Trapped

24: REVELATIONS 12:9

Some time later, I stood up. My boots scraped against the stone floor, filling the chamber with hollow echoes.

Where Annah and the Ring had been standing, there were now only smoldering lumps. Thin smoke rose from their remains. I considered saying a prayer for the dead, but didn't have the heart for it.

Alone in a world full of corpses, I thought. But that wasn't true — Dreamsinger was still alive, protected from the explosion by her armor. Her breathing was soft and calm, as if sleeping peacefully. I wanted to seize her by the shoulders, shake her roughly, wake her up… but the hypersonics from an Element gun knocked victims out for six hours, and nothing I could do would rouse the Sorcery-Lord sooner. Besides, she was still surrounded by that force field, the one that melted bullets; if I tried to touch her, my hands would disintegrate.

I looked down at Dreamsinger once more. The ‹BINK›-rod she'd been holding lay a short distance away. It must have fallen from her grasp when she'd been shot. I bent, picked it up, then felt foolish at the gesture. Did I think this was some kind of magic wand? A wonderful deus ex machina I could wave and abracadabra, bring back all my friends?

There were nothing but blackened lumps where Annah had been standing… and farther off lay Impervia's body, outside the range of the explosion but sprawled deathly still. I couldn't bring myself to take a closer look. What would be the point? Let her rest in peace.

So there I was: last man standing. Pelinor would say that made me the hero of our quest; but I'd done nothing anyone would call heroic. The hard work came from my friends — the protecting, the dying. All I could do was ensure they hadn't died in vain.

Element gun in one hand, ‹BINK›-rod in the other, I approached the laser cage.

The door of the airlock shack had one simple control — a lever with three positions marked INNER SHUT, BOTH SHUT, OUTER SHUT. It was currently set to the last: outer door closed, inner one open. I moved the switch to the middle and watched as the inner door slid into place. The imprisoned Lucifer had withdrawn into the main area of the cage, taking Sebastian with it. I guessed it didn't want to leave the boy in the airlock shack where he might be easier to rescue.

Deep breath. I moved the lever again.

The outer door opened. I had my gun set to shoot flames, ready to scorch any bits of Lucifer hiding in the airlock. But the shacklike space seemed perfectly clean: white walls, white floor, white ceiling, where the tiniest black grain would show up clearly. No doubt the airlock had cleansing devices that sanitized the place every time the doors cycled. I didn't know how decontamination was possible without killing any humans in the airlock… but if the Keepers harvested lightbulbs from the Lucifer's mass, people must go in and out through the shack all the time. One just had to trust that the Sparks could eradicate alien cellules while leaving Homo sapiens intact.

I stepped into the airlock. The inside wall had a three-position lever like the one outside. I moved the lever to both shut and waited.

A flat plane of green light rose from the floor, like a platform of jade ascending around me. The surface was too glossy to see through, but I could feel a tingle as it climbed my legs: like the brisk scraped sensation after drying oneself with a rough towel. The feeling increased to wrenching pain as it reached my abdomen — an unknown force clawing my intestines, scouring deep in search of alien intruders. Some part of my mind wondered what kind of energy the light was, how it could distinguish between human flesh and alien particles. But I didn't care that much. Like a man plodding the last hundred meters of a marathon, I just wanted to get this over.

The jade surface rose. As it reached my heart, congestion squeezed my chest. I tried to breathe normally; I closed my eyes and waited, feeling the tingle flush up my throat, my face… then a burst of jade flared as it swept past my retinas.

When I opened my eyes, the plane of light was vanishing into the airlock roof. I caught my breath, lifted my weapons, and moved the control lever to open the inner door.

The Lucifer didn't attack. It didn't even move. Its black powder mass sat silent. Waiting.

"Release the boy," I said.

No response. As if the creature didn't understand my words. But I was certain it knew what I was saying.

I raised my gun. "Give me the boy or I'll hurt you. Kill you if that's possible. Heaven knows why the Sparks kept you alive at all; but I'm sure they'd rather see you dead than loose in the world. So let the boy go."

Still no motion visible in the black heap, but a rustling sound came from the mound's dusty heart. The Lucifer towered above me, three times my height: like the mountain of coal that was dumped behind the academy at the start of each winter. My Element gun was no more than a pea-shooter compared to the Lucifer's bulk; the gun's supply of fire and acid could only braise the monster's surface. If the beast withstood the immediate pain, I'd soon run out of ammunition. As for the glittering ‹BINK›-rod, I didn't know how much mass it could "roll aside" at any one time… but surely not the entire mound. I might banish a few handfuls of black before I was overwhelmed, but that would just delay the inevitable. Sebastian would remain trapped, the batteries powering the cage would run dry…

"Give me the boy!" I shouted. Conserving my more effective attacks, I fired a burst of bullets into the mound. Lightbulbs on the surface shattered into sprays of chipped glass; but the Lucifer itself was unhurt.

Quickly, I switched the gun back to flamethrower. "I'm counting to five. Give me the boy or I'll—"

Something shifted within the mound. My nerves were so jittery, I almost pulled the trigger… but I stopped myself on the minuscule chance the monster might be letting Sebastian go.

The heap closest to me bulged with a human-shaped protuberance: head and shoulders coated with gunpowder black, pushing their way out of the pile with a dry rasp. Crusted in midnight grains, a figure struggled to wrench free — pushing, pulling, until it abruptly tugged loose from its surroundings and stumbled forward, trying to catch its balance.

I kept my gun trained on the figure. "Don't come too close." If a thing that looked like Sebastian materialized out of that mess, I'd be a fool to believe it must be the real boy. Besides, the thing before me was still just a humanoid clump of black, standing weak and wobbly, head turning back and forth as if trying to get its bearings. Then the outermost layer of powder slumped away to reveal…

Rosalind Tzekich. As naked as when I had seen her last, but with life and health shining where there had only been the limpness of death.

The new Rosalind gave me a tranquil smile. Beatific. A much different look from the listless way she'd endured math classes. The distance and loneliness were gone now: she had the look of a prisoner who'd been released.

Reluctantly, I trained the Element gun on her — hoping that wherever the real Rosalind was now, she wore exactly the same kind of smile. "I've seen enough fakes of this girl," I said. "Let her rest in peace."

The Rosalind-thing didn't answer. She held her arms out at her sides, hands open, palms toward me: the pose of someone showing she was no threat, as if I were a dog who had to be mollified. "Stop it," I said. "You're nothing more than shapeshifting sand; a piece of Lucifer, trying to distract me. I want Sebastian and I want him now. One… two… three…"

She stepped toward me, still smiling. I cursed the Lucifer under my breath, and switched the gun back to bullets. What I had to do next would give me nightmares… as if my brain didn't already contain enough horrors for a thousand sleepless nights.

I pulled the trigger. A single bullet at point-blank range, straight into the chest of a teenage girl.

But it wasn't a girl at all. The shot hit the creature dead center, scattering gouts of black sand out the thing's spine; but a shock wave of blowback sent grains spraying forward, splashing onto my feet, my coat — and my face. I reached up blindly with the ‹BINK›-rod, hoping it would spirit the dark flecks away… but by then, my world had vanished.

No sight, no sound; but I could still breathe. The grains hadn't gone down my throat — not yet. I couldn't even feel them on my face. In fact, I felt nothing at all: as if my body had dissolved, leaving only a consciousness divorced from my five senses.

Then a sixth sense dawned: a feeling of connection and dispersion, my mind spread across the universe. A million, billion, trillion places at once. I had no eyes or ears, but I sensed myself standing on a plain covered with lacy blue ice, not frozen water but solidified nitrogen, oxygen, and methane; I was also floating through hot sulfur clouds where fat balloon creatures built cities from cottony fibers that drifted as light as dust; and I was deep undersea, clinging to the ocean floor as a warm soup of my own children clustered about me in the jelly stage of their life cycle. I lurked in the heart of trees. I swam through the bloodstream of an animal as big as the moon, and together we fed off dark energies filling the interstellar vacuum. I sipped on magma at a planet's core; I conversed with red moss in a tumbledown city peopled by senile machines; I clotted in a solid shell around a giant sun as it collapsed into supernova.

None of these scenes reached me as normal vision; I simply comprehended my surroundings, knowing instead of sensing. I was a million, billion, trillion shapeshifting grains spread through the galaxy, conjoined in a single mental whole: a hive mind with every cellule in contact with all the others despite being separated by countless light-years. A single unified consciousness distributed over untold star systems.

This was the past — a stunted ghost of memory that didn't come close to the Lucifer's true splendor. I sensed its frustration at not remembering more clearly… at not being able to impress me with its full former glory. It had been a creature vastly higher on the evolutionary ladder than Homo sapiens: like a god compared to us mere mortals, or at least like an angel.

And like all angels, it eventually fell.

Another memory: this time on Earth. A human doppelganger similar to Jode, a colony of cellules shaped like a handsome man pretending to sleep beside a beautiful woman. Suddenly, the door burst open. People were there in plastic armor — four Spark Lords. They grabbed the false human and hustled it into the night. The Lucifer didn't protest; its impersonations had been discovered before, had been captured, tortured, and burned. The experience was unpleasant, but not a cause for concern. The death of a few cellules had no effect on the whole… and the great Lucifer consciousness had plenty of other representatives on Earth to continue observing our species.

So the Lucifer didn't resist. It even laughed as the Sparks said, "We're doing this for your own protection. Word has come down from the League." The Lucifer kept laughing right up to the moment where it was thrown into a cage made of light…

…at which point, the world went silent. Communications cut off. Isolation. The cage somehow blocked mental contact with the hive mind gestalt.

For a time, the Lucifer went mad. Not just from the shock of separation — the creature had been part of a single far-flung brain, with psychological functions distributed over all the component parts. Now a tiny chunk of that brain was forced to survive on its own. Almost all its memories vanished, stored as they were in other individuals that had dropped out of touch. Its angelic wisdom dissolved; its knowledge of the galaxy; its personality, whatever that had been: lost, lost, everything lost.

Eventually, the imprisoned creature stabilized — each remaining cellule taking its share of the burden, creating an entity that was far from the original but at least able to function. Still, it was a grossly diminished version of its former self: less memory, less intelligence, less far-reaching perception… like a creature that was once a whale now reduced to a gnat.

Even so, the gnat had regained its sanity.

When the Sparks were sure it had found a new balance, they turned down the cage's blocking power an infinitesimal amount… and the Lucifer reached out eagerly, trying to reestablish contact with its fellows.

A moment later, it reeled back in horror. The angel outside the cage had become a devil: a shouting shriek of corruption, poisoned with hate and violence. Lusting to conquer and kill — many of its component colonies committing murder at the very instant the Lucifer made contact. During that fleeting touch of communication, the prisoner in the cage got the impression its parent mass now deliberately choreographed its actions so it was always in the act of killing sentient creatures somewhere in the galaxy… so that it never lacked the taste of blood and death.

The great hive consciousness outside the cage had changed from the archangel Lucifer… into a howling Satan.

How could such a thing happen? Had some distant cellule been twisted by mutation, poison, or sabotage? If a single cellule went mad, could the madness spread instantly through the whole, like a disease infecting the entire consciousness? An explosion of evil no cellule could resist, so that in the blink of an eye, a wise and mighty creature was lost to the cancer of malice. Or had the parent mass simply turned vicious as a whole, rejecting its passive observation of lower species and deciding to tyrannize them instead?

The caged Lucifer had no answers. All it knew was that its parent had become a malignant embodiment of hate… and if that hate ever broke through the blocking power of the cage, the Lucifer's mind would be washed away in the flood, perverted by the sheer mental force of a billion trillion former siblings.

So the Lucifer remained in its prison, grateful to be protected against its Satanic parent outside. It spent its time wondering how the League had foreseen the coming corruption. Who had enough advance warning to rescue a small part of the whole, when the Lucifer itself never suspected a thing? Wouldn't the Sparks have needed months to build a cage and adapt the generating station to power it? Could the League really look so far into the future? And if so, why hadn't they warned the hive mind itself? But neither the League nor the Spark Lords ever offered to explain.

The Sparks did explain why they'd captured the Lucifer. By preserving a piece of the "angelic" Lucifer, the League one day hoped to cure the "demonic" part. Little by little, year by year, Spark Royal would turn down the cage's blocking field… and gradually the imprisoned Lucifer would grow stronger, better able to resist the psychic onslaught of its depraved Satanic brethren. In a few more centuries (or millennia, or eons — the League was patient), perhaps the good could win back the evil, just as the evil had forced out the good.

Meanwhile the Lucifer waited. And it grew. Its kind had a complex life cycle and didn't reproduce quickly… but with the Keepers providing its needs, the Lucifer expanded from the original human-sized doppelganger to the great black mound now occupying the cage. For something to do, the cellules had busied themselves as little chemical factories, building lightbulbs and other equipment, molecule by molecule.

The evil outer consciousness had kept busy too. Just as the imprisoned Lucifer could touch its parent Satan's mind, the parent could feel its small uncorrupted child: an aggravating hold-out, a slim incompatibility, an itching flea-bite that couldn't be scratched. Satan raged at the tiny irritation; perhaps it couldn't tolerate any reminder it had once been an angel, or perhaps it feared for its own existence, recognizing that someday its corruption might be reversed. Whatever the reason, Satan despised the caged Lucifer. The galactic demon couldn't rest till the prison was bashed down and the independent black mound was bludgeoned back into the venomous whole.

So Satan declared war on Lucifer… and on the Spark Lords who guarded the cage. Many times in the past, evil doppelgangers had tried to break into the generating station. On each attempt, the aliens penetrated farther into the Keepers' defenses. On each attempt, the Sparks stopped the intruders and destroyed them. On each attempt, Satan kept a few cellules of itself safe elsewhere on the planet — enough, in time, to build a new body and try, try again.

This was a war of move and countermove: Satan would devise new strategies of attack; the Sparks would respond with new modes of defense. Spark Royal had always maintained the upper hand, thanks (as I'd guessed) to equipment that could detect gunpowderlike cellules at the range of a kilometer. The Niagara region was spanned with hundreds of such detectors, immediately reporting any evil Lucifers that dared to approach.

But Satan was vastly intelligent, a single brain spanning the galaxy. It had learned science tricks from a thousand cultures… and whatever was known by the whole could be used by the fragments on Earth. If the Sparks could detect dry black cellules, why not mutate into moist white nuggets?

I don't understand how Satan managed it — I received vague impressions of the demon grains bathing themselves in chemicals, bombarding themselves with radiation — but the specifics were lost on me. Anyway, the details didn't matter; the demon somehow changed itself to a new form Spark Royal couldn't detect. A form that caught Sparks unaware.

Mind-Lord Priest had been first to meet the mutated demon. Priest's detector equipment identified Jode as nonhuman, but the device which should have said THIS IS A LUCIFER was fooled by the mutation into maggots. Result? Priest had no idea what he was dealing with. He'd been taken by surprise and killed. Jode sailed away doubly triumphant: not only had the Lucifer obtained Priest's ‹BINK›-rod but Jode had proved its new curdlike form could fool the Sparks' defenses.

Though I got this information from the Lucifer in the cage, it had known none of it at the time. Yes, the angel had a faint mental link with its demon siblings… but the connection was patchy, seldom providing more than quick glimpses of Satan's violent acts around the galaxy. The good Lucifer hadn't perceived the death of Priest, and it hadn't caught a whiff of Jode's plans for Rosalind and Sebastian — Satan concealed what was happening, veiling its thoughts to prevent the caged Lucifer from foreseeing the imminent attack.

So no alarm sounded till Dreamsinger deduced the truth at Nanticook House. She'd hurried to Niagara and rallied the Keepers' defenses… but I'd seen how it all turned out. Crushing defeat. Now Satan pounded the still-angelic Lucifer with its thoughts — boasting how clever it had been, like a villain in a melodrama explaining everything in the last act. The mutation from black to white. The death of Priest. The murder of Rosalind. Inside the laser cage, the angel wished it could shut out the gloating tirade; but the cage's defenses were weakening and Satan's hideous strength was close to breaking through.

Yet no matter how much the mental onslaught pained the good Lucifer, I could sense no fear in its soul. The angel had embodied itself as Rosalind, wearing a radiant smile; I could feel the same beatific assurance filling the Lucifer as it touched my mind. A confidence that everything would work out for the best.

How can you believe that? I asked. You're hanging by a thread, yet you still think you'll be saved?

The answer didn't come in words. Instead, I had a vision of the Caryatid in her classroom, watching a dog's tongue predict she would go on a quest; I heard Rosalind's harp playing in empty darkness; finally, I was shown again the moment in our chancellor's suite when Opal said, "It sure is a bitch living in a universe where so many species are smarter than you."

What was the Lucifer trying to tell me? That the League of Peoples had anticipated this, the same way they'd foreseen the fall of Satan? That they'd arranged to bring me here because I could somehow put things right?

If not for the haunting, we wouldn't have discovered Rosalind's death till many hours later — too late for any of us to reach Niagara Falls in time. If not for the prophecy, I wouldn't have thought to call my friends after finding Rosalind's body. And without my friends, without the haunting and prophecy, I wouldn't have arrived where I was now.

Was that it? The League had manufactured supernatural events to nudge me and my friends in the direction we'd gone?

A wave of agreement came from the Lucifer. It believed I'd been brought here to play the hero. Me. As if I could save the world.

Suddenly, my link with the Lucifer broke. A moment of dizziness. Then I was back in my own body, seeing with my own eyes by the dim violet light of the lasers. The ‹BINK›-rod and my Element gun lay a footstep away. The mound of black grains had pulled back against the walls of the prison cube, leaving me lying in a clear space in the middle. I felt as if I'd woken inside a volcano cone, with heaps of dark ash all around me.

I wasn't alone on the cage's floor. A short distance away, Sebastian lay squeezed into fetal position. He looked dead.

Slowly, carefully, I moved across the floor to Sebastian. When I tried to touch him, my hand was thrown back as if something had shoved it away. Nanites. They'd formed a shell around him, ready to repel anyone who came close… like a ring of growling dogs protecting their fallen master. If I tried to touch the boy again, I suspected the nanites would respond with more than a harmless push.

Now that I was closer, I could see Sebastian was still breathing. He didn't look injured: just catatonic. And who could blame him? He'd discovered he'd bedded a monster — the monster who'd killed poor Rosalind. The boy might also have realized he'd butchered dozens of innocent Keepers at the monster's prompting. Then there were the ugly deaths he'd seen: Impervia and the Caryatid. Enough to drive anyone into a stupor… especially a sensitive teenage boy whose head had been full of romantic notions.

It's devastating when you finally recognize the world is cruel. But time was running out, and Sebastian was the only one who could put things right.

"This is it, isn't it?" I said to the Lucifer. "Why I was brought here. I'm the boy's don; I'm supposed to get through to him. You think I can wake him before it's too late."

A rustle went through the surrounding black mound: a scratchy sandy hiss.

I nearly gave a bitter laugh. All this way, through bullets, fire, and acid; then it turned out my role was not to slay monsters but to talk to a teenager.

Almost as if my destiny was to be a schoolteacher.

"Sebastian," I said, "it's Dr. Dhubhai."

The boy didn't move. Still scrunched into a tight fetal ball.

I tried again. "You've just experienced some horrible things. Worse than you could imagine. And you probably don't understand a bit of what's going on."

The gunpowder mass rustled again. I took that to mean agreement. When the Lucifer covered Sebastian, nanites must have immediately formed a shield around the boy. They'd prevented the mound from establishing a mental link; otherwise, the Lucifer could have melted into Sebastian's thoughts and perhaps eased away the catatonia.

"I could explain everything," I told the boy, "but that would take time and we don't have much to spare."

Once more the black grains rustled in agreement.

"So here's how it is," I said. "You're feeling like the world is broken. Your life is ruined and nothing will ever be the same.

"Well… you're partly right. Good people are dead: people who never deserved what happened to them. And you've done some ghastly things. You were tricked into doing them, but you'll still have to live with the memory. That's going to hurt; perhaps forever.

"But you know what, Sebastian? Everyone's life is a mess. Everyone's. We all make mistakes… and not just little slip-ups. Major mistakes that hurt us and other people. We all go down wrong paths because we don't know better… or because we're too lazy, lonely, and afraid to change.

"I've screwed up my life just like everyone else. I've been a teacher ten years and I've never taken it to heart. Isn't that ridiculous? I should either get out or accept where I am. No more acting like the job is beneath me.

"And women! I can't begin to list the ways I've been a fool. Staying with one woman because she was convenient… even though she and I knew the affair was a poor substitute for what we should have wanted. And for years I looked down on another woman, even though she was far more than I ever dreamed; not to mention how I was completely blind to a third woman, who must have been hurt every day by my obliviousness.

"Those three women are dead now, Sebastian. I'll never get the chance to make it up to them. I'd like to curl up into a ball and cry until my eyes bleed.

"But crying won't help. Nothing will. I can't fix the past. I can only resolve to do better in future.

"Are you listening, Sebastian? Can you hear what I'm saying? Because I'm going to tell you something important: something everybody knows and everybody forgets. Are you listening? Here it is. You have to confront life. That's all. No matter how tempting avoidance may be, you have to confront life. I know it sounds trite, like the usual nonsense teachers tell their students. But it's true. You have to confront life. If you don't, your problems just fester. Nothing gets cleaned up. The messes you've made just grow worse.

"Believe me, I know. In the past twenty-four hours, I've seen people confront their lives. I've seen them do what had to be done… even if it meant they'd die. They faced up to necessity. I don't claim to be a great example myself — but you know what? I'm doing it."

I stood… walked back to the Element gun and the ‹BINK›-rod. Picking them up, I told the boy, "I could leave right now. I could head for the door and this big sand-heap probably wouldn't try to stop me. If it did, I could blast my way free. Out of this cage, out of this building, out of the whole ugly mess. I wouldn't go back to the academy — my purse is full and I can live like a king almost anywhere on Earth. No one would track me down. I'm not important enough for the Sparks or Satan to care about.

"But I'm still here with you, Sebastian. Because you have the power to set things right. You can't bring back Rosalind; you can't resurrect the people who've died. But you can remove your dam; you can reconnect the power cables; you can save the sanity of an innocent creature; and you can foil the plans of a monster who killed the girl you loved. All you have to do is use your power — speak to those little puppies who want to follow your orders. It would be so easy. I know you're tired; it must seem impossible to make the tiniest effort. God knows I've felt the same. Paralyzed. You can barely breathe, Sebastian, and I'm just some pompous adult preaching platitudes.

"You wish I'd shut up… but I have to say something you might not have considered. About Rosalind. I've been thinking of her ever since last night, and the image that keeps coming to mind was the way she'd gaze out the windows during math class. Just staring, as if she was light-years away. I would have said she was disconnected from life: stuck in a trap of her mother's making; wrapped up in numbness and three-quarters dead. But then she made a decision — to elope with you. Not a decision I'd agree with, and if I caught you two sneaking out, you'd both get homework detentions for the next thirty years… but it was a sign of life, Sebastian. Rosalind recognized something had to change, and she did something about it.

"So did you, Sebastian. You and Rosalind together. It must have taken courage; and now, after horrible things have happened, maybe you're thinking you never should have done it. But there's no such thing as playing safe. Life might hurt, but it's better than numbness. Rosalind knew that. So did you when you agreed to elope with her. Be brave again, Sebastian. Wake up and do something. It'll get easier once you start. Just talk to your nanite friends and ask them to help."

The light in the room flickered. For a moment, I didn't realize what that meant; I thought Sebastian had come to his senses and done something… told the nanites to start repairing everything that needed to be fixed. Then the flicker came again and the truth struck me: the only illumination in the entire chamber was the soft violet glow from the lasers. The lasers flickered once more, then went out.

Deep blackness — the thick absence of light that happens only underground. One tiny glitter remained: the red and green nuggets on the ‹BINK›-rod I held in my hand.

The room was utterly silent: nothing but the thud of my pulse. Then all around me, black gunpowder grains whispered against one another.

Uh-oh.

The cage had run out of power. No more mental shield protecting the angel from the demon. I could imagine Satan screaming in triumph as it crushed its good enemy with galaxy-sized willpower.

A million black cellules rustled again.

Quickly turning off the ‹BINK›-rod and tucking it up one sleeve, I gripped my Element gun in both hands. I pulled the trigger and swung in a fast circle, spraying a bright stream of fire spiraling outward. Dark grains sizzled as the flames swept across them, but the blaze only scorched a thin layer on the outside of the mound. Underneath the blistered surface, the Lucifer rolled itself forward like a dune in a windstorm.

"Sebastian!" I yelled. "Wake up!"

The boy didn't move.

I moved to his comatose body and stood astride him, gun ready to fire again. I'd released the trigger after the first burst, but there was enough light to see by — small patches of the Lucifer were burning, weak orange embers all around me. Those tiny fires must have caused the creature pain, but it showed no sign of being intimidated; the great black mound continued to close in, rasping as sand crept across the floor.

"Sebastian!" I loosed another gout of flame from the gun. Roaring orange streamed forth, painful to the eyes; it cast the Lucifer's shadow onto the room's stone walls. I made another complete circle with the fire, then quickly switched to acid. It spattered like deadly rain, hissing when it hit hot-spots left by the flamethrower. There were more ember patches on the mound now, dozens of them… but they just made it easier to see that the bulk of the Lucifer wasn't damaged at all. My gun could only dole out flesh wounds; and it would soon exhaust its ammunition.

Flame. Acid. Flame. Acid. Nothing stopped the Lucifer's steady approach. I was sure the alien mass could move faster — Jode had lashed out like lightning at Pelinor — but this was a creature who toyed with its prey. Before it killed me, Satan wanted to smell my fear.

Flame. Acid. Then I pulled the trigger and nothing happened.

I switched to bullets and emptied the clip. Despite the noise and muzzle flash, my barrage was as useless as firing rounds into a sandbank. When I ran out of lead, I tried hypersonics. No discernible effect; if anything, the rustling around me grew louder with gleeful anticipation.

The battery powering the hypersonics went dead. I dropped the gun and pulled the ‹BINK›-rod from my sleeve, pressing the activation button immediately. With luck, I'd banish a few more cellules from this plane of existence before a flood of them rushed down my throat.

Embers in all directions. The mound towered above me, twice my height.

"It's okay," I said to Sebastian — not from calm acceptance, but because I didn't want Satan to see me panic. "Your nanites will keep you safe; and I'll join my friends in whatever comes next, Gretchen. Oberon. Myoko. Pelinor. Impervia. The Caryatid. Annah." I took a deep breath. "Rosalind. I'm going to die like Rosalind, Sebastian. Unless you do something."

Glowing embers showed the Lucifer was almost within reach. "In the name of Most Merciful Compassionate God," I said. "Praise be to God, the Lord of all Being; All-Merciful, All-Compassionate, the Master of the day of judgment. Thee only do we worship and of thee do we beg assistance."

I lifted the ‹BINK›-rod to swing it at the mound… then suddenly, an idea blossomed inside my beleaguered brain. Inspiration. I dropped to my knees and whacked the rod hard on Sebastian.

To be honest, I doubted it would work — the nanites protecting the boy might resist the ‹BINK›-rod's effects, might even knock the rod from my hands before it made contact. But either the nanites couldn't resist or they were smart enough to recognize I had Sebastian's interests at heart. The ‹BINK›-rod came down… made contact… and the boy disappeared.

The gunpowder heap loosed a furious hiss, like a poisonous snake cheated of its prey. It hurtled toward me, no longer teasing out the moment of fear but trying to avalanche across the gap before I too escaped. The leading edge slammed against my legs, knocking me off my feet; but as I fell, I had time to swing the rod, slap my own chest with the tip…

…and the sandy roar fell silent. The burning embers vanished. I finished my fall and struck dust that billowed up in clouds on my impact.

A weight clinging to my legs sloughed off: gunpowder grains that had traveled with me on this abrupt trip to wherever. They dropped limply from my clothing into the dust, all sign of malice gone.

I looked up. I was inside another laser cage, much bigger than the one I'd just left, but still delineated by thin violet beams outlining a cube. Those beams showed this cage was still working, isolating the captured cellules from the Satanic overmind outside. It made perfect sense; since this was where Spark Lords sent bits of Lucifer, they'd erected a special holding cell to separate the parts from the whole.

Beyond the cell ceiling, stars shone untwinkling in a pure black sky. There was no sun, but amidst the starry waste floated a large cloudy blue moon. I knew it wasn't really a moon at all — I'd seen photographs from OldTech space missions, and I recognized the Earth when I saw it.

My homeworld. My planet. Drifting overhead as I stood in a laser prison on the moon.

"Pretty, isn't it?" said a voice behind me.

I turned. It was Annah.