“Heck.”

  Isaac was pretty sure Mechaniacal’s drones were going to feature in his nightmares for years to come. It was bad enough when Greg had been wielding stolen goods, but now that Mechaniacal himself was using them, they were infinitely more threatening. They weren’t just a gaggle of spheres, but coordinated, precise, moving with an intelligence and authority they hadn’t shown before.

  “Maybe time for invisibility,” Isaac suggested, leaning forward to rub Shay’s neck as the raptor picked up on the sudden nervousness. “I’ll do what I can to make it stick better.”

  “Okay, but start slow,” Sarah said, more careful now that the downsides of his power had been demonstrated, but she still focused and the smoke surrounding them fuzzed and vanished. Everyone else went translucent, though he had to imagine that from the outside their little group was completely gone.

  Isaac raised his hands, trying to actually touch the effect, though he knew that it was already in contact with him in some way. Regardless, he was used to the physicality of inertia and the habits remained. Pulling on his power, he focused on making it harder to change the invisibility of it all. Not the specific look, not the specific shape. Drawing on the same approach he’d used with the wall, he tried to reinforce the property of remaining unseen, making it harder to alter that property, that effect. Nudging Shay, he went to each of the others and reached out to touch them, providing the exact same boost but focused only on them as individuals rather than the general effect.

  It wasn’t foolproof, of course, and it wouldn’t work without Sarah actively sustaining the effect. Probably. The permanence of his own power implied that maybe he could make these temporary alterations permanent if he knew how, though he doubted most things worked that way. He wouldn’t want to inflict permanent invisibility on anyone, anyway, but the temporary version would hopefully be enough to fool the drones.

  “Done,” he said, after he let go of one of Savage’s mechanical arms. Through the bracelet, he urged Shay to keep silent and stealthy as Lia pointed in a direction and they took off once again. Something about the shift to invisibility prompted the drones to drop down to where they had once been, searching for their presence. Even from a distance Isaac could hear a distinct ticking and clicking, much louder than the other drones, and had a very bad feeling these were something more terrible than what he’d faced up in Star City.

  The three drones split off, two heading in other directions that were quickly lost in the forest, but the third roughly parallelled their course, zipping back and forth to, it seemed, scan the environment. Isaac suppressed a sigh, realizing that invisibility didn’t extend to leaving tracks behind, but there wasn’t much he could do. Except be ready if the drone got closer.

  He still had the stick that he’d picked up back at the compound – it was a good stick – and while he didn’t have any inertia invested now thanks to riding Shay, it would have to serve. There was no telling how well the invisibility would hold if and when he actually attacked the sphere, and such an attack would definitely betray their presence. Which prompted a sudden thought.

  “Lia, Savage,” he hissed. “Where’s the nearest big animal?” Both of them looked his way, understood the plan, and then Savage swiveled almost ninety degrees. Isaac urged Shay to follow, matching pace with Astoria as the drone started to close in. The raw invisibility was definitely working, but wasn’t sufficient. The next few minutes were in tense silence, muffled by the suppressing smokescreen, watching the bobbing drone fall behind and then close in again, swooping smoothly through the vines and limbs of the subterranean jungle.

  Suddenly they broke out into a clearing with a rocky tor, some massive ancient boulder upon which lay an absolutely stupendous iguana, or something near enough as made no difference. The invisibility held, the truck-sized reptile seeming to not notice them as it sunned itself – or whatever basking could be called in a land with no actual sun – while they cut across the clearing. The drone, on the other hand, garnered a warning hiss. Then, when the ticking, whirring sphere didn’t desist, the reptile pounced.

  It wasn’t really a fight, but the sounds of growling and tearing metal echoed behind them as they bounded back into the dense jungle. They kept going, plunging through the venerable, ancient trunks and occasionally startling a bird-sized pteranodon that flitted into the invisibility bubble, but Isaac knew that wasn’t going to be enough. If Mechaniacal had found them before, he’d find them again, unless something threw him off the trail.

  After another few minutes, he signaled for Shay to slow down, waving at the others to get their attention. Insects zinged through the air and somewhere in the distance thunder growled as Sarah and Lia guided their mounts to a halt. Isaac could tell through the wristband that Shay was starting to get thirsty and hungry again, and to be frank so was he. They really needed to get out of the wilderness.

  Isaac was a city boy; they all were, though Lia and Savage might have some kind of survival training even if it wasn’t meant for the Deep Kingdoms. And Shay – and the rest of the mounts – weren’t cars. They got tired, hungry, thirsty, bored, and while Isaac might have been willing to drive a car until it failed and abandon it in a pinch, he wasn’t going to do that to Shay. As if reading his thoughts, his mount gave him an interrogatory warble, and he rubbed his hand along the scales of her neck.

  “I can’t imagine we’ll be able to shake his tech for long,” Sarah said, drawing down into herself as she glanced back nervously. Both of them had pretty bad histories with the spherical drones, and it seemed damned unfair that the technology had followed them all the way to the wilderness of the Deep Kingdoms, thousands of miles beneath the surface.

  “Probably not,” Isaac agreed. “I was thinking about how I did a pretty good job hiding out from Star Central before, though. This isn’t a city, and I don’t really know what I’m doing, but what if we look like ikiski instead?”

  “Oh, I bet he’d just float right past us,” Sarah said, gnawing thoughtfully at her kiseru, every thought practically visible as her expression shiftd. “Maybe keep Lia and Savage invisible, so it’s just two? And no offense, Savage, but I think you’d stand out the most.”

  “I know I do,” Savage said, sinking down onto his haunches, oddly catlike. “Besides which, at her size I believe Lia would invite unwanted attention as an ikiski.”

  “Can you keep up the illusions that long?” Isaac asked. He didn’t have any idea how much of a strain it was, since his power didn’t take sustained effort like hers.

  “I think so,” she said thoughtfully, rubbing her hand along Astoria’s scales. “Your power made it easier, so I can probably keep it going until we find a town or something.”

  “Great,” he said. Although he was still a little leery of pushing too much into a disguise. All he dared to use was a light touch, like he had used with Harkeem. “Just give us new faces and new names, and I’ll lock them in place.” That wasn’t exactly what he was doing, but since he had trouble articulating the exact mechanism of ontological inertia to himself, it was hard to explain to others.

  Sarah’s expression became hidden again and her form firmed up as she dropped her invisibility – and he was glad to see she could drop it - before smoke flowed over her and turned her into an ikiski that more or less matched Astoria. Similar scale colors, and tasteful topaz crystaltech augments. Not that any of them had any idea what the augments did, other than look good, but Gratin was the only ikiski they’d seen without them. Isaac got a similar makeover, turned into a blue and green reptile, which made the robes match only so well. Not that fashion was their first priority at the moment, but at least they had proper clothing for the region.

  “Chiak and Tianit,” Sarah decided, gesturing to herself and to Isaac. Not having any reference for how good those were for ikiski names, he just nodded acceptance and adjusted himself a little bit, abandoning Bulwark and pushing a touch of inertia into Tianit. Shay startled briefly, turning her head around to snuffle at him, but seemed satisfied enough after a moment. Giving her another scratch, he nudged her over to Sarah and reached out to reinforce her disguise the same way.

  Shay grumbled something and Astoria swiveled her head to watch the process, making Isaac wonder exactly how intelligent the raptors were. Not that dogs or horses were stupid, but he had a feeling that Shay was closer to human than to horse. There was, unfortunately, no magic point at which it was clear that Isaac had invested enough, but he was pretty certain that he only put in as much for her identity as for his.

  Neither identity would stand up for very long under scrutiny, especially since even with Lia’s translation magic they couldn’t properly converse as ikiski, but it’d probably fool a drone scanning over the forest from above. He was more comfortable losing himself in a crowd than in the jungle, but it wasn’t like they had a choice. Though some part of him wondered how much it actually mattered.

  If Mechaniacal had decided to call Star City home, and the tinker was looking for Isaac, then returning wasn’t going to help very much.

  “Okay, I’m about ready to find a place we can sit down and have dinner,” Sarah said, and Isaac shoved aside his worries with the physical gesture he’d been taught all the way back in foster care.

  “Let’s go,” he agreed, and looked to Lia – still fuzzy and transparent – for directions. The moonie pointed off through the trees, and Isaac nudged Shay into motion. They’d have to break for water soon, but one of the benefits of being in a humid jungle was that there were streams everywhere, and by the sound of things there’d be rain soon as well.

  Hopefully it wasn’t too far to a settlement, though. Once there, they could ditch the disguises – Isaac didn’t dare try to masquerade as something other than human – and try to get a ride to the south pole. With any luck, they could stay ahead of Mechaniacal, and not have to deal with him at all. Between Star Central and the Great Kings, he was sure the old tinker would have his hands too full to keep pursuing Isaac.

  ***

  Gratin was old. Older than most would suspect, and while his crystal workings did little for his strength or speed, as a Tenth Claw he had access to more subtle technologies, flowing through his blood. He was never destined to develop additional facets regardless; he’d never had the knack. Yet despite having been around for quite a while and seeing very many things, nothing awed him quite like Great King Iy.

  There was a reason beyond simply being outsiders that humans shouldn’t be around a Great King. Iy radiated power, palpable force accompanying every motion and gesture and look, something that other species could neither withstand nor understand. The further removed from the crystalline technologies, the more vulnerable others were, to the point where those who had never been to the Deep Kingdoms might be affected.

  Even if the surfacers had never met one of the Great Kings in person, such was their might and presence that some knowledge of them had leaked into the world above even before the Great Polar Passages had been traversed. The humans called them kaiju, and they appeared in comics and movies with a fair modicum of accuracy. They had leaked into the fundamental knowledge of the world, the dreams and imaginings of the populace everywhere, just as in the Deep Kingdoms there were stories of monsters such as Glorybeam and Blacktime from time immemorial.

  Gratin’s Great King was a match for any of the skyscrapers in Star City, even larger than Star Central itself, shining with brilliantly emerald scales with crystal fins along his back. Leashed energies crackled and snapped from the crown of horns that graced his brow, racing down the sapphire and ruby armor along his back and grounding into nodes of the master-crafted crystaltech that clad his gargantuan form. If it came to a fight between Iy and one of the human sovereigns, Gratin would bet on Iy and not simply because of loyalty.

  Wherever the Great King looked, dust billowed from the impact of his gaze, the mere act of beholding what existed pressing against the world. The line of upset debris and rattling stone terminated at the still-standing wall of the compound, which creaked under the pressure. It would be a losing battle for the wall, but the fact that it fought at all was admirable.

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  “Hmm,” said Iy, a rumble that shook the earth. If any of the surfacers were still around, they probably would have thought it was another attack, but they’d taken Gratin’s advice and relocated. “Interesting.” One word, rendered in a single rising tone.

  Iy looked downward – very far downward – at First Claw, and spoke in the True Tongue, a hyper-compressed rumble and chirp that minimized the amount of time Iy needed to spend talking. Something that was more a concession to the fragility of other ikiski than it was a means to preserve the dignity of the Great Kings. Outside of their gemstone palaces, an extended conversation by a King would have severe and irreversible effects on both peoples and places. Even the legends around crystalline entities implied the destructive things were creations of storytelling contests from the truly ancient days of the first Great Kings.

  First Claw bowed, ignoring the surrounding throngs of worshipful ikiski who had crept out to witness their ruler, and flicked his tail, beckoning Gratin forward. He jumped to obey, scurrying out among the much larger and more powerful Claws, feeling awe in all its shades. Of course he was gratified to have the attention of the King, but it was also a terrible thing, for the imperious demands of the King’s expectations were almost more than any mortal could bear.

  “Great King Iy wishes to know more about the surfacers you have brought down here, and what their true strength is.” In strict words, it sounded cold, but in tone and context there were layers of warning and sympathy. It was the Great King’s purpose to ensure his people remained well and whole, just as it was Tenth Claw’s purpose to be where those of real power could not.

  Gratin hoped that after this he could keep being the Millers’ cook. He rather liked the surface, and cooking, and seeing the sights of Star City. The great sweep of blue and the intense ball of the sun were a constant wonder, and where the Millers lived none of the struggle between hero and villain truly touched him. At least until now.

  Reporting the nature of James, Sarah, and the new addition of Isaac took little time. Gratin was entirely loyal to his King, of course, but he bore some measure of consideration for the Millers and their interests, so he was judicious about what he revealed directly. More discreet communication was performed through his crystalline blood, though that was even more judicious to avoid revealing any information too personal to be in good taste. No one could serve two masters, which was why Tenth Claw was so difficult a post.

  Conveying opinion and shaping impression when it came to people so far removed from Iy was, in fact, serving his King, so Gratin felt little guilt in building a very particular view of the humans and their roles, not to mention their abilities. Isaac was not someone who had any interest in using his strength to change his social ranking; in fact, he barely understood his strength at all. Like one who had newly ascended a facet, tottering around like a newborn. Though unlike the faceted, the strength of humans was no straightforward thing, something that not every King understood.

  “He sounds in many ways harmless,” First Claw said, towering over Gratin in much the way Iy towered over them all. “Yet, the pair who came seeking him were themselves impressive. One who has harnessed the shadow of a dark god, and one who is from far beyond even the surface. The crystals sang such discordant notes of his presence.” Iy rumbled something else, too rapid for Gratin to fully parse, and First Claw nodded.

  “Strength draws strength. Sending them away was the best idea at the time, when we did not expect any visitors for weeks or months, but now they must be found again. Other Tenth Claws surely have been able to draw the same conclusions and make the same inferences. And other Kings may be less understanding of someone like that traveling through their territory—never mind those who chase after them.” First Claw used the cadence that implied he was translating King Iy’s words directly, and with it came implicit instructions.

  “I hear and obey,” Gratin said, with a deep bow to the towering entity that he served. It was hard to tell, but he thought Iy was perhaps even larger than in Gratin’s youth, proof of the value he’d been able to extract from trade with the surface. Though of course there were risks as well, as the diplomatic catastrophe of Gloryfall had shown. Iy himself reached down, a claw larger than Gratin stretching out to halt just above his head. At that distance, the simple aura of Iy’s presence nearly rendered him unconscious, but he braced himself and bore the pressure.

  “Well done,” Iy said, though the simple words were not enough to convey what was behind them. A spark of power jolted into him, a blessing that raced through the crystalline technology embedded in his blood; reminder that the Great Kings were no simple brutes. They were the first to harness crystals, and remained great wizard-scholars, constantly tinkering and experimenting to push the boundaries of what was and might be.

  Gratin had no idea what King Iy had blessed him with, but he was sure he would find out in time. Something that Iy found worth bestowing upon him would be tested, proved, and as easy to use as flexing a hand. He prostrated himself for a moment as Iy straightened, and then turned and scurried away through the crowd, slipping further and further into silence and shadows with every step.

  It was a skill he rarely used on the surface, and even then mostly for making it past traffic jams or super-fights when he was out and about in Star City. The ability did not fool many of the more powerful supers, and Gratin’s citizenship was somewhat more tenuous than a human’s. It wouldn’t do to be suspected of any skullduggery; or at least any more than he was actually engaged in. Though he hardly needed to spy, when he could just read the papers and listen to the radio.

  He zipped off in the direction that he’d sent Mocker and Mechaniacal, the strange transport having moved in ways that were entirely unlike anything Gratin had ever seen. Even with the extra senses his blessings gave him, it was impossible to know where it went when it vanished. On the other hand, its emergence was impossible to miss.

  The discordant pulse came from somewhere off to the south – of course, all points were south – and leeward of the prevailing winds and migrations. Proper directions used the great pyramids that fed the light above, and by his reckoning the pair had relocated themselves ruby-by-diamond, a few dozen miles away from the city of Borealis itself. A distance that, almost paradoxically, would be faster on foot simply because Gratin had not seen the need to secure a riding raptor with compatible augments.

  Instead he tapped into his own personal enhancements to slide along the fluxveins of subterranean crystal, dipping in and out as it brought him further from Borealis. Such slipwise movement was impossible on the surface, and he found himself to be a touch rusty in his technique. But not so rusty that he wasn’t able to close in on the vehicle within the hour.

  It might have been better to go to the surrounding settlements, instructing them to hold onto Sarah, Isaac, and the Brute Squad members—but Gratin had doubts such instructions would work, even provided they could be reached in time. Unless it was Gratin himself who found them, natural caution on the part of both those he wished to find and those who populated the itinerant settlements arrayed on the fringes of Borealis would complicate matters. In short, their strangeness meant a lack of trust in both directions.

  The surfacers, though, had means and methods at their disposal that nobody in the Deep Kingdoms could mimic. Ones that might well be able to track and reach the quartet before they could get too far, and draw all kinds of attention. Negotiations from that point would be somewhat ticklish, but better than trying to negotiate between various Great Kings.

  He emerged from his slipwise jaunt at the base of a great tree, stretching wide and tall and nearly as large as King Iy. Blooming orchid-flowers large enough for Gratin to fit inside sprang from the vines climbing the gnarled trunk, leading upward to where he could hear the out-of-place ticking of the mechanical conveyance. Scrambling up was easy enough – much nicer than human architecture, which had no accommodations for claws – and as he hauled himself up onto the massive branch he could see where it rested, canted ever so slightly on the uneven surface.

  Several weapons swiveled to face his way, deployed from the shell of the metallic sphere, and Gratin straightened his clothing as he waited for someone to check the automated defenses. It made sense to have them, of course, given some of the wildlife in the Deep Kingdoms, and Gratin wasn’t going to challenge anything fit for that purpose. Fortunately, as the smallest caste of ikiski he did not look particularly fearsome, and indeed in many ways was not, so he should not cross any invisible lines. And they should remember him, or at least he hoped so.

  As he suspected, after a few seconds of silent standoff, the barrels and humming rods extended from the side of the contraption swiveled away, and a section of the smooth steel hull opened up. A small ramp extended on hydraulics, and Gratin trotted forward to find that the interior was, somehow, larger than the exterior. While he would have likened the size of the conveyance to a car, the interior was a full room, with couches, chairs, and a floor that seemed to be composed of brass casing and intermeshed gears under glass. Inside were four people, all of them supers of one stripe or another.

  The two men standing by a display on the far wall were an amusing pair; both tall and thin. One in a black cloak and top hat, a master of magic and a warlock if his information was correct, and the other, in a three-piece suit and wielding a cane, was the exact opposite, a man of science so esoteric that it might as well be magic itself. The pair on the other side of the room were not human at all; a shadow and a rock lounging in chairs behind a semicircle of humming, glowing coils rising from the floor.

  “Hello yes!” Gratin said in human speech, which didn’t take the cadence of ikiski vocabulary in the proper way, but that didn’t stop him from trying. “Have you found Miss Miller and Mister Hartson?”

  “We did for a moment,” the warlock said with a resigned expression. “But they slipped away again. Mister Hartson is exceedingly difficult to pin down.”

  ***

  Professor Mechaniacal regarded the small creature curiously, his sensors registering far more to the ikiski than met the eye. He could very well see the value – for the Deep Kingdoms – in having someone like that embedded in an important family on the surface. It was hardly his business, but if he was the lizard-man’s employer he would have serious questions about loyalty.

  What he was doing at the moment was hardly sensitive, however, and Mechaniacal returned to the display that showed the sensor data from his remaining drones. Most of them had been sourced from local caches; ancient, mostly-disposable drones, outdated and showing the wear and tear of decades in storage. Not cut out for the effort it seemed it would take, and while most of his drones were simple enough that automated construction methods were sufficient to create more, The Teleopter didn’t have the facilities for that kind of thing.

  Mechaniacal’s dimensional craft was a wonder in all ways, to be sure, but it was not the same as a proper base and manufactory. He’d already ordered another batch of drones from his tower in Star City, but unfortunately even there he was limited in terms of raw materials. Despite keeping his hand in over the years, even in exile on the moon, he didn’t have the sort of infrastructure he really needed to create a proper army.

  The ultimate consequence of which was that he had only so much he could contribute toward tracking down one Isaac Hartson and companions without taking time out to resupply. He had been expecting a moment of dead space to properly establish himself, and challenges more in line with deflecting superheroes and supervillains trying to assault his tower. An irksome lack of foresight.

  “Have you located any of the others?” Mechaniacal asked of Mocker. He didn’t understand all magic, but he still respected it, and the warlock’s abilities were complementary to his own in this endeavor. Getting eyes on the people involved was easy enough if he could direct his drones to the area, but he didn’t have the weight of materiel required for a thorough sweep. Mocker solved much of the issue by localizing the search region through more esoteric means—though it seemed those efforts had been stymied as well.

  “No. Mister Hartson has already shown the ability to deflect direct scrying, which he seems to have extended to Miss Miller. The Lunarian has kept herself screened from most magics, and Savage…” Mocker frowned and looked across the room at their other guests. “He’s another extradimensional. Hard for magic to find.”

  “That surely can’t be coincidence,” Mechaniacal observed, tapping his fingers on his cane. He had recognized Bubs, of course, as one of the shadow beings that infested the ruins of Glorybeam’s Folly. And it made some sense that he would be so sensitive to Mechaniacal’s presence, as such beings already lived on the skein of reality, their intrinsic dimensional resonance granting them their unique properties. Rigging up a variance shield to protect the poor thing from Mechaniacal’s presence was easy enough, but he was still curious how exactly it had managed to find itself in reality. His own attempts to take things from shadow realities had found no joy.

  “Did you and Savage arrive here in the same way?” Mechaniacal asked directly, as it might be relevant. If the warlock couldn’t locate them with magic, there might be methods available to science if he could track the extradimensional resonance. But all the foreign energies generated by the crystalline technology made that difficult without something to reference from.

  “Yes,” Bubs said tiredly, clearly still wary about being in the same room even if that included proper screening devices. “In the wake of the BlackBeam incident twenty years ago, Administrator Ike tried…” He gave a bubbling sigh. “Something. Savage and I wound up here, and Star Central took us in but eventually we decided it wasn’t for us.”

  “I should have known the Director was involved,” Mechaniacal sighed. There was a close connection between the realm of dreams and the shadow realities cast by the bright light of the true timeline. Perhaps they were even the same, and he’d merely never ventured far enough out to comprehend Creation in its totality. Regardless, it was perhaps an avenue, though not one he could manage without returning to his laboratory.

  Hartson was the key to returning Glorybeam to her appropriate place, and that was the primary reason he was interested, but he had to admit that the apparent ability to augment others was quite alluring. A simple illusion shouldn’t have fooled his drones, but something had ticked the effect a few notches past audiovisual tricks. Something more adversarial, in a way that reminded him of the altered walls in his reclaimed laboratory.

  “I will be returning to the surface,” he said, waving toward the door. “Those who are staying should leave now. This hunt requires more equipment.” It had been a long time since he had worked with the Deep Kingdoms, but now the teeth of his memories had begun to mesh properly, along with all the old ideas he’d had to deal with their crystaltech and the Great Kings.

  When he came back it’d be with real tools, the kind that could contest any power at the center of the Earth.

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