#041123

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False gets them as far as beyond the Evermoor, drops them off at the fringes of the enchanted forest and heads back to Sanctuary with a salute.

They’ve figured in a couple of days for this trip, with how carefully they have to move. Stratos is nearly on the other side of the map from Sanctuary, but it’s not a trek that they haven’t made before. There’s a decent path beaten between most of the empires, and Scott knows the closer they get to more civilization, the wider (and safer) that path will become. For now, it’s little more than a footpath, weeds springing up through it, so they move single-file: Katherine leading, brandishing her battleaxe; Jimmy in the middle, stomping as loudly as possible and shaking tambourines; fWhip behind him, ears and eyes swiveling and checking every which way to ensure nothing sneaks up beside them and pickaxe strapped to his back; and Scott walking backwards and bringing up the rear, glaring at any mites that dare approach, trusty shovel held aloft.

And, somehow, it works.

It’s a little bit terrifying. But the noise has any mites on the paths scurrying to the grass, and Katherine swings at any that get too close, and they quail under Scott’s gaze.

They travel all day, not speaking, so close that they bump into each other repeatedly. And really, despite all the clamor that Jimmy’s making, it’s . . . quiet.

The whole world is almost silent. There are animals to run through the tall grass, no bird taking flight above. The leaves, dipped in inky blackness, make no noise against each other when the wind buffers them around.

It’s quiet. It’s too quiet, and it’s disquieting.

They pass the Rift around midday, the dim glow of it visible even through the hundreds of mites piled around it and crawling all over it. Scott allows himself a moment to stare at it, before turning his eyes back on the road behind him.

“What do you think that was, anyway?” he asks, loud enough to be heard over Jimmy’s jangling (the tambourines are now looped through his belt and banging against his hips, giving his arms a rest).

There’s a telltale swooshing sound that Scott knows, after hours of hearing it, means Katherine swung her axe across the ground like a scythe. “What what was?” she calls back to him.

“The Rift.”

“A portal, of some sort,” Jimmy pipes up. “When . . .  when Lizzie left, she meant to go through it. I don’t know if she ever made it.”

Being a portal would explain the glowing, purple quality of it. “So it goes to the Nether?”

“No,” Jimmy says. “We weren’t sure where it went. fWhip sent something through, actually, the day before everything . . . happened. It wasn’t in the Nether, and there’s no portals there that lead to the Rift.”

“Yep,” fWhip confirms. “One of my hogs. Miss that guy.”

So . . . to another dimension, possibly. Not the Nether, not the End. Some secret third place.

Maybe some place swarming with mites. Somewhere the mites had come from.

Scott swallows, hikes his shovel up a bit higher, and resolves never to go through the Rift. If Lizzie made it there as she intended . . . well. They may as well hold a funeral.

They continue on, and Scott tries not to let his thoughts wander too far. Whenever he does start to dwell too much on the futility of their situation, the deaths of his friends, or whatever dark thought takes hold of him, he forces his mind to blankness.

And blankness quickly gives way to pain.

The thing that he must’ve forgotten about traveling long distances is that it takes a toll. And mostly walking backwards, depending on fWhip to keep him on track, Scott’s been stretching muscles that he didn’t even know existed. His thighs have never felt worse, and when he’s so frequently having to redirect his thoughts, he often lands on just how much he aches.

“Wish we could take a break,” he grumbles at some point. Jimmy laughs wryly.

“Just keep going, Scott,” says Katherine, practically out of breath. “Everything will be worth it when we get there.”

None of them mention the fact that there may not be any coal in Stratos. Nor do they mention the little fact that if there’s nothing there, they’ll have to make the long trek back, crossing through the Evermoor this time.

So Scott keeps walking backwards, and keeps glaring at the plaguelings that threaten to converge upon them, and does his best to ignore the pain slowly gnawing away at his muscles.

They have quite a few scares and close calls—at one point, they end up in a dead sprint, hollering at the top of their lungs to try to scare the things away—but only one other roadside attraction: the mites that have been creeping after them, lingering on the edges of Scott’s vision, piling up atop each other like cairns marking the path, just . . . vanish.

Scott checks right and left, but they’re gone. They’re just . . . gone.

“Um . . . guys—” he starts to say, but Katherine cuts him off.

“They’re on that giant dodo.”

He cranes his neck around, looking ahead of their party for a brief moment. Sure enough, a good hundred meters away from their path, is the most mites he’s ever seen in one place.

What has to be thousands of specks of darkness are mobbing a singular animal carcass, too mutilated for Scott to tell what it is—though he’ll gladly take Katherine’s word for it being a dodo. He feels a little nauseated as he watches—and he’s reminded of checking on Martina in the inn, finding her dead and crawling with those things as if they were devouring her whole.

“They feed on dead things,” fWhip says in an aside to Scott, as he looks back to the road. “And they . . . multiply, or reproduce, or something. Grow from it, maybe. So they’ll abandon us for something dead—it gives them a chance to grow in numbers.”

And if that isn’t a horrendous bit of knowledge. It makes sense—every llama that died had brought a new legion of plague upon him, apparently eating the corpses but perhaps, in actuality, growing from them.

Scott shudders. Hopefully he never has to witness it up close.

They arrive just as the sun begins to set. Lower Stratos isn’t too hard to pick their way through, seeing as Joel made large enough roads that they have ample space to leap away when a mite comes skittering out from under a building.

There’s not as many of them as Scott had expected—plenty, of course, but they aren’t lining every single brick, blanketing the entire city. Maybe they’d gotten bored of the city, dead as it was, the upper level unattainable and taunting.

Or maybe they’re hiding in the crevices, waiting for one of them to split from the group before launching their attack.

Something tickles the back of Scott’s leg.

He panics, kicking at the air—one of them got him—he loses his balance, falls onto Jimmy with a great clang! as they both (and both tambourines) hit the road hard.

He scrambles up, tugging up his pant leg to check—nothing.

Actually, one of the seams inside the leg has pulled out a bit, a singular thread left hanging loose, ready to tickle his leg at any time.

“What happened? Did one get you?” Jimmy demands, pulling himself up.

An ashamed laugh (with the brim of relieved tears, for that brief second it had been the end of Scott Smajor and he hadn’t ever had time to mourn any of it) bubbles out of Scott’s throat, and he scuffs at the road a bit with his shoe. “False alarm,” he says, then, to avoid having to confront the embarrassing situation and the heat flooding his cheeks, he shoulders past both fWhip and Katherine (who had stopped to help them up) and leads the way to the elevator.

The elevator is an empty space in the middle of Lower Stratos. There’s a rectangular trench dug into the ground (lined with magma) with a couple of mechanical workings around it, such as the stand for the button. It’s otherwise bare, but for several floating glass panes in the sky above them—more to encase the water than the lift itself. All of the glass cuts off about ten feet above their heads, making it far enough away that there’s no way the mites will be able to climb up the sides.

He hits the summoning switch, watches as the water flows down through the glass of the elevator chamber. The cab itself falls with it, lined with water on three sides (which flows into the trench to avoid overspill), the fourth open for them to step into.

“I’ll go up first with fWhip,” Jimmy instructs, drawing his pistol. He waves fWhip into the elevator, steps into it behind him. “We’ll do a quick scan of the place. If everything looks fan-dabi-dozi, I’ll give you a shout and you can lower the elevator and come up yourselves. Sound good?”

Scott swallows, then nods. There’s nothing to be nervous about, really. This is the safest part of the mission so far, all the hard stuff is over. “Just—there’s a button labeled ‘up’ in the elevator,” he says lamely. “Hit that.”

Jimmy gives him a quick nod, then smacks the button with his elbow, both hands gripping his gun. With a sound of shifting pistons, the magma in the trench switches out for soul sand and the elevator shoots up, bubbles flying past.

Scott tears his eyes away and toward their surroundings. A handful of mites scatter from where they’ve bundled up several meters away, each fleeing in a different direction.

Katherine sends him an odd look. Scott ignores it, just keeps watch. It wouldn’t do to die here, in the ruins of Lower Stratos, leaving Jimmy and fWhip stranded.

There’s a distant call from above, and Scott turns back to find the elevator slowing to a stop before them. He clears his throat—Katherine looks over—and steps in.

His heart drops a fraction as the cab rocks, sloshing about in the water. Katherine’s face goes positively green when she steps in.

“Oh, it’s like being in a tiny boat,” she says, voice pitched an octave higher than normal. “That’s fine.”

“It is surrounded by water,” Scott points out.

Katherine shoves him lightly, then grabs his shirt when the cab rocks further. “Okay. Just don’t move, and we’re fine.” Rather pointedly, she doesn’t release him.

Scott doesn’t bring up that the one time Joel had let him up through the elevator (he’d been so proud of it, so eager to show it off to someone that he didn’t even mind Scott’s status as a non-god, apparently, despite so often proclaiming his lesser worth), he’d suggested a handrail. Something to hold onto when the bubbles got choppy.

Joel had clearly ignored his input. Not that Scott can really be mad at him about it now. It feels weird to think ill of the dead, even if he had been a bit of a pompous jerk before all this.

And really, it’s all just another reminder that he hasn’t had the time to properly process any of this. It’s been—what, a week? A week since he was rescued? Maybe a bit longer? He’d lost all of his llamas and several friends and—

And he doesn’t have time to process it now, either. It’s the apocalypse, and he’s in a shaky elevator trying to find coal to fuel their possible escape route in a dead god’s empty kingdom.

Scott inhales deeply, then presses the button.

Katherine actually screams a little, clutching his shirt tighter and falling against him, because the elevator really does rocket up. Scott barely keeps his footing himself, his stomach in his mouth and heart in his boots. So this is how they die, in an elevator that overshoots and sends them flying into the air, only to come down with a splat against the ground—

And then the elevator jerks to a stop, swinging a little. The water cushions it enough that Scott and Katherine don’t slam their heads against the roof of the cab, but they are knocked against the wall. Scott loses his balance and pulls Katherine down with him, scraping his chin on the concrete outside of the cab.

He hisses, crawls off of Katherine (who, by some miracle, had managed to avoid hitting her head), then presses a hand to his chin, ignoring how it hurts. He doesn’t remember packing bandages or any sort of ointment—they’d all assumed, silently, that if there was an injury it was going to spell the end for that person. If there was a situation in which they’d need first aid supplies, that person was likely already beyond help.

Somehow, in their panic over the touch of the plague, they’d forgotten about simple human accidents.

He stands, shifting the way his shovel sits in his belt, the flat of the blade having pressed sharply against his pelvis in their fall. He grits his teeth—his chin really stings. Maybe he can find something like first aid around here?

Who is he kidding—Joel was a god, he had no need to worry about mortal scrapes and bruises. There won’t be anything in Upper Stratos to help him.

And then Scott looks up, and really takes in Upper Stratos.

It’s. . . .

It’s sad.

Upper Stratos looks almost exactly how it had before all this. The towering buildings are the same, all white and gold, all wonderful craftsmanship.

But it’s all wrong.

The heavenly glow that had lit the building materials themselves is gone, leaving the walls dark and bland in comparison. There’s no glimmer to the gold, no sparkle to the concrete, no life to the dry fountains and yellowed grass.

There aren’t any cobwebs, or animals (there are so few animals anywhere, but their absence here is somehow extra noticeable) taking up residence, or any sort of physical decay. But there isn’t any power to the city, the heart of it cut out and condemning the city to rigor mortis.

fWhip has his pickaxe out, pressed flush against a building across the floating island from Scott. As he watches, fWhip taps it lightly with his pick, then frowns and moves on.

Jimmy’s already across at one of the other islands, pistol still held out in front of him. He kicks open a door, ducks his head inside, then moves on to the next building.

It feels wrong. It isn’t right for them to be here, rummaging through the untouched memorial of a dead god. Even if it was hubris that did him in.

This was a place of honor, the city seems to scream. This is a place of remembrance.

“Taking in the sights?” Katherine asks beside him, looking a bit more steady, and Scott shakes himself from his reverie.

He gestures to the city wordlessly, but Katherine just frowns. “C’mon, Scott, we gotta get going. Head that way, shout if you find coal.”

Nobody else cares, he realizes. Maybe they don’t see the lack of grandeur—or maybe, something niggles at the back of his mind, he’d been the only one able to see the grandeur in the first place—, but they don’t care about disrespect to the dead and their tombs, as long as it helps keep them alive.

Scott knows firsthand the consequences of such foolhardiness, but he says nothing. Surely whatever curse Joel has left on this place is no worse than the certain death of the plague just outside their front door.

They can’t just . . . let it happen, can they? They can’t just sit in Sanctuary for the next couple of weeks, or months, or however long it is until the boundaries give entirely, their crops dying bit by bit and their animals keeling over to an invulnerable plague.

So Scott ignores his instincts and begins to explore what appears to have once been a garden of some sort—judging by the dead plants, a sunflower garden, murals wrapping the pillars and arches that line the island. Scott crumbles one of the crisp, brown petals between his fingers, idly wandering through the garden.

He has the strangest sense, he realizes, as he looks around at murals that no longer seem to hold any meaning, that there’s something behind him.

There’s nothing—he checks over his shoulder several times as he walks a bit further into the garden, but he’s alone.

There’s one mural that captures his attention, and he stares at it for maybe longer than he should. It doesn’t look like anything, just a bunch of colors and two small splashes of white near the middle. It feels . . . like it doesn’t quite belong here. And it doesn’t mean anything, of course—if this were some average temple Scott was raiding, he’d bypass it without a second thought, but something pulls him to it. It’s like . . . it’s like a puzzle, one last message from Joel that he’s meant to figure out. 

He feels, again, that insistence that there’s something behind him, but he hadn’t heard anything moving. He can’t even hear his companions.

Upper Stratos isn’t so big that he shouldn’t be able to hear people.

Scott backs out of the garden slowly, paranoia going haywire, jumping at every sound his own feet make against the concrete. The murals—the murals had meant something, hadn’t they, they’d been something once upon a time, but now the prime one is a mess of greens and yellows and there are two eyes right in the center and they’re begging him, pleading him to turn back, go back, this is no safe haven—

He turns and flat-out runs, right back to the elevator where he stops to catch his breath—right beside the small smear of blood where he’d fallen. He spins around—no one in sight, but getting away feels far less pressing out here than it did in the somewhat-enclosed garden space. Out here he can believe that Katherine’s in that building with the open door, that fWhip is behind that blacksmith with his pickaxe tapping against the wall.

Scott kicks a bit at the blood. It mars the paving of Stratos, and he doesn’t really like the idea of leaving his blood here, so he bends down and starts unscrewing the cork of his waterskin, intending to wash it away.

Instead, his eyes catch on the elevator shaft below, visible through a crack between the ground and where the elevator cab has floated up a bit, unburdened by their weight.

There’s. . . .

There are piles of black gathering at the waterfall.

And there is a mite crawling around the glass panes that are too far for them to reach.

And there is a mite pushing its way through the flow of the water, up to join the other on the glass.

They can swim.

When Scott screams, there’s no words to it. He’s screaming for help, for the others to come back, to see that their escape route is compromised, but he can't seem to form any words.

They’d noted, in their brief planning session before setting out, that the mites couldn’t drown. Couldn’t easily be washed away, clinging to the ground with all their strength.

They’d all considered, briefly, the possibility that the things could swim. They’d all dismissed the thought.

Scott pauses to take a gasping breath, and he hears the sound of running footsteps slapping against the ground. He looks up to see fWhip turning the corner of a building, running toward him.

“What is it?” fWhip demands, skidding to a stop at his side. “What happened, what’s—?”

Scott points over the edge of Stratos. fWhip frowns, crouches down to peer over the side.

Scott watches as the color drains from his face.

Neither of them say anything. They don’t even speak as first Katherine, then Jimmy, run up to join them, all four leaning over the edge of Upper Stratos.

“Right,” Jimmy says suddenly, standing from where he’s knelt beside the three of them. “I’ll message False. It’ll take her an hour or more to get here. We need to find coal, or else we aren’t making it home.”

fWhip leans back on his heels, and Katherine straightens, but Scott keeps staring over the edge.

They don’t move towards them as long as he keeps his eyes on them.

“I’ll head that way,” fWhip volunteers, and Jimmy points Katherine another way.

“If you see one, make a lot of noise and run,” Jimmy says, voice low and serious. “Come back to the open space here if you can, it’ll be easiest to defend. Scott, are you. . . ?”

“I’ll stay here and hold them off,” Scott says, watching as one of them on the glass shudders and crawls down under his gaze.

There’s silence, then fWhip asks, slowly, “How?”

Scott gestures down below. “They don’t come closer if you look directly at them. I’ll stay here and keep them at bay.”

More silence.

“Right,” Jimmy says after a moment. “You do that. fWhip?”

“On it.”

Each of them give him a light pat on the shoulder, then head off in their separate directions.

And Scott stays in place, and suddenly wonders if he’s the only one who’s noticed that the mites hate eye contact. The others, after all, had left for Sanctuary long before it had gotten as drastic as it had in Chromia—apart from Katherine, who apparently had been holding them off on her skills as a monster hunter alone.

And then, of course, Scott remembers that he was the only one to see the woven magic around Sanctuary, and he appears to be the only one who can see the lack of godly influence on the city, and perhaps his magical eye can do more than just see magic.

Scott turns his glare on a group of mites making their way up the water with a renewed vigor. If he’s the only one who can hold them off, then he absolutely has to do his best to keep his friends safe.

He keeps them at bay for quite some time, but at some point they start slipping by in the edges of his vision, crawling around each other and hiding in the shadows of floating buildings to keep out of his range.

He tries. He really, really, tries.

But it’s not long before Scott has to acknowledge that some have made it past his gaze. There have to be some on the bottom of the island, some that he can’t see, and they’re on their way up.

He’s not sure how long it’s been. Definitely not an hour. But it looks like it’s time to fall back.

They haven’t given him a communicator yet—it’s barely been a week, after all, since his rescue—so he just shouts at the top of his lungs.

“They’ve got this island! Move to a center island!”

Then he scrambles back over the thin bridge to the island with the deadened garden and waits, slowly rotating every couple of seconds to make sure there aren’t any mites creeping up behind him.

Scott swallows, throat dry—but he doesn’t want to reach for his water skin, instead leaving his hands ready and open for drawing his shovel.

This is far too similar to his last days in Chromia for him to feel comfortable.

He tries to breathe in, slowly, but his breath releases far too soon in a gasp that he can’t control. They’re going to be cornered again, with no way out, and it’s not been an hour and they’ll be dead by the time False finds them and then she won’t have enough fuel to get back to Sanctuary and then Sausage and Gem will be left without half their team and their only method of transportation—

Katherine and fWhip exit from a squat building an island away, each lugging a burlap sack full of something heavy. They carry them over to Scott, the bridge creaking ominously under their weight. Scott watches the ground around their feet like a hawk, ready to catch any mites that target them.

“Coal!” fWhip declares, grinning nervously. “Not much, but should be enough to get a couple more trips out of the ship. Then maybe we can find more?”

Katherine meets Scott’s eyes and he swallows, glances away. As if there’s anywhere else they can find more coal.

“It’s been close to an hour,” Katherine changes the subject. “False should arrive soon, right?”

“Maybe,” Scott mutters, glancing around—no mites behind him, that’s good—before scanning the sky. He can’t see anything.

The sky’s too bright and blue for the early evening. The sun seems almost cheerful where it sinks, the clouds fluffy and floating lazily.

It isn’t right. It isn’t right that they’re here, surrounded by death, cornered and trapped, while the sky seems to celebrate its summer.

It’s all so wrong. Scott can’t believe, for a second, that they’re meant to be here. That they’re meant to have to fight in the last days of their lives, nor that their lives are ending so suddenly. He can’t believe that any greater power would subject them to such destruction for no reason, and they’ve not done anything!

Maybe that’s why Sausage spends so much time locked in the chapel, praying to the god of harvest and sunflowers and death as a season. He doesn’t understand either, the world that they’ve somehow ended up in.

There’s something black crawling in the corner of Scott’s vision.

He whips around, glares, and though it squirms back out of view under the island, it’s too late. They’re under this island too, moving with a hunger he hadn’t expected.

They don’t have time to get out of here.

There’s a loud bang from their left, cracking like a gunshot, and all three of them turn to see Jimmy, running for his life from a tall, white-and-blue building, the door still swinging behind him.

His running is frantic, uneven, hat hanging onto his throat by the string and his boots landing heavily against the paved road until he crosses to their island.

Jimmy stops in front of them, near doubled-over, out of breath and face drained of its blood. He swallows several times, adam’s apple bobbing in his throat, and when he looks up, there’s a fear in his eyes that Scott’s never seen from the Sheriff.

“Jimmy, are you all right?” Katherine asks, pushing past Scott to see him. Jimmy shies away from her outstretched arm. “I—you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Jimmy winces, looks around her at fWhip. “I—” he starts, cutting himself off with a small, awful sound. “I think one of them got me.”

Scott’s stomach drops.

No. No, he can’t lose someone like this, not another person, not their leader—

There’s tears in Scott’s eyes before he even knows what’s happening. He’s losing Jimmy. He can’t—Jimmy’s supposed to be safe, he’s supposed to be different. He isn’t supposed to die in an apocalypse, just another loss. He’s supposed to save them all.

“What did you see?” fWhip asks quickly. It takes Scott aback for a moment, before remembering his and fWhip’s conversation from the other day—hallucinations are one of the first signs of contamination, sometimes presenting before the infected even realizes that they’ve been touched by death.

Jimmy opens his mouth, ready to speak, when the door he’d exited so hurriedly from slams open.

All eyes turn toward it and the figure in the doorway, who stands there, glancing around at the area, before focusing in on their group and pointing an accusing finger at Jimmy.

“You shut the door in my face!” Shelby yells.

Shelby.

Scott almost sprints for her—out of all the rulers, he’d considered her to be the most like a friend, and it’s so good to see her again when she’d been presumed dead before he’d even been rescued.

There’s no need for him to join her, however, as she storms across to their island, crushing a dead sunflower head beneath the single rubber boot she’s wearing, the other foot covered by a dirty sock.

Scott’s holding his breath, he realizes, as Shelby approaches the group, very clearly sizes them all up, then slaps Jimmy hard across the face.

“You shut the door on me!” she says, crossing her arms, brows drawn down over her eyes in a picture of anger. Despite her height, she seems to tower over Jimmy. “I just—you let me think one of ‘em finally got me, and left?! You little—”

“Shelby!” Katherine interrupts, taking a careful step forward. “I—you’re alive!”

Shelby turns to Katherine, and the intense ferocity in every line of her face softens somewhat. “I—Katherine,” she greets, tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear. “You’re alive, too!”

“Shelby!” fWhip launches himself into a hug, and Shelby giggles a little, hugging him back.

Jimmy shrinks back, subtly stepping behind Scott. Scott raises a brow, but Jimmy doesn’t answer and he doesn’t really care, because Shelby’s alive.

She’s actually here, right in front of him, in the flesh. He can see her. He can touch her.

She hugs him next, and Scott gives her a little squeeze before releasing her. He can’t help but grin, even in such a dire situation. “They told me you died,” Scott says.

Shelby hums dismissively. “Yeah, my comm broke. But those things haven’t gotten me yet, and they won’t.”

It’s decisive, the way she says it, and Scott finds herself believing her. Shelby won’t be touched by one of the mites, he knows it—whether by her own force of will or by the blessing of some god, Shelby will be spared.

“How’d you get here?” Katherine asks. “The elevator wasn’t down.”

Shelby points to a place over her shoulder—and Scott, following her finger, sees Joel’s grandly overcompensating Nether portal. Which—isn’t it impossible? The mites swarm the portals, even if they can’t get in.

“How’d you manage that?” fWhip asks, picking up his abandoned sack of coal again. Shelby shrugs.

“They were all over the portal I went in, so I lured them away,” she says, and Scott wonders: is it really that simple? As simple as giving the mites a different focus, then sneaking by while it occupies them?

It had worked on the way here, with the dead dodo. It had pulled their attention quite well, leaving their chosen path almost clear.

Oh.

“What’d you do, Shelby?” Katherine asks slowly, and it sounds like she’s giving her a chance to lie. Asking her to lie, even.

But Shelby’s face goes stony, and when she speaks, her words are cold. “I did what I had to do.”

Scott swallows, and notices that he hasn’t seen her toad around Sanctuary.

There’s a mite crawling onto one of the dead sunflower stalks.

Scott fumbles around at his belt loop, pulls his shovel through and into his hands. “They’re here,” he manages, spinning around to check.

There’s two others on the island with them. If Scott focuses on one, he can get it to shiver and scurry back to the underneath of the island, but the other two move closer while he can’t pay attention to them. And there are more, there have to be more coming, they never stop.

Almost without speaking, the five of them naturally come together back-to-back, a shifting mess of bodies pressed up against each other fearfully, weapons raised. Scott finds himself between fWhip and Jimmy with Katherine at his back. He readjusts his sweaty grip on his shovel.

“I can’t believe you thought you hallucinated me,” Shelby mutters to Jimmy, who groans.

“I’m sorry, all right? I didn’t figure there was any way you were still alive.”

A mite, moving quickly, comes close to fWhip’s boot beside Scott. Scott smacks it with his shovel; it backs off.

The group stumbles, rotating slowly, glancing around themselves as they try not to hit their neighbor. There’s more mites—clumps of them appearing at the edges of the island, and Scott only has so many eyes to watch them with. He can’t keep track of where they all are, and he swallows back a thrill of fear that runs through him.

“Of course I’m still alive, no thanks to you.”

“I’m doing my best, Shelby, I have to make hard choices, I’m the leader—”

“Right, like how it was a hard choice when you kicked Lizzie out?”

Scott shakes himself, trying to focus on the matter at hand instead of their steadily-growing-louder argument. fWhip keeps sending nervous glances toward Jimmy and Shelby, who are sniping at each other over their shoulders.

And—Jimmy had kicked Lizzie out? Scott had been told that they’d just had disagreements, and Lizzie had chosen to leave.

The darkness that’s been lurking in Sanctuary, the little discrepancies he’s been noticing, the notes left behind his mirror—

“You didn’t even try to look for me,” Shelby says, abandoning all pretense of a whispered conversation. “When’d you get Scott? Right after my comm died?”

“We were already planning to get Scott, you know that—”

“Sacrifice one friend for another, I get it.” Shelby laughs darkly, hefts her staff over her shoulder as she turns around to properly look at Jimmy. “Well, excuse me if I don’t exactly trust you, mister Sheriff. Whose fault is it that we’re even in this situation, again?”

“Shelby—” fWhip starts, his voice a warning. Scott glances at him, sees the way he’s watching Jimmy—Jimmy’s red in the face, grip on his pistol so tight that his knuckles are white. Shelby peers over her shoulder at Jimmy, too, rolls her eyes.

“What, fWhip? Your weird obsession with Jimmy isn’t going to change the fact that he—”

“Shelby, behind you!” Katherine shouts, swinging her axe at the ground, and several mites, all reaching for Shelby, scurry back, regrouping at the edge of the island.

Scott wipes one of his hands on his trousers before reaffirming his grip on the shovel handle and facing out again.

There’s so many of them.

They’re diving into the dead flowerbeds with abandon, and as Scott watches, they seem to multiply in the dirt without more crawling up to join them. There has to be dozens, maybe even a hundred of them, all surrounding them, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

Scott glances down briefly, checking to make sure his trousers are tucked into his boots. At least if one of them touches him, it won’t be the end of the world. Not unless they manage to get under his clothes.

“C’mon, False,” he says under his breath. She’s their only shot at getting out.

And, as if his words brought her into existence, he can suddenly hear in the distance the whooshes and gears of a certain flying machine.

There’s a gunshot beside him, dirt going up in a cloud and mites scattering from its impact—Jimmy’s tambourines are clamoring again, and Scott pictures briefly Jimmy frantically shaking his hips, before turning instead to help fWhip on his left with a group of five or so plaguelings.

He can still hear the airship, but he can’t let himself feel relief—there’s more mites appearing by the second, any one of them could be caught off guard and as good as dead in a matter of seconds.

Scott barely holds back a scream when three of them come skittering toward him, hitting at them frantically with his shovel. Jimmy’s stomping and hollering and shooting off his gun, the air is whistling with Katherine’s axe and Shelby’s staff, there’s a loud thunk beside him as fWhip brings his mace down on a group of darkness.

Can he throw the mites?

He’s not sure where that thought came from, appearing suddenly in his mind, but Scott’s weapon of choice is still, after all, a shovel. Could he scoop up a group of mites and fling them?

When another bundle creeps close to Scott, he shovels them up and throws them off in the opposite direction.

Almost comically, the mites fly through the air and over the edge of the island. Scott lets out an incredulous burst of laughter—how did that work? How did he just—toss them away?

Maybe they’ve been going about this the wrong way. Sure, noise can create a brief path, but maybe they ought to experiment with shovels. Or giant fans, maybe. Blow them away.

He does it again, scoops up four at a time and flings them away. Jimmy hoots beside him, gesturing toward the flying mites with his pistol.

“Nice one!” he crows. There’s a couple creeping toward Jimmy, and Sott opens his mouth to warn him, but quick as a flash Jimmy unstraps one of his tambourines and throws it at the mites. It lands on top of them perfectly, and the tambourine shifts from side to side as they try to escape.

Scott lets out a whoop of his own, a vocal release of the fear and anxiety and sheer hilarity of watching the mites soar over the side of the island. It cracks at the end, and he cuts off into almost a sob, but he doesn’t have time to cry, he’s got to keep safe until they can escape—

Saint Pearl must be watching over them or something, because at that very moment False’s airship rises up beside the island, in front of Shelby.

“Let’s go!” False calls over the sound of the machine, and Scott doesn’t need to be told twice.

He makes a break for it, feet slamming against the ground so hard it hurts, and even though the airship is a good couple of feet from the edge of the island, he jumps the gap without even stopping to consider it.

fWhip is right behind him, landing on his hands and feet, and Jimmy behind him tosses one of the sacks of coal on board before jumping across. Behind him is Katherine with her sack of coal, and Shelby bringing up the rear.

“Let’s go, False,” Jimmy yells over the whirring and clunking of the ship. Scott steadies himself on the railing as the ship lurches, then rises, higher and higher, making a wide turn over the islands of Upper Stratos.

Stratos isn’t completely overrun, but it’s getting close. Scott peers over the edge of the ship, his stomach turning dreadfully.

It looks so much like Chromia had, squirming blackness blanketing it, devouring any sort of life that may have remained in the buildings and gardens and statues. As he stares down at it, Scott can almost imagine that it’s covering him as well. That he’s down there, drowning in the darkness, choking on it and pressed on all sides by it and dying so horribly—

“I did what I had to do, Shelby,” comes a loud voice behind him.

Scott turns around, and sure enough, Jimmy and Shelby are face to face—Shelby looking up at him, face dark with anger, and Jimmy just standing there, hands in fists at his sides.

“Right,” Shelby scoffs. “Because we all know you so well for making good choices. When’s the last time you actually helped anyone?”

“You know that’s not fair, you know—”

fWhip isn’t doing anything, and Katherine’s disappeared to somewhere, and False is busy at the wheel—

Scott steps between them, pushing Jimmy away with the hand still holding the shovel. “Guys, come on,” he says, and like a wave, exhaustion hits him. He really doesn’t have the energy to deal with infighting right now. “We’re all safe, can we just leave it? Jimmy’s done a lot to help, he’s saved a lot of people. And Shelby, he should’ve tried to find you. Now, can we move on?”

Shelby makes some sort of disbelieving sound through her nose, eyes narrowed at Scott. “You can’t say he’s saved anyone when it’s his fault we’re in this mess!”

That hits Scott harder than the exhaustion had.

That—that doesn’t make sense.

He turns to Jimmy, who glares hard at Shelby.

“Explain,” Scott demands. “Jimmy’s fault? How—I don’t think a human could cause this, any of this.”

“You didn’t even tell him?” Shelby asks, incredulous. Jimmy turns away, stalking over to the railing. fWhip gapes openly at him, then Scott, then back to Jimmy.

“Didn’t tell me what?” Scott asks, frustration quick to rise to the surface.

“A human couldn’t cause any of this, you’re right,” fWhip steps up, wringing his hands anxiously. “The things—they aren’t human. Or human made.”

“They’re a god,” Shelby says. She gestures around in a vaguely over-the-edge-of-the-ship direction. “Jimmy killed him. Jimmy killed Joel, and he turned into—into those things, and it’s all Jimmy’s fault for killing a god.”

It’s Scott’s turn to gape. He glances between Shelby and fWhip, searching for some kind of proper answer in their faces.

“I—” he starts, then clears his throat and tries again. “He—” he turns toward Jimmy, and maybe the finger he points is accusing, but he’s suddenly not sure who to trust and he needs someone to tell him what is a lie and what’s the truth. “You told me hubris killed Joel!”

Jimmy laughs, a wry, humorless sound, his back still turned to them. Scott can just barely see the grim corner of his mouth, the darkness in his eye as he turns his head to the side to survey the ground. “Well. I ain’t exactly the most humble of people, am I?”

Scott’s shovel slips from his grip, clatters to the deck. Jimmy’s the killer. Not fWhip, not Gem, not False.

Jimmy killed the god.

But there isn’t time to marvel. There isn’t time to mourn.

So Scott picks his shovel back up, nods to everyone, and heads belowdecks to check his body for mites.