Pizza sticks.

  The cafeteria at Lansdowne served them all the time. They had options—the salad bar, pre-packaged sandwiches, and a couple of different hot lunch options. Pizza sticks came up more than they probably should have in the rotation.

  I think it was just popular, but the school claimed that the menus were randomly generated.

  They were always too hot. Like they’d been microwaved, then put out under a heat lamp for an hour.

  But they were still my favorite because they were consistent. There were no hidden depths to them, just semi-stale crust, marinara cooked inside the sun’s core, and pepperonis. But there weren’t unpleasant surprises, either.

  Pizza sticks would never betray me, or ambush me. They’re reliable.

  SHOCKS Olympia Affected Humanoid Containment Sector, Washington, USA - June 19, 2043, 2:29 PM

  - - - - -

  It’s only been eight minutes since I entered this Geren-Danger wing. And in those eight minutes, I’ve gotten so much new information to work through.

  Worse, I don’t have time to deal with any of it.

  The moment the door opens, my Revolver fires four times—once at each corner of the door. Swirling black-and-blue vortexes appear, tearing Offspring off the walls of the industrial fridge I’ve been hiding in. They swirl and bob through the air, but I’m already reloading, switching to reality skippers. The spider monsters swarm toward me, but I’ve got a few precious seconds and a tiny gap between the singularities.

  I pull the trigger, get sucked through the straw, and appear on the kitchen’s far side.

  [Stability 5/8]

  And just like that, I’m on the move again. The rest of the reality skippers empty into the swarm of Offspring before they can so much as break free to pursue me, but even though my Revolver Mastery feels like it’s on the verge of leveling up, killing spiders isn’t my goal.

  Instead, I run.

  I run through the industrial kitchen, Slithering through curtains of icy-hot spiderwebs. There’s a hallway at the far side, and I need to get down it. The singularities break. I keep shooting and running. Spiders scream behind me. They slump over the oven, hand their shattered limbs off the counters, and drip greenish spider blood onto the floor.

  A poster flashes by about keeping your lips sealed or being terminated. I don’t think they’re talking about being fired; this whole facility seems built to disappear people.

  The Offspring keep closing in, and I jump from place to place as I retreat down the hallway. The sheer number of spiders is almost overwhelming; it reminds me of the rats from the maze reality in the Aberdeen Hospital basement or the tree faces in Mrs. Lightsen’s room. I keep ahead of the tide, mostly.

  Mostly.

  An exceptionally fast spider gets through my firing. Its jaws slice through my leggings and skin, leaving a pair of almost microscopic cuts on my leg. It starts to burn and fizz, and the whole muscle feels like it wants to seize up. I push through, gritting my teeth and stomping the spider to death.

  [Skill Learned: Physical Anomaly Resistance 15]

  I keep running down the hall, shooting and stomping as I go.

  [Skill Learned: Revolver Mastery 24]

  [Skill Learned: Endurance 9]

  At least it’s good training. And at least I’m getting stronger.

  It takes a solid minute of running, Slithering, fighting, and forcing my body to deal with ever-increasing amounts of poison. I’ve probably killed thirty of the oversized spiders when I reach a powered door. [Get through! I’ve got you!] James yells in my ear.

  I Slither ahead, and behind me, the door slams shut.

  And the good news is that this definitely isn’t a prison.

  The door’s not rusted or welded shut, and its wide, square Plexiglass porthole’s downright clean—at least, until a dozen spiders start scrabbling all over it trying to get inside. I’m in a room that’s not much bigger than the basic living bedroom I shared with Alice, but this one’s full of computers. They’re all ancient, and they’re all showing security footage of the facility. I can’t find the kitchen I just fought through or the hallway I ran down, but the rest of this wing’s all there.

  “James, we’re safe here, right?”

  [Right. It’ll take those anomalies a long time to breach that security door. I’d measure it in months to years, rather than hours. Unless they have something bigger and stronger, we’re secure here.]

  “Great.” I ignore the obsolete-looking, pixelated pictures on the computers and the door I just ran through. There’s another door on the far side. “Can you open that?”

  [Yes. The facility’s powering back on—at least, the wings I have maps for are. We’re back in documented, white SHOCKS facilities, rather than the black one.]

  I don’t say anything. I just point at the door and sit down at the bank of computer screens. It opens with a soft hiss, and air rushes out of the room. I regret it a moment later, as the smell of spit hits me, but it’s too late to fix that.

  The battle stress bleeds off of me as I scroll through the cameras with James’s help. It only takes a few seconds to find them.

  Alexander, then Director Ramirez. Sora, her family, and Dad. A woman who looks more or less fine on a stretcher, a gaggle of teachers who look more exhausted than me, and a handful of SHOCKS agents. Plus Daley. L4-4. He’s still alive. The agents and Daley have weapons, and they’re obviously covering the rest of the group. Silent gunshots go off—I can only tell by the kick of the submachine guns, but they’re fighting something.

  The group moves down the main hall and into a wide room with—

  [That’s the tram.]

  It looks less like a tram and more like one of those monorail bullet trains from Japan. The doors are open, and the power’s on, but every car’s shrouded with webbing and cocoons that might be egg sacs.

  That means the Offspring have a way into the main facility—and that this isn’t the only way around.

  I have to move.

  The gunfire echoing down the hall was beyond deafening; even with her aural aug turned all the way down, Sora couldn’t hear a thing—except for an overwhelmingly loud ringing sound and the guns.

  She piled into the third car on the web-covered train and shoved herself onto one of the thin, hard benches. Someone slammed into her and squished her into her mom’s side. She just let it happen; the things pouring down the hallway after them wouldn’t care if they were comfortable. They’d only care if they could eat Sora and her family.

  And they definitely could.

  Everything had gone crazy; Sora couldn’t stop her heart from pounding in her ears, and every flash of gunfire made her want to jump out of her skin. For a second, she thought about pressing against her mom and trying to cover her face. But she couldn’t.

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  Sora pushed and twisted until she could see out of the window. There were four cars, and they’d aimed for the second and third; according to Director Ramirez and that Alexander guy, the first was filled with controls with only enough space for a handful of people, and the fourth was strictly for supplies for the SHOCKS facility. If they had to overflow, it wouldn’t be a comfortable ride in there.

  The agents and handful of armed teachers weren’t enough, either. Their perimeter was getting pushed back faster than they could kill spiders. Sora didn’t need to be a math genius like Claire to see that their time was limited.

  A rumbling feeling ripped through the train. She couldn’t hear it, and she couldn’t hear the announcement that had to be playing. But the engine was on, and the train was ready to go.

  The last few defenders piled in, firing their weapons into the oncoming spiders until the doors closed and the train started moving. And for just a split second, Sora thought she saw something move across the crowded platform and launch itself toward the fourth car. Then the train slid into a dark stone tunnel, and Sora stared at the passing rock inches from her nose.

  They were safe—safe from the spiders and from that bizarre, horrifying glacier.

  My window’s not huge.

  I’ve got about three seconds from the time the guns stop firing until the train leaves and the spiders get overwhelming. In that time, I Slither and Smoke Form across the battlefield, firing mergekillers that act like regular bullets into the Offspring crowding the platform, and land safely in the fourth car.

  My aural aug’s resetting repeatedly as James tries to get it running through the deafening combat, so I can only see his words through text. [We’re in for a quick ride; according to the blueprints, this train takes about ten minutes to pass from the Geren-Danger wing to the main SHOCKS Olympia facility. While we’re waiting, let’s think about this. What advantages does this facility offer you that we don’t already have between the two of us?]

  “James, you didn’t even know about half of this wing. How much other black stuff is under these mountains? Wait, you can’t answer that, can you?”

  [No,] James says. The English accent’s shockingly stiff. Fully academic-sounding. I’ve struck a nerve. [But do those black facilities and wings have critical information that will let us get in under the System’s one-week time limit? We’re down to five and a half days.]

  “We don’t know the answer. We can’t know the answer because you don’t even know what’s in them!” I half-shout. The fourth car’s a mess. Steel i-beams and a pile of what looks like slabs of drywall lay haphazardly everywhere, and a few big tanks that look suspiciously like compressed oxygen like divers use roll around. They’re probably explosive.

  James starts to say something, but the train’s moving, and the swarm of Offspring chases after it. I put a few rounds into the closest ones, and the train picks up speed with a magnetic humming sound that makes my teeth ache. The back door to the train’s hanging open from when I pulled it open and jumped in.

  I slide it shut, pushing against the train’s inertia until it clicks.

  [Like I was saying, the answer doesn’t matter. What matters is increasing your strength to the point where I can make a viable argument about your ability to both beat whatever anomaly comes out of a merge and close the merge itself,] James says. [Discovering the skeletons in SHOCKS’s closet doesn’t help us with that.]

  “You were a skeleton in SHOCKS’s closet,” I snap back. I relax against the drywall as best I can.

  I don't know why my relationship with James is starting to fray. It might have something to do with Sidney. As much as I’m trying not to say anything about him, just the fact that Sidney still exists at all and that, unconsciously or not, James was suppressing him, doesn’t sit well with me.

  But I think it’s more than that, and it’s more than the System and James being one entity. I can’t place it, but it feels a little like…

  I don’t know. The truth is elusive sometimes.

  [Yes, I was. Do you intend to dig up every one of them? And what will you do if there are hundreds of skeletons like me? Will you get yourself killed trying to save them all?]

  “No. I think I can handle myself,” I say.

  But that second question? Whether I’ll kill myself trying to save them all? That’s the core of it, isn’t it? I’m a tool. I’ve been a tool since SHOCKS noticed the Revolver. And even though James-as-Sidney cares about me-as-Claire, James-as-the-System cares about me as a bonded human/anomaly pair with massive power potential. That’s what it is.

  That’s a lot to process, but I’ve got a few minutes. I lie back on the pile of drywall.

  And that’s when the back half of the train car tears off.

  It takes almost eight seconds from the time the train starts shrieking and its brakes send tides of sparks up against the tiny door window until the whole back of my car vanishes. I get to watch it in slow motion, since there’s nothing I can do to stop it.

  First, the drywall slides to the front of the train. That saves my life; I roll off it and Smoke Form the impact with the steel floor before it can hit the door to Car Three. A pair of massive jaws, each the size of my body, punch through the car and slice into the metal, leaving a five-foot gash in its frame.

  Intertia does the rest.

  The train’s got to be moving at a hundred miles an hour. The back half’s brakes are on, and whatever’s attacking it slows it down even more. There’s a horrible shredding sound that goes on and on even as James pops my aug into hearing protector mode. Then the car sheers off entirely.

  I catch a glimpse of the gigantic spider-thing that just mauled half of a train car.

  It’s big. Really big. It looks a lot like the Offspring— and a lot like the spiders we learned about in middle school science. Its spinnerette trails half-formed webbing behind it as it tears into the train car until it’s nothing but steel rubble. It keeps surging after me. After us.

  Sora and Dad and the teachers are one and two cars ahead of me. I’ve got to do something.

  [That’s a Xuduo-Danger anomaly. No identifying—wait, I’ve got something. I’m extrapolating from the smaller versions we fought a few minutes ago, but my Analysis is coming along.]

  “Great.” I pick myself up off the floor and take stock of what I’ve got that might stand a chance against this thing.

  Gravity shells are my first thought, but I’ve already seen that they don’t always grab the most powerful enemies—especially when I’m moving fast and so is my target. I fire one anyway, just in case. The shot grabs a single leg, but the monstrous spider’s momentum is too much; it pulls free and keeps coming, hardly losing a beat.

  Soundbreak might cause enough of a pressure difference to pop it backward. Fire shells aren’t a clear-cut answer; I could throw one of the oxygen tanks and try to shoot it, but that’s risky. In a small space like this tunnel, an explosion could get trapped and overrun the train. At least, that’s what James thinks. I’ve got reality skippers, but they’re even less effective than the gravity shots, since we’re moving so quickly.

  I’ve got to have an answer, though. I just finished telling James I could hold my own against just about anything.

  The spider’s catching up. I don’t have much time.

  “Is this thing from Earth?” I ask.

  [I doubt it. Analysis won’t fill in that gap, but even anomalous, this kind of monster’s not sustainable here. The food needs alone would be staggering.]

  “I have a plan,” I say.

  Then I take a deep breath and adjust a few Inquiries.

  ?Inquiries (5/5)

  ?Why was the Truth Club’s circle so interesting?

  ?How does Director Ramirez intend to weaponize the merge generator?

  ?How can I get Alice back in her body?

  ?Who is Alexander?

  ?Why is there a giant spider in the Geren-Danger wing?

  It’s a stupid Inquiry, but it’s good enough for the System to accept it.

  And a split-second after I finish it, I use Truthseeker.

  Location Unknown, Location Unknown, Time Unknown

  - - - - -

  It’s nothing like my trip into Li Mei’s psyche.

  It’s hardly a psyche at all.

  There’s a forest. The trees are a thousand feet high. Two thousand. It’s hard to tell because the sun doesn’t reach the floor, and my vision doesn’t reach the canopy. The pine needles on the forest floor are so thick, so deep, that the spider I’m watching hunt sinks into them almost halfway up its massive legs.

  A second spider looms over me, jaws open and shivering. Its whole body quivers, but I’m not worried. Li Mei was like this. She knew she should be killing me, but she couldn’t. I’m safe as long as I’m in this vision. So, instead of panicking, I watch the first, real spider hunt whatever it is giant spiders eat.

  It turns out the answer to that is everything.

  I don’t get information from the spider whose jaws are inches from my temples but can’t close them. That’s fine. I don’t need information. Emotions are enough, and even a spider has those.

  So I pay attention to the hunting spider’s emotions.

  Determination. Anxiety. Satisfaction. It hunts gigantic five-legged insects that remind me of deer when they run. Webbing shoots out across their path, tripping them up, and the spider’s on them in seconds, even as the icy-hot webbing eats through their legs. Dozens of them die and are drained dry within just a moment, leaving the monstrous spider hungering for its next meal.

  But there’s another emotion. Two of them, in fact.

  The first is hunger. It’s constant. Overwhelming. No matter how much the massive spider eats, it can’t possibly sate itself. No matter how much it kills, there’s always another meal, another hunt, another victim. The hunt is endless; so is the hunger.

  And a second one.

  It takes me a long time to realize what it is, because I’ve never really felt it. Not like this, at least. But when it finds what it’s looking for, it’s obvious, and I can’t avoid it. It’s lust. An overwhelming desire to breed, and then to murder its partner and consume. That hunger’s never sated, either.

  I try to detach while I watch. It’s like a nature documentary. But then I watch as the spider covers itself in its eggs until it’s no longer a black, chitin-covered shape but almost white-orange and glowing from the thousands of eggs stuck to every inch of its thorax, spinnerette, and body. Even its legs carry eggs, leaving the joints barely free to bend.

  The spider continues into the forest.

  One egg falls off.

  It rolls down a hill, and the massive spider that’s been threatening to eat me—the one without an entire brood of Offspring waiting to be hatched—follows it.

  Before it can stop, I catch sight of the thinning, and watch as the egg rolls into it—and through the opening merge.

  Apocalypse Engineering yet? You should. I wrote it, and I think I did a pretty good job!

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