There was a creeping horror in how easy it was to track them in the dark. How the signs of a silent, desperate struggle had scattered the camp to pieces. How the trail of two bodies dragged through long grass sketched a long, dark line in the starlight. There was confidence in that trail, Kaya thought. A cold, alien certainty that nothing would follow, that nothing would dare. It stretched out like a highway in the night, out past their vision, a path laid by creatures that couldn’t be bothered to hide themselves. Not anymore.

  “They aren’t dead,” Tyver said. “They aren’t dead.”

  “They’re gone, Tyver, how can you-”

  “Dragged off. Unconscious, not dead.” The little thief began to head down the trail, but Kaya caught him by the arm.

  “How do you know?”

  “He knows,” Wynn said quietly. “Let’s leave it there for now, Kaya. Please. If we’re lucky we can catch them.”

  She turned to face them.The dark was almost enough to hide Wynn’s look of disgust. Disgust, and shame.

  “Our friends are lucky,” Tyver said, drawing his knife. “Raugs aren’t.”

  The trail led into the hills, quickly joining a worn path of packed earth. The wind and stars did strange things in the absence of the moon, Kaya’s posthuman eyes splitting the near dark into countless velvety shades of silver and green. She couldn’t see nearly as far as she would have in daylight, but it was a far cry from what Kaya remembered from before the Caretaker had done its work.

  The wind had kicked up in the hour they’d been on the move, a patch of starless sky slowly widening ahead of them as the smell crisp, coppery scent of ozone drifted past. Rain wasn’t falling, not yet, but every minute or so the gentle tap of water reminded Kaya that a storm was coming.

  The others had stopped just ahead, where the path curved around the base of a hill. As she came up behind them, she saw the nest.

  Ahead was a shallow dip of earth set into a broken horseshoe of ridgeline. Nestled inside was a ruin. Rebar jutted from crumbling foundation like rusted bones, the mummified remnants of a complex peeking up from the grass. A solitary helix of corroded steel and metweave rose above the ruins, the last of several wind turbines. It still managed to spin as the wind picked up, its low, creaking drone carrying across the valley.

  “Upwind.” Tyver whispered, pointing where a few lean, dark shapes sprawled in the shadow of the buildings. “Else they’d scream for t’others, fair.”

  “Shouldn’t we hurry, beat the storm so they can’t follow us into it?”

  Tyver shook his head. “Storm won’t help us run.”

  “Wouldn’t it wash away our scent?”

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  That won Kaya an odd look from the little thief, but he blinked and nodded to himself. “No recall, right. Rain won’t destroy t’smell, just spread it.” He peered up. “Should be enough to get us close, once it starts.”

  “It’ll be heavy,” Wynn said. “Heavy and loud.”

  “Good,” Tyver said. “That’s good.”

  There was a long pause as the three of them considered each other in the dark.

  “When the rain starts, we move fast,” Wynn said eventually. “We get to the sentries, take them quietly, find the darkest, deepest hole in this place. That’s where the nest will be. Pray Naomi and Gael are awake when we find them, or this will be…” They swallowed. “Just… pray.”

  “If we’re waiting for the rain,” Kaya said “You should tell me about these things. Tell me what to expect.”

  The two children of Lapis VII eyed each other, then turned to her.

  “Bad idea,” Tyver said.

  “You must be joking.”

  “He’s not,” Wynn said. “If you want my advice, don’t think about what’s going to happen. Whatever you imagine this is going to be, just… trust me, it’ll be worse.”

  It was almost easy, bringing the sentries down. When it came the rain didn’t fall so much as launch itself, punching down in heavy, stinging impacts that kicked up an aching roar of noise. The raugs huddled in whatever shelter they could find, wet and miserable, and could hear and smell nothing of the martyrs coming for them. Not until it was too late. Kaya slipped out of the rain and set her knife almost delicately into her mark, the lean body going into convulsions as she held it in place. She wrinkled her nose as she waited for the thing to go still and tried to ignore the fishy stink of the raug’s blood, the greasy heat of its fur, the clacking jaws rattling in death throes.

  That wasn’t so bad, she thought to herself. There’s got to be more to this.

  Wynn stepped in from the rain and leaned close so as to be heard over the downpour. “Tyver found the nest,” they half-shouted. “We were lucky: he thinks he can hear Naomi shouting down there.”

  Kaya made as if to stand but Wynn gently held her back. “When we go in, don’t bother killing. Maim them, hamstring them, do just enough damage to drop them and then move on” they said. “And for the love of all things precious to you don’t hurt the big one.”

  “The big one?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Wynn, you’re scaring me,” Kaya said.

  “Not good enough,” they said. “You should be terrified.”

  The screaming began almost the moment they stepped out of the rain, stinking heat rising in a soupy, fetid wall as Kaya and her friends stormed the nest. An eerie, childlike chorus of shrieking voices rose like the embers of a kicked fire as they barged in, and before her eyes had even adjusted Kaya was slashing at the horrible, furred heat that brushed at her legs.

  That was only the beginning. Even in the dark of the storm, even without the moon, there was still enough light to fuel nightmares for years to come.

  The nest was in the rubble of a classroom, a wide triangle of space that sloped gently down toward a screen, ranks of desks sized for children facing the place where a teacher might have stood. The space seethed with raugs, boiled with them, an army of gaping jaws angling toward three intruders in startled fury, but it was the bottom of that room that held her attention. The place where Naomi, eyes wide in elemental horror, blood weeping from countless tiny bites as she crouched over Gael’s body, her knife in one hand and a broken shard of desk in the other. The place where a churning knot of small, shrieking forms surrounded Kaya’s stolen friends, young raug with teeth like needles darting in and away with dribbling mouthfuls of flesh. The place where one vast and wrinkled figure, bloated and hairless where the other raug were sleek and furred, turned an eyeless face of broken teeth toward them in hissing fury.

  A queen in her court, Kaya thought in a second of bizarre clarity.

  Then the fight began.