James looked on one side of his paper. Then he turned back to the other side. Then he scanned down from the top.

  “Dammit,” he cursed.

  “What is wrong, husband?”

  He looked up at his wife and smiled, his bad mood instantly banished.

  “Oh, I just added some numbers wrong again. It’s no big deal. I just wish that white-out existed in this world.”

  Daran frowned, her face somehow growing even more cute as her lips pressed in a slight pout. “Maybe you are too tired. You have been working on Hanti’s numbers for days, and hardly spending any time with us.”

  James shrugged. He couldn’t deny it; humans couldn’t keep working without a break, at least not without some abilities to help them out, and it was his responsibility to spend time with his wife and child.

  “They aren’t just Hanti’s numbers though, and no one else knows how to use a spreadsheet. We need to figure out if we’ve got enough food for everyone in the Golden Plains, including the human refugees from Satrap.”

  He sighed.

  “I wish Flann had sent us a better estimate of their numbers, though.”

  Daran skittered across the room to look over his spreadsheet. He laughed when her nose wrinkled at the sight.

  “Oh, come on, they’re just numbers. They don’t bite.”

  “But there are so many,” she protested. Her antenna beat through the air with mild distress and James grinned. The sight made him wonder how their daughter would look when she grew older. She had inherited his legs, but had kept her mother’s antenna. She was already an adorable toddler, but he was sure that she would be an even cuter kid.

  He picked up the paper and made animal sounds as he shook it at his wife, pretending the numbers might leap out and attack. She rolled her eyes in disgust, but he saw the corners of her mouth turn up in a smile.

  James put the paper back onto his desk and pointed at it. “These numbers are our food production. Now that the rains have returned, it’s actually constrained by labor and time, so we could grow more.”

  “That is good, yes?”

  He nodded. “Yup, it’s great. But–”

  He tapped another set of numbers.

  “–we’ll have more mouths to feed once the humans arrive. However–”

  His finger moved onto another column.

  “Some of the humans should be able to help with the sowing and harvesting. I’ve calculated things with different ratios of able-bodied humans to children and elderly, but I wish I had the real numbers.”

  Daran look up from the paper and inspect James’ communication array. “Flann should be calling back today, yes?”

  James grimaced. “Any moment now, hopefully, although I’m not sure our signals will reach all the way to Baytown. It’s been spotty without a Pillar acting as the conductor, but we’ve been deploying more repeaters to help out.”

  James was about to launch into a new idea of his that would take advantage of a spirit’s ability to divide into smaller versions of itself to quickly train a large number of flying message carriers, but a loud thump interrupted him. Daran put a steadying arm on his shoulder as the room shuddered and dust sifted down from the ceiling. James hastily moved his papers as ink sloshed over the side of his inkwell, and from the adjacent room their baby wailed, signaling the sudden end of her nap.

  “I will check on her,” Daran said as she rushed to their child.

  James sopped up the wasted ink with a few scraps of paper and wondered what had happened. “An earthquake, maybe?” he muttered.

  “Whoa, hey, looks like you’re fine,” Beth shouted from the door. James grimaced at her habitual refusal to knock, but her sweaty face and messy hair made it look like she’d dashed over at full speed.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  Beth fully entered the room and looked in every corner and nook. Seth, the taciturn scorpion guy, trailed in after her.

  “Not fully sure yet,” Beth replied.

  James noticed that her leather armor was wet with something, and when he glanced at Seth he saw a thick liquid dripping from his claws. James reached under his worktable to another one of his side projects, this one of a more martial nature than the others. He gripped the hand of his spirit cannon, readying himself to protect his family.

  “What’s going on, Beth?”

  She scowled. “Spies or saboteurs or something – or maybe normal people who had their heads pried open by Technis – all struck at once.”

  Beth stabbed her hand through the air. “They set off a big explosion near Hanti’s hive are just causing general havoc. Where’s Daran?”

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  James turned towards the back room. “She’s with–”

  Daran strode out of the room, a fierce look upon her face. “I am here. Are we under attack?”

  James cringed with he saw Daran wielding a spear while holding their baby on a sling. He thought it was probably overkill since a pair of her ant-headed attendants flanked Daran on either side, each wielding a menacing, lumpy club of roughly shaped metal.

  Beth continued looking around the room with suspicion. “Is everyone here who they say they are?” she asked.

  James snorted. “Is that a riddle? We’ve never seen Technis make copies of people, he just hollows out the insides and replaces them.”

  He gestured at Daran. “We’re hardly ever out of each other’s sight anyway. When would Technis’ people have gotten to us?”

  “Well…” Beth tapped the pommel of her dagger and relaxed slightly.

  “I suppose so,” she admitted.

  Seth pointed one of his pincers at Daran’s attendants.

  Daran glanced to her sides. “They are not fully – what is James’ word? Conscious? They only–” Daran flinched back as one of her attendants turned and smashed the head of its nearest companion. She jumped behind her other attendants, who moved quickly to block the aberrant one.

  James thought two on one was good enough until the murderous attendant grew a trio of long tentacles from its back. The creature whipped them around, grasping one attendant around the neck as it disarmed the other. It quickly smashed in the head of its defenseless victim while breaking the other attendant’s neck with a loud crack.

  Beth crossed the room in an instant, using her new shadow step ability to appear behind their mutated attacker. Her hand blurred as she stabbed with a dagger, but a blue shield flickered into existence at her foe deflected the blow. The mutant’s knees popped as it moved backwards, advancing towards Beth with its flailing tentacles. Beth attempted to cut and slice them, but her weapon ineffectively passed through the mutant’s rubbery limbs. Unable to wound the creature, Beth was forced backwards.

  At least she’s leading that thing away from Daran, James thought. He aimed his weapon and squeezed the trigger. It didn’t kick like a regular gun from his world. Instead, he had designed the trigger to open a pair of trap doors that would release a small water spirit and a small flame spirit into the central chamber. He still wasn’t able to predict exactly how long it would take the two spirits to react, but the end result was always the same.

  With a loud hiss and a flash of heat, his weapon launched a cylindrical projectile across the room. James’ eyes popped with disbelief as the mutant pivoted slightly and batted the heavy metal slug aside as easily as he would swat a fly. His heart thumped with dread as he fumbled under his desk for more ammunition and the small cartridges filled with tiny spirits.

  Meanwhile, Beth tried to capitalize upon the distraction by shadow stepping around the creature. Darkness clung to the edge of her dagger as she thrust it past the distracted mutant’s defenses and into the former attendant’s brain.

  Or where the brain should have been – James froze in horror as the body split open like a shell and a writhing mass of tentacles and teeth oozed out of the torso. Beth was caught completely off-guard and wrapped in heavy, slime-covered limbs.

  Seth waded into the fight, his pincers snapping as he snipped his way through the forest of writhing tentacles. He made little progress: for every tentacle he cut two more rose to take its place. Beth’s feet scrambled against the ground as she wrenched her arm away, but she couldn’t gaining any distance from the writhing horror.

  James frantically fumbled, spilling his carefully sorted materials in his panic, and had to force himself to look away so he could actually reload his weapon. He slammed a cartridge into the water side and another into the fire side and then dumped the rest of his flame spirits into the barrel of his weapon. Their small containers bounced and pinged with the spirits’ displeasure, but he didn’t mind riling them up. They would be released in a moment.

  He looked up and yelled in horror when he saw a large, toothy maw enveloping his adopted sister.

  “Beth!”

  A torrent of bricks broke free of the ceiling, slamming into the slimy body like a waterfall of stone. It knocked the creature down to the ground, pulling Beth with it.

  Daran heaved her arms, pulling down one last surge of bricks before she leaped over the fight. As she passed over the mucous-covered monster, she heaved an arm and launched her spear straight down. It moved like lightning, piercing the creature’s center of mass and pinning it to the stone floor. The mucus monster struggled furiously, but the spear had momentarily stapled it to the ground with its mouth closed.

  Daran landed gracefully on the other side of the fight, and James was relieved to see her gently cradling their crying child in her free hand.

  Seth seized the opportunity, wading into the writhing tentacles and pulled Beth free from the distracted monster.

  It’s my turn now, James realized.

  He rushed forward with his improperly loaded weapon, getting to nearly tentacle range before releasing another pair of spirits into the barrel of the spirit cannon. He thought that the two spirits must have already been agitated, because there was hardly any delay before his weapon exploded, splitting the metal tube apart in a gout of flame and heat. As he slid backwards over the rough floor, James cheered at the sight of the shriveled and blacked mass where the creature had been moments ago.

  He realized that he should have been paying more attention to his own situation when his head slammed against the wall. James allowed himself a few moments to be dazed and limp against the wall while he waited for the stars in his vision to pass. His head kept ringing even after the room stopped spinning, and James was beginning to wonder if he had permanently hurt something when he realized that the source of the noise were the bells on his communication device.

  He crawled over to it, not quite trusting his shaky legs.

  “Y-yes?” he stammered. “Flann?”

  “Hello brother!” Bel’s happy voice came through. “You sound kind of flustered. Wait, I didn’t interrupt something, did I? Should I call back? Wait, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know.”

  James head had started spinning again. Beth saved him by coming over and taking the communicator into her own hands.

  “Hey,” she said harshly. “Glad you’re alive. It’s been a while.”

  “Beth! Hold on, before we get distracted I wanted to give you a warning.”

  Bel paused for a breath, and Beth arched an eyebrow at the smoldering mess that had nearly mauled her.

  “We – me and the gorgons and some scrattes to be specific – just took Baytown from Technis’ troops. He’s probably mad about it, because he sent a bunch of sleeper agents to try and kill use.”

  “Sounds like him,” Beth replied calmly.

  “Pelagius was one of them! That fish person! Can you believe it?”

  “I guess that explains why she wasn’t very useful,” Beth replied.

  “Anyway, I wanted to warn you that Technis could have more people hidden in the Golden Plains.”

  Beth glanced behind her. “Yeah, that sounds likely. Do you think he used them all up in one attack?”

  “Well, there’s a priestess of Lempo here who said she would check everyone else, and she hasn’t found anything. I guess that means he used them all at once.”

  “Great,” Beth said. “We just dealt with the same thing, and I’d hate for this to be a regular problem.”

  The one-armed woman leaned back in James’ chair and stretched her sore shoulders. “So, tell me what you’ve been up to, kid. Have you gotten strong enough to kill Technis yet?”