“Do you see Matt anywhere?”

  “Nooo. Waitsss…heresss.”

  Before I could ask her what she planned to do, she climbed over the top of the disgusting scrum, vanishing into the darkness. I remained where Ixy left me, most of my attention on the queen. If she noticed me, all hell would break loose. A minute passed. Another. I started to worry that something had happened to Ixy. Except I hadn’t heard any indications of conflict.

  I nearly screamed out loud when she dropped into view directly overhead, taking me completely by surprise. As it was, my entire body tensed and my heart jumped to my throat. Did she not realize how frightening she could be?

  “Comess,” she whispered, deploying a strand of silk for me to climb like a rope. I expected it to be too sticky, but she had done something to make it less adhesive, allowing me to easily pull myself up to the stone ceiling, nearly thirty feet up.

  Ixy had attached her silken strand beside a matte black object that vaguely resembled a football. It appeared to be wrapped in a bony shell not entirely unlike the skin of the gorathi, and from the warmth surrounding it, it was giving off some kind of energy. Recalling what Veneel had said, it was probably the power source the demons were using to both survive and multiply.

  And it appeared to have been placed there on purpose.

  I stared at the device, wondering how it had gotten here, if there were more scattered in other places around the settlement or planet, and who had placed it. The whole thing seemed so wrong, but I couldn’t figure out how.

  “Followsss,” Ixitat repeated, creating a strand of silk for me to grab onto.

  Swinging my knees up over it, I activated enhance and crawled forward, hand over hand, making me feel a little like a spider myself as I moved across the top of what I knew now was a room, not a cavern. The wall Ixy led me to was nearly a hundred feet from the middle of the horde hidden in the darkness below. She climbed down, leaving me more silk to descend on, my thoughts flashing back to when I had seen her scrunched down in a cage in the Junket. Where would I be now if I had left her there to be sold as a slave? I don’t know if I ever would have made it to this place, but I definitely wouldn’t have been able to get around the gorathi without a major fight. One that would have left me completely drained and quite likely dead.

  She waited for me on the floor of the room, in front of a large metal door that had been forced open at some point. It hung from damaged hinges, a draft through it suggesting it led somewhere outside. Dropping off the strand of silk to land beside her, I spotted what looked like a monitoring station to my right. A large, curved screen hung over an empty desk, a padded seat bolted to the floor behind it. The seat was stained with what I imagined was blood. The stone floor was also stained around it, ancient coppery blood having seeped into the slightly porous surface.

  Whatever this place was, there was no question in my mind of what had happened to the original settlers. Had these gorathi been here the entire time?

  Ixitat scurried silently over the crumpled door, and I followed.

  CHAPTER 34

  Exiting the large room filled with gorathi, we moved into a dark, moist corridor, its heavy ceiling drooping so low it seemed like it might collapse at any moment. Coming to a doorway, I saw that the room on the other side had already suffered from collapse. Only a small part of the floor was visible beneath the rubble. The solidity of the cave-in made it obvious we were still underground, the original purpose of the place still a mystery. Not that it mattered what the place had once been used for.

  We passed more doorways to rooms filled with debris and walked down potions of the hallway that were filled with rock and earth. It was clear this place wouldn’t be upright for too much longer.

  With only one way to go, Ixitat and I funneled through another ruined blast door and into another larger room where the forward wall had collapsed. Only this time, the pile of rubble created a ramp leading into dense vegetation and a constant flow of moisture that coated the debris in wet moss and algae. For the first time I noticed a dull roar, though I couldn’t see the source of the noise yet.

  Ixitat had no problem scaling the rubble pile. I went up more cautiously, picking my way over the slick stones. While restore would fix anything I might twist or break on the way, I preferred to both avoid the pain and save my chaos energy for something else. Reaching the top of the collapse, I looked in the direction of the roar, spotting a line of thick mist beyond a grouping of wide, squat tree trunks. Looking at the ground, I quickly found claw marks in the damp earth leading toward the mist.

  “Come on,” I said to Ixy as I followed the prints. “We’re close.”

  Moving cautiously as we made our way through the trees, I remained on high alert, my rifle ready to use the bayonet if needed. I was especially wary of running into another of the cloaked creatures like the one that had killed Veneel. But anything just as bad or worse could be lurking out here. I had to be ready for anything.

  It wasn't long before the roar intensified, signaling that it came from my left and that we were getting closer to the source. A crackle from somewhere in the overhead branches found me whipping the rifle up toward it, eyes narrowing as I hunted for the threat. More snaps and cracks joined the first, sending my pulse into overdrive. It calmed a little when the first sharp squawk echoed through the mist, followed by dozens more as a flock of native birds fled my—or more likely Ixitat’s—approach.

  Realizing we were sitting ducks against creatures with a superior sense of hearing and smell, I started pushing the mist away. Surrounding us in a column of clear air, I extended it forward to make a new kind of tunnel leading toward the source of the noise.

  It didn’t surprise me that much when the parting of the thick mist revealed the base of a heavily flowing waterfall, the water smashing down on large rocks in the pool below, generating the mist that spread into the surrounding trees. Looking up through less dense mist, I saw the wall of a dam positioned nearly a hundred feet up. Apparently, the gorathi had tunneled to the settlement from a substation built into the rock behind the waterfall. Turning my attention in the opposite direction, I was able to just barely make out the edge of the city in the distance.

  What I still didn’t see was where the demons might have taken Matt.

  Maybe we weren’t as close as I thought.

  I found the claw marks again, following them to the edge of the river. Of course they vanished there. Any disturbance to the riverbed would be erased by the current in no time. I moved fifty feet downriver from the waterfall and stepped into the knee-deep water. It funneled in between my boots and armor to drench my feet.

  Crossing quickly, I reached the other side before I noticed that Ixitat hadn’t followed. She waited on the opposite bank, watching me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, tapping on my comm badge so I could keep my voice low.

  “Scaresss,” she replied.

  “The water?”

  “Yesss.”

  “You just climbed through the middle of a massive horde of creatures that would have ripped us apart in half a second if they noticed us, and you’re afraid of a little water?”

  “Yesss,” she repeated.

  “It’s not even that deep.”

  “Scaresss.”

  I almost laughed out loud, it seemed so ridiculous. Then again, if she had just walked across a bed of clowns I would probably feel the same trepidation. “Can you get across overhead?” I asked, looking at the trees. The branches were separated by nearly twenty feet over the center of the river.

  “Too farsss,” she said. “Ssstuckss.”

  I considered trying to pull her over the river, but the distance and her mass were enough that I thought it might drain me too much. “You’re going to make me go ahead by myself?”

  “Sssorry.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, doing my best to mean it. “Keep an eye on the entrance to the tunnels. Warn me if anything comes out.”

  “Copysss.”

  I nodded to her before turning around and scanning the riverbank for the resumption of the gorathi path through the area. When I looked back across the river a few seconds later, she was gone.

  I expected to find the claw marks in a straight line, immediately opposite their entry into the water on the other side. Instead, I wound up walking closer to the waterfall in search of them, quickly becoming fully drenched by the heavy spray before retracing my steps and looking in the opposite direction.

  Forced to circle one of the native trees growing right at the river’s edge, I came across more than footprints. Dead gorathi lined the riverbank, nearly twenty in all, face down with no obvious wounds. Crouching beside one, I shivered at the size of its teeth and the blankness of its dark eye which bulged abnormally from its head. As far as I could tell, it and the others here with it had all drowned.

  Had Matt?

  I wasn’t ready to accept that, and thankfully there were additional prints leading away from the scene in great enough numbers that they might still be holding him prisoner. But even as I followed the tracks back into the treeline, I couldn’t help fearing that they might not have him. That he might have gone into the river with the demons that hadn’t survived the crossing. While I knew him to be a strong swimmer, his athletic prowess didn’t mean anything if he were tied up, unconscious, or otherwise subdued.

  But the gorathi appeared to be massed inside the substation, not out here. There was no reason for them to keep going, wherever they were going, without Matt, assuming he was why they had crossed the river. Judging by how many had died, I didn’t imagine the creatures liked water all that much. Whatever was driving them or whoever might be controlling them, they had found the risk less frightening than remaining on the other side of the river.

  The tracks meandered through the trees for another few hundred feet before leading me to a small clearing in the middle of the wooded area. With most of my attention on tracking the prints, I almost didn’t notice the object resting in the center of the field before the trail abruptly stopped just in front of it. I jumped back a step and stared at it.

  The object was the size of a small bus and shaped like an asteroid. Though the exterior was made of the same matte black hard shell as the power supply in the substation, the indents and protrusions were sharper and more pronounced. It obviously wasn’t an asteroid, though. Or even a satellite. I didn’t see any evidence of thruster ports, but the object hadn't crashed. It rested on natural protrusions at its base. It had obviously come down in a controlled landing as there was no crash crater beneath it.

  A spaceship, then. But not like any spaceship I had ever seen.

  The gorathi tracks stopped outside it, but I didn’t see any outer hatches or seams in the hard shell. The whole thing appeared to be one solid piece. So how had the gorathi gained entry into it? And exit. Looking more closely at the tracks, I realized some of them were facing in the opposite direction, heading back to the river and probably across. There hadn’t been any dead gorathi on that bank. Assuming the ones strong enough to make it across had also made it back the other way, I figured they hadn't been washed downstream.

  I was relatively certain they had carried Matt inside, dumped him and left. If he were anywhere nearby, then he was inside this spaceship. Which meant that no matter what, I had to get in there too.

  But how?

  Before I could give it too much consideration, the hard shell of the craft right in front of me seemed to disintegrate, creating a pitch black hole. Shocked, awed, and more than a little frightened, I hesitantly reached into it, cringing when my fingers sank into the darkness and disappeared. I had seen movies like this before, and I quickly pulled my hand back. It was fully intact. Nothing had grabbed it or sliced my fingers off.

  So I did what I knew Emerald would do when faced with an impermeable black portal.

  I jumped through it.

  CHAPTER 35

  I landed in a space inside the mysterious craft so dark I could barely see my hand in front of my face despite the glow of it. It was so dark that when I activated the light on my rifle, it only penetrated about a foot before diffusing away to nothing. Beyond that, the first thing I noticed was that the ship had an atmosphere suitable for humans. I was able to breathe, but with every breath I took, I inhaled particles drifting like dust through the interior. The darkness appeared to come from these particles. When I breathed them in, it allowed a small amount of light through. When I exhaled, the light faded. Clearing it with push should be a piece of cake.

  The strangest thing though, I could feel movement beneath my feet. Soft undulations and vibrations as if I were standing on a living creature. That observation freaked me out the most, and I took a couple of steps forward trying to escape it, only to find it remained.

  “Matt!” I shouted, which was probably a bad idea since I didn’t know if there were any gorathi or other creatures inside the ship with me. I listened intently for a reply or the sounds of claws or hissing.

  There was only silence.

  Turning completely around, I reached for the exit only to have my hand smack into a solid wall. The portal had closed. I might have panicked over it, but I still believed Matt was in here. Somewhere. Unconscious, maybe. I hoped with everything in me that he wasn’t dead. I had to find him.

  And quickly.

  I turned back around and activated the construct, pushing with enough force to move the particles gently aside. The walls on either side of me were matte black, an inverse of the ship’s outside, proving there were no bulkheads between it and the hull. The floor I was standing on, a thick, black primordial ooze, seemed alive. It swirled and bubbled, thin tendrils stretching up around the front of my boots. I stepped back and watched as the goo released me, retreating back into itself.

  I pushed the particles in front of me away, sweeping them to the port and starboard side to reveal the bow. Stepping forward, the darkness spread away, the beam of my rifle’s light finally punching through.

  And landing on the face of my best friend.

  His head was up, his eyes open and alert, so that was good. But a black tendril stretched across his mouth and his patchy covering of whisker growth. Dozens of the tendrils held him suspended off the deck against a bulkhead made of the same goop as the floor, holding him prisoner. His pupils didn’t shrink in size when the sudden light beam from my rifle hit his eyes. He continued staring straight forward, eyes remaining dilated.

  “Matt,” I said, rushing toward him, extending the bayonet in preparation to cut him loose. “Matt, it’s Ben!” He kept staring at me, but he didn’t even try to speak. He looked exhausted, sallow and sick. “Hold on. I’m going to get you down. We’re going to get out of here!”

  I went to slice the tendril away from his mouth, but a long, black tendril from overhead grabbed my bayonet and yanked the rifle out of my hands, sucking it into the goo before I could pull it back. The ooze rose from the floor again, wrapping around my ankles. I tried to yank my legs free, but this time it refused to release me.

  What had I just walked into?

  While my instinct told me to fight like a caged animal, I kept my calm, my mind feeding me a different line of information and action to take. Understanding came too late. I had entered the spaceship, determined and desperate to find Matt.

  And had walked straight into a trap.

  I felt like an idiot for not seeing it coming. The gorathi hadn’t taken Matt because they wanted him. They had taken Matt to use as bait to catch me. And here I was, like an insect stuck on fly paper. But how had whoever was behind this known I would be here? And who was behind this? I knew it couldn’t be Sedaya. He'd already had Matt. He didn’t need to stick him on Kill Spree to get me to come. He could have just sent a message to Head Case, set a trap, and waited. I would have eagerly jumped right into it.

  Just like I had eagerly jumped right into this ship.

  It wasn’t Lyke or Blorb for the same reasons. A new player? Sulamat, maybe? The one who had taken Prince Hiro? I couldn’t rule it out, but I wasn’t convinced. There was only one other name I knew.

  The ooze beside Matt began to stretch from the wall, reaching out with multiple thick tentacles that quickly coalesced around one another in a blob that matched my height. A humanoid shape began taking form from the blob, legs and arms coming into view as if someone were rapidly sculpting the goop. First, the ooze resembled a drippy mannequin, but it gained more definition with each passing second, until finally it looked like a dark version of me.

  An evil doppelganger.

  “Hello, Benjamin,” it said, in a gurgling version of my voice.

  “Uh…hi, there,” I replied, staring at the thing.

  “You may release the veil. It will remain in place.”

  I stopped pushing the dark molecules away. As my duplicate had said, they didn’t drift from their place. “You know it uses more of my energy to keep holding them.”

  “I know more about your capabilities than you ever will. You believe because you’ve learned to use algorithms to harness the power of chaos that it means you understand its nature. You understand nothing.”

  “Believe me, I don’t pretend to know how it works. I just know how to use it.”

  “You’ve barely scratched the surface.”

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Because I thought I knew before you made yourself out of black Play-doh, but now I get the feeling that I’m completely wrong. Nothing about this meeting is going the way I expected. Well, maybe I should have expected the gloating and patronizing remarks, but the fact that you’re actually helping me use less chaos energy is a bit of a surprise.”

  “Because even if you were at full strength, which you clearly are not, you would be no threat to me.”

  “I guess that makes sense. What is it you want from me? Why did you lure me here?”

  “You want to know who I am?” My evil twin smiled, the ooze shifting and reforming, the entire dark Gumby mannequin gaining a different yet still familiar visage.