…into the night.

  Dusty had no idea how long they’d been walking. Probably five hours. He and Inu were alright, but the humans were looking decidedly wrung out. They wouldn’t be able to keep going much longer. He glanced at the all-blue Ssaya man and they exchanged thoughts the way angels do:

  Another hour and we’re going to have to find these humans a place to sleep before they fall down.

  Charis was using his skateboard. Not really using it… just standing listlessly on it, and despite the rocky broken asphalt it glided along as if it were on fresh new cement. Despite her elogic exhaustion she was doing fine, but Dave was limping badly; his leg (and head) had taken quite a beating in the crash. But he was too chivalrous to take the skateboard from Charis. Dusty wished he had another skateboard for the Normal.

  With a sigh, Dusty glanced to the horizons again. He almost tripped on the rough asphalt with surprise when he saw dim and distant lights. They were probably too far away for the humans to see, but his eyesight was much better than theirs.

  “Wait, guys, look, light! There’s a city ahead!” Dusty pointed.

  It was enough to encourage them, and they all plodded slightly faster to the sound of the crickets. That was the best they could do. Most of another hour passed as they crested a vast rise in the land. At last they came over a final ridge to see…

  “Oh… my god…” Dave breathed, face going white in the darkness.

  Scott groaned. “Oh, shit.”

  Las Vegas spread before them like a blanket made of a million fireflies of every color, pulsing with veins of light.

  Never has Dave seen anything like it. It looked like a goddamn Hieronymus Bosch painting. There was a giant black horned and winged demon standing on top of one of the casinos laughing while things exploded around him, and his minions danced the dance of brotherly love. Spears of black and red fire shot silently into the sky, which was obscured by thick boiling black clouds which hovered just over the city among swarms of sick, greasy colored lights that swirled overhead like the scum on top of oily water. Darkness filled the city, darkness and fire. Even from their distance they could hear the screaming and whooping and cackling and shrieking of the minions of the Veil echoing across the desert while black lightning struck silently.

  Dave’s knees buckled and he sat down on the asphalt. “Just kill me now.”

  Charis sighed and planted her fists on her hips. She said with certainty, “We can’t go to Los Vegas. It’s an Enemy stronghold. Like, THE Enemy stronghold. Like worse than Mount Shasta. Four Morians walking in there… with whatever Dave has on him… is just suicide.”

  “Well,” Dusty thought for a moment, scratching his sunburned scalp through his messy white hair, “I mean it might be worth it… maybe we could find a Popeyes or a K.F.C. or something?”

  “I’m not eating anything that comes from that… that…” Dave grimaced at the hellscape.

  The suburbs that surrounded Vegas were dark, though they were filled with physical house and street lights. They looked like an oil slick of crawling dirty little dark things, a sea of despair.

  Dave snatched the silver UFO radio from Inu’s belt. “Sally, for the love of God, talk to us.”

  “Maybe we can head for Phoenix? I’m from there. I know my way around,” Dusty suggested, and everyone gave him a look of disbelief.

  Charis took charge. “Okay. Look, both sides know we went down in Southern Nevada. Since this is pretty much the only city down here, everyone is going to figure that we headed this way. Our guys as well as theirs. So our guys should be headed this way too.”

  “Who with their head on straight would want to go there?” Dave asked everyone and no one.

  “David,” Charis snapped, “Can you see anything going on?”

  He sputtered, “Are you kidding?” He stared at the huge black winged demon playing Godzilla from a tower.

  “No! I mean look up. Is there anything looking for us? Can you see anything coming, like you did with the Katarai, um, the giants?”

  He really didn’t want to look up. The last time he looked up he almost passed out from a sense of dimensional vertigo… but Dave was a man. He took a deep breath, braced himself, and looked up.

  Into domes of fire and ice, blue wheels and lights, and infinite mirrors and hallways of doors, with a man made out of fire at the very highest point looking down… RIGHT. AT. HIM.

  Dave screamed and fell over onto his back and started repenting of his sins at the top of his lungs.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Everyone sighed and rolled their eyes. Charis blew out a lung full of air and looked at the city with frustration.

  “Well, that didn’t work,” Inu said, watching Dave squirm.

  “I’m blind! I’m blind! Ohmygod! HELP!” Dave cried.

  “Seriously?” Scott asked in disbelief.

  Dave flailed around and found Miradon’s leg, hugging it like a little kid. Miradon looked vaguely disturbed. He frowned and glanced at Scott. “What the hell sort of Mantle is this, anyway?”

  “You got me,” Scott shrugged.

  “God looked at me!” Dave wailed.

  Dusty couldn’t help it. He started to laugh.

  “Huh,” Scott said, looking at David then up at the night sky. Then back at David. “God? Really?” He looked up again.

  Dave began crying with the most pathetic whimper that sounded like, ‘Ah hoo hoo huu.’

  Charis sighed. Time for a new plan. “Okay, you know what? The Gateway are the ones looking for us. Right? They’re the extraction team.”

  Scott and Dusty nodded, waiting for the punch line.

  “That means they don’t just have Lavissar… they have Madrik with them. Madrik, the Archon of the Lost! He always works with them. That means all we have to do is go down into the city… and get lost.”

  “There’s a lot of eyes down there,” Scott warned, pointing at the city.

  “I know. We just have to chance it,” she said firmly.

  Dusty wasn’t convinced, frowning at her. “Can an Astrology major GET lost?”

  She scowled, thinking about that for a moment. Part of her Academy training had been not only movement but also dimensional and spatial location. As long as she was conscious and using half of her brain, she would always know exactly where she was. “Good point. Maybe I need to be unconscious.”

  Dusty scowled, picking at his lip as he thought hard about that. “Maybe I could overload your optical nerves and knock you out…”

  “I don’t want to go BLIND, Dusty!” She yelled.

  “Wait,” Miradon pointed to the blue Inu, “we have a Ssaya!”

  “Right!” Scott grabbed the grumpy pilot and shook him a little. “Can you sing?”

  Inu looked startled. “Huh? Oh. Yah, I guess.”

  “Do that Ssaya shit! Sing! Knock her out, make her go to sleep or something.”

  “If I sing I’ll knock all of you out!”

  “Then you go out into the desert, sing to her and knock her out, and carry her back!” Scott told him. “We have to be totally lost, and this won’t work if she’s still awake because Astro majors can always find their way.”

  The Ssaya shrugged, “I can try…”

  “Come on.” Charis grabbed his hand and led the way out into the darkness.

  The others stood and shivered by the road, watching the lights. The desert at night had grown shockingly cold even in the heat of early autumn. Miradon had brought back his top hat and cloak, and pulled it around his shoulders tightly. Soon they heard, at a distance, a hauntingly beautiful man’s voice singing. They all tried not to listen. They didn’t want to be knocked out too.

  “I can’t see.” Dave whimpered, blinking hard. At least he was pretty sure he couldn’t see. Everything was dark except for a blue-purple man-shape right in the middle of his vision, with black pinpoint eyes, which wouldn’t fade. That figure had been glowing brighter than the sun, and those eyes had been pure white when he’d accidentally looked at it.

  It took the man-shaped blot in his vision a very long time to fade, giving Dave an equally long time to think about what, exactly, he was looking at. He stared at it on the inside of his eyelids until it became a blur, focusing on the black eyes. It made him shiver. He decided he would never look up again.

  Just to be sure they all knew he said sulkily, “I’m not looking up again.”

  “Nobody is asking you to, man.” He smelled smoke; Dusty had lit up one of the cigarettes he’d bummed from Dave. Dave crawled toward him and stuck out two fingers in the universal begging gesture. He took the cigarette when it was passed to him and comforted himself with the flavor of burning tobacco. His hands were shaking.

  Meanwhile he could still hear perfectly fine. It sounded like that night in San Francisco, maybe worse. The sound of a metallic string stretching beyond its endurance, suddenly breaking with a twang that was so loud it sent a tremble through the cold dirt below him. There was a subsonic thrumming, like a huge diesel truck idling under the city, but so loud that it rattled his skull. He could smell acrid smoke, and hear roaring and booming voices laughing in an evil language. He was grateful that it was so far away.

  And he’d thought San Francisco was bad…

  Finally they heard a man’s footsteps running toward them across the gravel, and Dave thought he saw a white smear against the night. Inu was back. He said breathlessly, “I think I did it. She’s a little heavy for me to carry, I don’t want to drop her.”

  Miradon stood, pulling off top hat and cloak gallantly. “Not a problem. Let me lend a hand. Or a hoof.” He yanked off his shirt, stepped out of his pants, and as he did he leaned forward. And he was suddenly a horse.

  Dave closed his eyes and looked away. He didn’t want to see. All this shit was too much for him. He couldn’t take at any more weirdness after looking up. He was just done for the night. Done.

  He scowled and glared at the ground, then around the man-shaped blot in his vision the ground slowly darkened like a great shadow was falling across it, even at night.

  Or worse… maybe the dirt under him, the road, the cracked earth, was becoming transparent and he was seeing a great, vast cavern below the surface. Was the Earth actually hollow?

  He held his breath, hoping to God he wasn’t seeing that. If he started seeing hell when he looks down he was going to start crying again.

  Dave shut his eyes and put a hand on Dusty’s shoulder. “Pretend I’m blind.”

  “I got you, man,” Dusty promised.

  Only Dusty really understood him.

  Miradon-the-horse and Inu left. They returned moments later. Inu was riding Miradon, and a snoring Charis was seated bareback in front of him. He held her up, her head resting on his shoulder. She was out cold.

  Dave noted that she snored, and put the very first mark in his mental ‘points against Charis as a girlfriend’ list.

  Scott took command, suddenly sounding confident. “Come on, guys!” He started walking toward the city.

  “Wait,” Dave climbed to his feet and accidentally opened his eyes. But the ground looked normal again, so he kept them open. “What’d you guys do to Charis?”

  “Inu’s a Ssaya,” Dusty told him, as if that explained it all.

  “I think I missed something,” Dave followed Dusty, closing his eyes again. “Why are we going into Doom City again?”

  “Don’t worry. We have a good plan, it will work,” the horse said cheerfully with its kooky British accent. “Just come along, and keep up!”

  Dave stared at the horse, then quickly shut his eyes again and held on to Dusty’s shoulder. As he walked he muttered under his breath about being ‘done’ and shook his head.