be of more help.

Ahexotl sat down in Xippilli’s chair. “Okay. Go, go to the stars.”

Ahexotl spun the chair around, pleased with himself. Xippilli turned to leave the room, trying to get out before Ahexotl changed his mind.

“Xippilli,” Ahexotl said.

“Yes.” Xippilli paused at the door.

“Up there, you won’t be able to save your friends, or them you. The gods rule there, even if they aren’t really gods.”

“I know,” Xippilli said, and walked out before Ahexotl could call him back.

Chapter Forty-Three

Two massive Teotl warriors flanked Jerome. They refused to speak to him. They looked straight ahead with silvered eyecaps glinting from the phosphorescent gleam in the walls.

He considered struggling. They were taking him into warrens, down tunnels, through what felt like miles of gloom. Jerome tried to keep track of the constant turns, but realized he couldn’t.

They could kill him here in the gloom, easily enough. But that didn’t make sense, he reassured himself. They could just as easily have done that in the room once his dad left.

A bright spot of light grew until it filled the corridor Jerome walked down. It bathed him in luminescence as a large gob of black fluid oozed down from the ceiling. Tendrils moved out to caress and sniff him. They withdrew as a large plug of rock rolled aside. The Teotl left.

John stood on the other side with his back to Jerome. What looked like a massive curtain of clear goo hung in the center of the rounded room. The wounded Teotl, Metztli, sat in its mobile chair next to John. It was still dirty, its dangerous necklace resting around its neck.

“Dad?”

John turned around. Metztli turned to look at Jerome as well. The chair with the large muscular leg underneath squirmed away from John, Metztli’s tentacles dangling over the edge. “Are you okay, Jerome?”

“Yeah.” Jerome walked forward, and the plug of rock shuddered back into place and sighed shut. “You?”

“They reopened the wormhole.” John gestured at the translucent film hanging in the air.

Jerome stepped up to it and found himself looking into a vast abyss. He stepped back, heart pounding, and looked at the giant slimy curtain again.

“It’s just an organic projection device,” John said. “Come on, step forward again.” He grabbed Jerome’s elbow.

“Worm’s holes,” Jerome muttered. “Like the story about how we all got to Nanagada.” He looked out into the black again. A faint glint at the center caught his attention.

“Waste energy,” John said. “They’re threading exotic matter back into the pinprick aperture of the original hole. It’s like finding a small hole in a wall. They’re putting a piece of material through that’s strong, and then spinning it, so fast, so that it expands, forcing the hole open.”

Jerome looked at his dad and frowned. “And the hole leads to a place far away. To another star.”

John smiled. “Yes.”

“So how come they doing this one so quick?” It had taken hundreds of years for the other wormhole to open, as he’d understood it.

Metztli shuffled forward. “This takes enormous energies, and our home is set to provide those, but we are almost bankrupt from the effort. The other wormhole was even more damaged, tiny, and it had a throttling device installed on it that tried to rebuff our efforts. A present from our cousins, your Loa, who helped you to initially close it.”

“And this wormhole is not throttled, just destabilized and its throat unsupported,” John said.

“Correct.”

“Amazing,” John breathed. “We knew how to close them, but never knew how to reopen them.” Humans had never had the resources to even try to make exotic matter on the scale needed, let alone use it for construction like this.

“But it means our killers will be coming after us soon. Despite our closing the wormhole behind us.” Metztli spread its metal-tipped tentacles. Jerome noticed that they were tiny gold caps. He’d thought they served as protection when on the ground, but maybe they were a fashion accessory. “Time is of essence. We need a treaty as soon as we can and the help of your species.”

“I understand.” John looked over at Jerome, who looked down at the ground.

Something stirred in the ceiling. Jerome stepped backward and looked up, realizing that what he’d thought were fluted decorative arches fitted into the rock above their heads were actually legs.

The spiderlike creature above him lowered a globular head and hissed.

Jerome turned to the Teotl. “Do you fear us?”

The Teotl reached a golden tip up and scratched at Pepper’s explosive collar. “I anticipate troubles,” it hissed. “But I am not worried about my own life, just the perpetuation of my own species now.”

That was interesting. These gods were worried about them, and yet dependent. Jerome liked that. “Just a few of us here, we ain’t no threat.”

“Your actions may affect our lives,” Metztli said. “If we cannot keep the other wormhole closed, we will be exterminated.”

Jerome shook his head. At the start of this he would have given anything to have a Teotl talk about its impending doom, and for Jerome to help destroy it. Or all of them.

He didn’t feel as if he could now. How strange.

The massive stone door blocking them into the nerve center of the Teotl spaceship rolled aside. Xippilli walked in. Five Azteca warriors followed him.

Jerome stared at him, numb and angry. The man who had betrayed them all walked casually in, as if nothing were wrong.

“John, I need to talk to you.” Xippilli walked quickly toward them.

“Jerome looked around. He had no knife, he had nothing. And the murdering clot stood within his reach.

A steady rumble wormed up through Jerome’s feet.

“We’re moving,” John said. “You were going to repair our ship.” John walked forward. The Azteca raised their rifles and John stepped back.

Metztli cleared its throat. “The wormhole is ready now. We did not intend to open it and then return to orbit, we must achieve our goals first. We must be secure.”

Jerome took a small step toward Xippilli, who watched John and Pepper, his hands near a pistol by his belt. The thundering increased, and Jerome could feel himself having to lean against it. He noticed Pepper standing behind them all, blending into shadows in a niche of the wall.

Was there a better time for revenge? It didn’t come easily or announce itself. One had to grab it. Grab it before standing still and just hating burned him up from the inside.

Jerome threw a shoulder into Xippilli and knocked him to the smooth floor. “Murderer,” he hissed.

“Jerome!” John shouted.

Xippilli fought back, but Jerome got his hands on the pistol. He jammed it up against Xippilli’s ribs.

“I only tried to help.” Their noses almost touched.

“Tell that to them that dead.” Jerome pulled the trigger and watched Xipilli jerk as the pistol cracked. “Pepper would do the same. He was there, he saw what happened.”

He could hear the snap of Pepper’s coat, and as Jerome pulled his bloodied hands free with the pistol still clenched in them, he looked up to see one of the Azteca warriors slump to the ground as Pepper whipped toward Jerome.

Pepper grabbed him by the neck and yanked him up into the air. “What the hell are you thinking?”

Jerome choked, vision graying.

“Pepper! Drop him right now.” John stepped forward with both hands tightened into fists.

Pepper threw Jerome against the wall. Jerome scrabbled to his feet, vision swimming in tears, and grabbed his bruised neck, taking deep breaths.

“He’s endangering it all.” Pepper turned his back to Jerome. “We should have left him on the ground.”

Jerome fell back to the ground, dizzy.

“I’m on it.” John dropped to his knees by Xippilli. “But you know what Xippilli did. He ran a big risk.”

Pepper radiated barely contained fury. “He worked from the inside doing what he could. The boy’s too full of misdirected anger.”

“You’re talking about misdirected rage?” John had stripped off Xippilli’s shirt.

“He was running interference for us, taking on the evil to redirect.” Just like that Pepper looked about, calm again. Metztli had backed away from all of them, its chair tilting.

“He’s losing blood, gut shot,” John said. He looked back at Jerome. Instead of fury, only a deep sadness masked his face.

Jerome swallowed and looked away. It felt as if cold water had trickled down his back.

“Get over there.” Pepper turned around and grabbed him hard by the shoulder. He pushed him forward. “Get over there and help your father.”

Pepper spun on Metztli. “You stay calm, this is a human matter.” Metztli’s strange chair had moved him away from their circle. Jerome crawled past an Azteca warrior who lay with his head cocked at an odd angle. Pepper had broken his neck to stop him from killing Jerome.

Blood pooled in the floor around Xippilli, and the man hiccuped blood from his mouth, but couldn’t speak. Jerome wanted to throw up. Instead John ripped his shirt from him with his free hand. “Bundle that up, hold it here.”

John avoided looking at him. Jerome looked down at wet strips of cloth, then John grabbed his hands and pushed them onto Xippilli’s stomach. “Keep the pressure.”

Jerome’s handiwork. Revenge. This is what it felt like. Wet and sticky, sickening. And a man lay in front of him slowly dying.

“You must wrap this up quickly,” Metztli said.

“Shut the fuck up,” John snapped. “Pepper, there are hundreds of Azteca on this ship and we just shot their leader.”

Pepper looked over at the entryway to the control room. “Open the door, Metztli, and you will die.”

“The door will remain closed,” Metztli said.

A strange feeling flitted through Jerome as he watched. As if he were being turned inside out and then back again.

“Transit,” John said to Pepper, as if were the most automatic and normal thing.

“I felt it.” Pepper folded his arms.

“Please,” Metztli said.

“The man on the floor is of no consequence. We need your assistance.”

“Why the hell are you still talking?” John snapped. “Unless you have a first-aid kit lying around, you’re going to need to give us some time.”

“There are no first-aid kits,” Metztli said.

The entire room shivered, distant explosions getting everyone’s attention. A keening sound from the walls threatened to deafen them.

“And that was?” Pepper looked around.

Metztli waved a tentacle. “There are a lot of vehicles out on the other side of this wormhole, human we assume. Someone fired a missile in front of us. We’re broadcasting that we’re no threat, humans are telling us to come in slowly and identify ourselves. We need your services, as I’ve been saying. We need them now.”

“Who’s out there?” John asked, looking up.

“We do not know,” the Teotl said. “But there are ships, everywhere. Some of them match the ship names of ships that once defended your planet several centuries past, so we assume them to be hostile. Do you think they will fire on us next?”

“I don’t know. Do you have any weapons?” Pepper asked. Blood seeped out over Jerome’s fingers. He couldn’t look down. But he could feel Xippilli’s slow, ragged breathing under his hands.

The Teotl looked at them all. “No. The nest has no real weapons to speak of. We’re slowing down as we have been asked.” It leaned forward.

Pepper walked over to a length of screen goop. “Show me who’s knocking and maybe we can start talking.”

“Do you think the Ragamuffins are still waiting out there?” John asked Pepper.

Pepper shrugged. “Why not? We were still on Nanagada, weren’t we?”

The rock under Jerome’s knees shivered again, and Xippilli coughed up more blood and moaned.