“I don’t know what a Pym particle is,” Keep said. “You know how most sigils are unidirectional and paired to a similar sigil that does the opposite? Like push and pull, combine and separate, excite and dampen?”

  “Yeah. So this is like shrink and embiggen?”

  “Nope. Scale is a bidirectional sigil. Fairly unique in that regard. The thing about that is it doesn’t require a whole lot of power to operate, and it can be programmatically triggered.”

  “You mean it doesn’t require a person to activate it?” I asked.

  “Bingo. Most sigils need a human behind the wheel, both to form the interaction through the DNA in their blood and to mentally launch the action, either with a focus word or in your case just thinking about it, which is still pretty incredible by the way. Don’t ask me why. My wife was the scientist, not me. I just know that’s how it works. Scale is determined by the amount of energy being diverted to it. More energy equals bigger, less energy equals smaller.”

  “So you would need a steady stream of energy to stay at regular size?”

  “Nope. Zero energy means no change. Right now, we’re tiny, and we’ll stay that way until you send the signal for us to return to our original size.”

  “I don’t want to be tiny,” Justus said.

  “Would you rather be dead?” Keep replied. “We’re too small to register as anything dangerous to any of the ships surrounding us. Meanwhile, they probably think we managed to escape into hyperspace without creating much of a field and that we’re long gone. As long as Bennie here manages not to crash into the Royal Sentry because he’s not watching where he’s going, we’ll be fine.”

  I snapped my eyes forward. "Oh, shit." The massive wall of the Sentry’s hull loomed up in front of us. Quickly disconnecting autopilot, I pushed the stick forward to veer Head Case away from an imminent crash.

  “Does autopilot not mean the same thing to me that it does to the future?” I asked, wondering why the ship hadn’t avoided the obvious obstacle on its own.

  “The change in scale threw off the calibration,” Keep replied.

  With Head Case being so much smaller than before, the Sentry’s hull seemed to stretch on forever. The side of it started opening, a thread of light quickly becoming a giant hangar opening. Looking to the port side, I spotted the Royal starfighters regrouping and coming our way in a retreat to the hangar. Much smaller than Head Case before, they were enormous now, their wedge-shaped fuselages bristling with ion cannons that could vaporize little us in one glancing blow. Actually, they didn’t need to shoot to vaporize us. If we collided with the fighters, their shields—designed in part to disintegrate tiny bits of debris—could easily do the job.

  And we were stuck between them and their destination.

  “Uhhh, Captain,” Justus said, noticing our predicament at the same time.

  “Yeah, I see it." Pushing the throttle all the way open, the relative force shoved us back in our seats, but the effect on the outside of the ship was less pronounced. Everything about Head Case was scaled down, including our rate of acceleration under full power. A heavy burn pushed us across the opening gap of the hangar faster, but not fast enough.

  I twisted the stick, throwing Head Case into a sharp maneuver as the first of the starfighters neared. Just barely managing to break over the top of the fighter, I looked down as it passed underneath, terrified by the size of the pilot visible through the canopy. As a kid I’d often wondered how ants felt about being so small, and now I knew how much it sucked.

  With the fighters in formation as they returned to the hangar, I had to break hard to port, cut the throttle to drop quickly, and then fire retro thrusters to avoid the trailing edge of the next starfighter in line. Opening the throttle again, I climbed hard, catching a glimpse of another pilot as we zipped by just over the top of his cockpit. His overbearing gaze seemed to latch onto us, spiking my heart rate in response to being seen. But the retreating fighters stayed their course as I continued fighting to guide Head Case through their midst. The pilot apparently hadn’t believed his eyes when he saw the tiny robot head drifting across his view.

  “Justus is right,” Meg cried. “I don’t want to be tiny any longer.”

  “And I don’t want to be dead,” I snapped back, focused on navigating through the fleet of giants.

  I flipped the ship over and cut the throttle, just barely managing to avoid a sensor antenna on the hull of one of the fighters. Normally only a few inches in length, it looked like a sword compared to our diminutive craft.

  Hitting the thrusters again, the added boost of Starbright’s engines gave us just enough juice to swing up and around the delta edge of another fighter. Seeing a small gap between ships, I made a beeline for it at full speed, just barely eeking past the nose of another fighter and finally breaking free of the squadron. The last group of starfighters pulled into the hangar behind us as we cleared the sentry. Kirillia came back into view, and I directed Head Case toward it.

  Justus started laughing. “This is ridiculous,” he announced, clearly relieved to be through the enemy lines. He lifted the visor of his helmet and turned toward Keep. “We’d better not get stuck like this.”

  “Cool your jets, pal,” Keep said. “We’re fine. Bennie, I think you can turn autopilot back on if you want.”

  “No thank you,” I replied. “I’ve got the stick. Now that we’re out of trouble, this might be kind of fun.”

  “Are you sure we’re out of trouble?” Justus asked. “We’re the size of a small bird. How do you know something won’t try to eat us?”

  Keep titled his head, momentarily perplexed by the question. “You know, I never even thought of that.”

  “Well, I for one don’t want us to have to blast our way out of something’s stomach.”

  “Or get stuck in a spiderweb,” Meg added, probably thinking of Ixitat. “That would be awkward.”

  “Maybe we should just scale up again,” I suggested. “Now that we’re past orbital defense.”

  “Don’t be too hasty, kid,” Keep replied. “There’s a lot of benefits to being small, especially compared to the current drawbacks.”

  “In that case, holler if you see any birds coming our way.”

  CHAPTER 6

  As it turned out, birds were the least of our concerns in our descent toward Lycanth, a coastal city on Kirillia’s largest and most developed continent.

  “Incoming, eight o’clock!” Justus drew my attention to the long, boxy transport about to rumble through our airspace.

  “Got it,” I replied, opening the throttle and veering us out of its way. The displacement of the atmosphere created heavy turbulence at our size, rattling the ship.

  Lycanth's dense population, along with that of its sister city, Hyacinth to the south, led to an abundance of air traffic. Both mass transit and smaller, individual airborne vessels created a constant stream of obstacles for us to navigate through, which would have been fine if Head Case’s sensors could detect them all. Like the autopilot systems, they were calibrated to operate at a different scale. Every ship from a ten-foot single-seater sports dasher to a fifty-foot bus looked like huge red masses filling our three dimensional grid.

  “I can’t take much more of this,” Meg said, face pale from the constant disruptions. “I’ve never been sick on a starship before, but this is punishing.”

  “I know,” I said, checking the nav marker for Sanguine Studios. “We’re getting close. Keep, maybe you can calm Meg to help settle her stomach?”

  The trip down from orbit had revealed an unexpected, beneficial side effect of restore. Despite all of the turbulence, my guts had remained unaffected. No nausea, headache, or otherwise. I remained as alert and capable as ever behind the stick. I couldn’t say the same for Justus, whose otherwise dark skin had taken on a greener hue in response to the bumpy ride.

  “I could,” Keep replied. “What do you say, Pixie?”

  “I don’t want you using that stuff on me,” she replied. “It isn’t natural.”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” I said. “He’s done it to me plenty of times.”

  “No offense, Captain, but you aren’t exactly the best spokesperson for sigiltech’s safety profile,” she answered back. “You have metal embedded in your skin and your blood glows.”

  Justus snapped out of his sickness long enough to laugh. “She’s got you there.”

  “Fair point, I guess,” I agreed.

  “Ten o’clock,” Justus snapped.

  I turned the stick and climbed sharply, getting us just over another aircraft as it roared past, the vortex of air behind it sending us rolling like a tumbleweed. By the time I got us leveled out again, Meg was leaning on Keep’s shoulder, doing her best to hold back her puke.

  “I changed my mind,” she said. “Hit me with the magic stuff.”

  Keep placed his palm on her forehead. “Pax,” he said softly, using the only other sigil he had outside of his push ring. Meg’s eyes fluttered closed and she became heavier against his side.

  “Lucky,” I caught Justus whisper under his breath.

  I returned my attention to the view ahead of us. We were still about ten miles away from Lycanth, closing at about four hundred miles per hour. It was nearly as fast as our miniaturized thrusters could push our friction-unfriendly shape through the air.

  With Kirillia in Sedaya’s territories, a part of me had been expecting something like Mordor—a dark, ugly city of fire and smoke on an equally dark and ugly planet. Of course, that wasn’t the case at all. Kirillia was a blue marble like Earth, only a little smaller. The seas were gorgeous shades of blue, the land an impressive mix of construction and natural landscape that suggested its developers had put a lot of thought into how to create homes for millions without disrupting the environment. It was everything I kind of wished Earth could be. In comparison, it even made Atlas look like an overdeveloped, polluting wasteland.

  Lycanth rose up out of the rolling hills and massive evergreens as if they had been there from the moment of the planet’s birth. The skyscrapers jutted from the treeline as tall peaks from the underlying mountain, the sides drenched in ivy. From the rainbow mix of colors visible at our current distance, the populace of Lycanth appeared widely arrayed in dress and style. Both pedestrians and vehicles crossed a series of elevated bridges connecting the structures to one another. The numerous platforms were thick with vegetation, the vines hanging from the bridge frames offering homes to the planet’s wildlife. The place was more like a utopia than the horrifying vision I had imagined all of Sedaya’s territories would be.

  Not Mordor then. More like the Shire.

  “Captain,” Justus said, admiring the same view. “Birds.”

  I smiled in response, having noticed them already. They perched mainly on the bridges, launching out in waves that spun and whirled around the long connectors before landing in the vines again. Bright coloring made them stand out against the green and gray, making the ivy look as though it were flowering until those flowers took off again.

  “They’re too small to bother us,” I replied. “And besides, they don’t look like predators.”

  “Maybe not. But what if something preying on them mistakes us for one of them?”

  “Keep your eyes peeled,” I said. “I’ll go in a bit lower. We need to steer clear of the air traffic anyway.”

  Most of the aircraft moved in organized chaos above the levels of the bridges, the landing pads closer to the top of the towers. A smaller number hugged the airspace just above the tops of the trees, occasionally vanishing into the forest in what I had to imagine were prescribed landing patterns. As we drew closer to the city, I could see some activity at ground level mirroring the action along the bridges.

  “Four o’clock, Captain,” Justus warned. The aircraft coming toward us was a bit further away this time, making its evasion easier. I cut well to the side of the oncoming transport, managing to keep our ride smooth.

  I reduced Head Case’s velocity considerably as we moved into the city limits at three thousand feet. We were flying just above the trees and slightly below the height of the majority of bridges, though some of the buildings had multiple connectors that stretched between them at higher levels. Now that we were right on top of the construction, I could see the bridges were all fully enclosed in metal and glass. Small drones shared airspace with the birds, tasked with cleaning the outside of the windows to keep the views pristine.

  Getting a better look at the avian air traffic, I marveled at their multi-colored down and long tails, their flight graceful as a few of them flew close to us. Nearly four or five times our size, their first few approaches made me nervous until it became obvious they accepted us as just another drone and wouldn’t do us any harm.

  “Pretty cool, eh kid?” Keep asked.

  “Amazing,” I replied, taking it all in. “It looks like Sanguine is in that tower near the edge of the city. Right along the coast.”

  The building was marked on the nav, which gave it a green outline through my helmet’s augmented reality view. It wasn’t even close to being the tallest, newest, or most impressive of the towers, but it appeared to have its own starship landing pad stabbing out from its side. A dark starship with plenty of sharp edges and gun turrets rested there. Clearly a military vessel, it stood in sharp contrast to the otherwise peaceful surroundings.

  “That’s a Niflin Grizz,” Justus said upon spotting the vessel. “It probably either just delivered a new round of volunteers for Kill Spree training or is waiting to pick up the prior group for transfer to the playing field.”

  The statement got me excited. “Do you think Matt is still here on Kirillia?”

  “The promos didn’t mention a date for the new round,” he replied. “But we should look for an update.” He reached for the center console, switching the primary screen over to the hypernet and navigating to the Kill Spree site. I did a double-take at the huge banner occupying the entire screen.

  Matt’s face filled the screen, draped in shadow and photoshopped to look a lot more menacing. Smaller faces occupied the darkness just beneath his primary mug, including Colonel Coil, Emerald Jones, some other guy I didn’t know, and…Shaq? They had enlarged his furry face to make him appear the same size as the others, and given him an open mouth full of razor teeth that he didn’t actually have, but I was pretty sure the alien in the image was him. A countdown ticker hung in the center of the banner, floating ahead of the screen.

  “Thirty-six minutes,” Justus said. “He’s definitely not still here. The game’s about to begin.”

  “It’s not a game,” I snapped, my worry for my friends exploding.

  “Not to us,” he agreed. “But look at that counter.” He pointed to a huge number in a smaller font beneath the timer.

  “What is that?”

  “Number of devices tuned to the stream. Ten million and counting.”

  “That doesn’t seem like that many.”

  “Not compared to a Gia concert, maybe. Kill Spree is still niche programming. But for that many to be waiting? It’ll probably hit a hundred million by the time the broadcast actually starts.”

  “In thirty-six minutes,” I said.

  “That’s better than three days ago. At least we know your friends are still alive right now.”

  “Yeah. But for how much longer?”

  “Step three, win,” Keep said behind me. “Don’t give up yet, kid.”

  “I’m not giving up. Not now. Not ever,” I replied, bringing Head Case up closer to the bridge connecting the Sanguine Studios building to an adjacent tower. The birds changed course around us to avoid a collision.

  Suddenly, the birds ahead of us scattered, their calls loud enough to pierce Head Case’s hull. Colorful bodies shooting aside, a huge, mottled beak appeared in the forward transparency, black eyes behind it shifting slightly to focus on us as a pair of inverted talons stretched out toward us from beneath a pair of tucked wings.

  “Shit! Predator!” Justus screamed, already too late.

  CHAPTER 7

  I managed to turn the stick and fire the main thrusters just in time to avoid the grasp of the raptor's talons. Even so, Head Case shuddered as we caught the glancing blow from one claw, the shields activating to singe the talon. It was enough to persuade the raptor to draw its feet back beneath its wings.The bird corkscrewed beneath the bridge in front of us, diving toward the fleeing birds.

  The ship shook violently as we crashed into the foliage hanging beneath the bridge. The shields tried to burn through the narrow ivy vines, the branches like small tree trunks at our reduced size. They whipped against the hull, scratching the exterior and wildly changing our course. Fighting against the constant changes in direction and impacts, I activated the cannons and opened fire straight ahead, weakening the remaining vines before we hit them, finally setting us free.

  “Damn, that was close,” I said, exhaling a breath of relief. At the same time, I scanned the airspace around us in search of the raptor, spotting it just before it dropped into the trees below us, talons curling around a small bird in a burst of red feathers.

  “I don’t think it was trying to grab us,” Keep said. “We were just in the way.”

  “Nevertheless, it nearly got us,” I replied. “This whole Honey I Shrunk the Starship thing is nuts,” I added, shaking my head. Getting us back on course, I returned some separation between us and the bridge, hoping to avoid a repeat of the near-miss if there were more of the raptors looking for a snack. We would soon reach the tower housing Sanguine Studios.

  “You might want to kick us down another notch, kid,” Keep said. “We’re still a little too visible to be flying through protected areas.”

  “You want us to shrink even more?” I replied, skepticism heavy in my raised voice.

  “The bar goes to microscopic,” he pointed out. “I don’t think we need to go that far, but…” He shrugged.

  I navigated back to the scale menu, reaching out and putting my finger on the slider bar. I hesitated to move it. Nearly being swatted by a raptor was only one example of the negative consequences of being tiny. But he was right. We were still too big to effectively sneak around.