“—and then he smacked the guy’s rear and sent him flying,” Savage said, gesticulating with one of his spindly mechanical arms.

  “I knew you had a sense of humor,” Sarah said, pointing her kiseru at Isaac.

  “It seemed a good idea at the time,” Isaac defended himself, though not very hard. It was pretty funny in hindsight.

  “Small animals incoming,” Lia interrupted, and Sarah went on alert as she shifted her smoke toward stealth. After seeing the size of mosquitos evolved to pierce scales, she had demonstrated to his surprise that she could make her smoke smell like smoke, and created a bubble that kept insects away. It had surprisingly worked as a deterrent in general, but they’d still run into a more than a few pieces of flora and fauna looking to snack on them.

  The four of them paused, getting into a defensive position, but what emerged from the foliage was a quartet of almost chicken-sized bipedal reptiles, their scales shifting visibly to camouflage them. The lead creature cocked its head at them and chirped, then hopped forward a few paces to stare up at them and chirped again.

  “Oh, they’re adorable!” Sarah said, crouching down but having the sense not to reach out to it right away.

  “I’ve seen some people with these as pets,” Isaac recalled, as the other three crowded up behind their leader. “Looked a little bit softer than these, though.”

  “Miniraptors are bred specifically to be pets,” Savage said, the synthetic voice betraying no emotion as the cyber-raptor eyed his smaller brethren. The lead miniraptor chirped back at him, as if insulted by the statement, before hopping closer to Sarah and butting its head against her knee. “These might be descendants of some that got loose.”

  “Poor things. Wish I could keep them,” Sarah said, reaching out and scratching the leader on top of its head. It rumbled happily, almost a purr, before chirping again and scurrying off, followed by its compatriots. She watched them go regretfully, and Isaac had to admit he was a little sad himself. Though he’d never been a pet type of person, they were pretty cute.

  “Might mean we’re close to the settlement?” He suggested, as the tail of the last miniraptor vanished behind a tree.

  “Lemme check,” Sarah said, forehead wrinkling cutely as she concentrated. Something that was only visible since they were all inside her illusionary bubble so she wasn’t using it to shield her face. He wasn’t sure if it was a natural limitation or just an issue of too many things to concentrate on, but it was obvious how much more expressive she was without the illusionary cover.

  Isaac had also noticed that since the attack she’d been aggressively using her power, more than just the exercises. It made him feel like he hadn’t been doing a good enough job, since he was the one responsible for helping her regain what she’d lost. It wasn’t like he was her boss, so he hadn’t been demanding exercises, but it still felt like he was lacking if it took a crisis for her to really expand what she could do.

  Admittedly, everyone did things they didn’t think they could when the situation demanded it. He had learned that for himself, and while some part of him was tempted to lean into the inertia of the new attitude, he immediately squelched the idea of affecting Sarah’s very self. Not just from the principle of it, but also because he still wasn’t confident in his ability to undo anything he did to a transient, metaphysical phenomenon.

  “Yeah, I see some buildings, but they’re still a couple miles ahead,” Sarah reported with a grimace. Despite her taking care of some of the problems of being out in the wilderness, none of them were properly dressed for it. Isaac’s dress shoes he’d borrowed for the event were utterly ruined, as were Sarah and Lia’s sandals. Only Savage wasn’t showing any real wear from the hot, humid, and foliage-dense trek, and he barely counted as clothed to begin with.

  “Sooner we get there, the sooner we can take a rest,” Isaac said, wincing as another burst of sound echoed from the fight they’d left behind, loud even if it was miles away. He was glad to have a concrete goal, a direction he could settle into. Even when he was careful with his power, he was pretty certain he affected himself. Stillness and motion both stuck more than they should, and he had yet to figure out the exact method to ignore it like he did his more physical inertia. Sadly, there was no instruction book for his power.

  “Could be worse,” Sarah drawled, and Isaac could swear that the smoke thickened even as she worked.

  “Never say things like that,” Savage hissed, looking around as if expecting to be attacked that instant.

  “You’re right,” Sarah said after a moment, and Isaac shook his head.

  “I just feel sorry that Stratum and Bubs are going to have to make their own way,” he said, trying to steer the topic away from superstition. “Do any of you actually know anything about the south pole? Wasn’t much covered in basic geography.”

  “I know that the group there is called The Mountains?” Sarah frowned, shifting her kiseru from one hand to another. “Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it’s probably translated.” Lia and Savage just offered their version of a shrug. Though he assumed someone from the moon and, apparently, the Deep Kingdoms weren’t likely to know much about surface politics. “I don’t think Gratin would send us somewhere we shouldn’t be, though.”

  “Probably not,” Isaac conceded. He didn’t really know much about the tiny cook, except he was clearly also someone fairly important in the Deep Kingdoms. Which might have seemed odd, except Isaac understood perfectly. He himself would have liked some time off as Lou, taking care of something simple like cleaning a house. Gratin didn’t need to be undercover; he could just be two things at once. He’d certainly seemed genuinely fond of Sarah and James, so Isaac was willing to trust him a little bit.

  “At least we don’t have to walk the whole way, probably,” Sarah continued. “There’s got to be some kind of plane equivalent, right? A giant pterodactyl?”

  “Right,” Isaac said, giving himself a mental shake. He’d fixated on the idea of walking over the whole of the Deep Kingdoms for some reason, and not had the flexibility of mind to think further than that. Which wasn’t a mistake he should have made; the Deep Kingdoms technology was strange but they weren’t primitive.

  He had been thinking of the Deep Kingdoms like the primitive wilds outside of the cities rather than its own, special thing. The wilderness between the cities of the Five City Alliance wasn’t hostile, exactly, but it belonged to a cabal of druids that, between them, more or less matched sovereign supers, though only within that stretch of greenery. On the up side, the Five City Alliance didn’t have to worry about any of that wilderness producing threats, but it also meant that Isaac hadn’t had much experience in the outdoors. As a kid he’d had a couple field trips to one of the parks, and that was about it, so he was hardly in his comfort zone traipsing through the jungle.

  He suspected that wasn’t the only thing, though. His power had always had a conceptual effect, that was obvious, but now that he’d begun exercising it the effects seemed to be stronger. Or maybe he’d changed himself permanently when he’d nearly been stuck as Ravdia, a metaphysical scarring that made him more likely to be singleminded or flighty depending on what he was doing.

  “We’ll figure that out when we get there,” he concluded after a moment, taking a large step to avoid a deep pit between a pair of tree roots then offering Sarah his hand to help her across the gap.

  They pressed on, and despite the heat and humidity making Isaac sweat, he actually enjoyed it in an obscure way. There were the worries about getting back to the surface and what had happened with James, not to mention Stratum and Bubs, but those were all separate, siloed off from the simple goal of reaching the next settlement. It might have been nicer if it was just him and Sarah, but things would have had to go catastrophically wrong for that to be the case.

  Soon enough the foliage did thin out, though it didn’t go away entirely. Rather than their target being a thriving village cut from the jungle, or even a set of farms or something, it was some small compound that bore the scars of combat. Vines and greenery climbed the walls of some multi-acre cluster of buildings, breaking through gaps in the stone. The conical structures inside were cracked, some with shattered gemstone windows, but despite that and the riotous growth it was clear that it hadn’t been abandoned all that long.

  For one, there was still power, however it worked with crystaltech. Despite drifted debris piled at the corners of the paths, the crystalline doors and controls glowed softly. For another, all the cracks and broken pieces still had sharp edges, untouched by wind and weather even if much of it was covered in vines. It was very clearly deserted, even if it wasn’t obvious how long it had been that way.

  “Not what I was hoping to see,” Isaac said, looking around while Lia and Sarah did actual surveillance. His stomach growled, and part of him really felt like a pizza or a cheesesteak, but those were foreign delicacies in a place like the Deep Kingdoms. They would have to see what they could scavenge from the abandoned town, which hopefully would have food or drink, but if not, anything useful would serve.

  “It is a ranch,” Savage said, artificial voice calm but his eyes darting around. “They are often transitory, depending on migration patterns. A compound seed can build this in a few hours.” Isaac whistled softly, but it made sense. A construction meta could manage something similar, though so far as he knew no tinker had come up with a prefabricated mini-town. Though the Mecha-Maestro had done something similar in a relatively recent issue of the eponymous comic, so the idea was out there.

  “Think it’ll have anything left?” Isaac asked, carefully picking his way through one of the gaps in the wall and surveying the group of buildings inside. He went first, ahead of everyone else, with his clothes fully invested. Doing so made him the toughest among them in case of an ambush, but it also meant he had to be careful with his companions. A casual bump could send them flying or worse.

  “I’m not seeing anything,” Sarah said, eyes distant under the broad brim of her hat. “But it’s a big compound.”

  “If there’s anything left, it’s under the ground,” Savage said with some clear reluctance. His voice didn’t carry it, but his forearms were tucked in, the various ports and sensors of his cybernetic armor closed down and drawn in. Isaac sympathized, but not dying of hunger and thirst – or being forced to return to the city when they were explicitly told not to – was more important. Though it seemed to him ridiculous that four powered individuals were worried about something so simple.

  “Let me…” Lia said, runes flashing as she attempted to scry something, but after a moment she shook her head. “I don’t have the range for it, this deep under the earth.” Isaac raised his eyebrows, not having considered that being away from the surface and the moon would matter, but magic was weird.

  “Door to door it is,” Isaac concluded, though he was careful as he approached the buildings. Once again he found himself taking point as he was the toughest there, though there were only small lizards of both the flightless and flying variety nesting in the abandoned dwellings. Some of the no-longer-empty rooms stunk, where whatever crystaltech maintenance systems had failed, but others were full of cool air, and Isaac stepped into one with a relieved sigh, followed by Sarah and Lia.

  The interior was only half-familiar; between the different body shape of the ikiski and the crystaltech that no one had any idea how to activate, there were major differences in things like windows, doors, and importantly sinks or refrigerators. Isaac had go scrounge a stick from the outside to smash through one of the doors in order to find a bathroom, but it was Sarah who located the basement.

  “There’s an entire passage under there,” she said, crouching by a vent set flush in the floor. “I think I can get through. Can you give me a push, Isaac?” She clearly didn’t mean a physical one, but rather one with his power. That wasn’t exactly how it worked, but he figured he could give her a little bit of a boost anyway.

  Taking her hand, he focused on her ability to shift between smoke and flesh, and tried to pull away the resistance to that change. He didn’t dare give any inertia to her power directly, as there was a chance she might be stuck as smoke and that would be absolutely terrifying, if not lethal. Sarah rolled the kiseru between her fingers, eyes squinted shut in concentration, and then suddenly vanished in a roil of smoke.

  “Yeah, there’s a big hallway down here!” She called, voice echoing up through the vent. “It’s lit up—hang on, there’s stairs here.” There was a pause, then a thumping came from a different corner of the room. Isaac followed the sound, and Savage gave a few exploratory whistles to see if he could try and open the apparently hidden passage – though it was probably obvious enough to ikiski eyes – before Isaac decided to just force it.

  “Stand clear!” he shouted, before he lifted his stick and brought it down, invested to maximum inertia. The stone and crystal tiling cracked underneath the blow, then grated as the now-revealed parts of the door crumpled inward. Another two hits sent the individual pieces tumbling down a stairwell, revealing Sarah standing well clear with her hands over her ears.

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  The hall was lit by geometric designs on the ceiling, the ever-present crystaltech glowing softly as they trooped downward. Picking his way over the remains of the door, Isaac offered Sarah his arm as Savage padded forward. The cyber-raptor sniffed the air, claws tapping against the stone in an irregular pattern. The underground reminded Isaac more of the Star City subway than Mechaniacal’s base, lacking the ancient foreboding of old abandoned places.

  “Could you undo some of that?” Sarah muttered to him, face screwed up on concentration. “I feel like I’m about to slip into smoke form just by thinking of it.”

  “Of course,” he whispered back, anxiety twisting his guts as he focused on undoing the changes he’d made to Sarah. Feeding inertia back into the change between smoke form and flesh, and understanding very much how awful it was to be trapped by his power. The feedback was still incredibly vague, more guesswork than anything, but he worked slowly and steadily as they walked along until Sarah nodded, squeezing his arm.

  “That works,” she said, and Isaac smiled, turning his attention to their surroundings. He did want to try and pin down more of what he could do on the vague, metaphysical side, but there were more important immediate considerations.

  Even if Isaac couldn’t read any of the ikiski, there weren’t any branching passages, so it was obvious enough which way to go. The hall slanted downward just slightly, and by the time they reached the end of it they were probably another full story underground. Which only made sense, since there was an entire room at the end of the passage.

  A big crystaltech column dominated the middle of it, the center of a large circular chamber with a number of dark, smoked-glass alcoves around the perimeter. Inside each alcove was the obscured shape of some animal, or rather reptile, since the silhouettes were all obviously Deep Kingdom life. Isaac carefully walked forward, half-expecting them to spring to life, but nothing changed as he approached one of the alcoves.

  “Are they in stasis?” He wondered aloud, drawing more on things he’d seen in comics and stories than any actual knowledge.

  “I believe so,” Lia said, runes flashing over her skin as she examined another of the alcoves. “They aren’t dead, but they aren’t quite alive either.”

  “These have got to be the little ones,” Sarah said, stopping at once of the alcoves that was subdivided into a number of smaller cubbyholes. “Are these the breeding stock maybe? Or products waiting for delivery?” Savage growled softly at the question, but had the good grace to look abashed when everyone stared at him.

  “These are more likely custom orders, ones that hadn’t been picked up before the ranch was attacked,” he said, artificial voice as level as ever. “The stasis can keep for a long time, so likely someone planned to return in the near future. It will keep until it runs out of power or someone triggers it manually.”

  “Or until we do,” Isaac suggested. “Not sure it’s a good idea, though. Some of these look large enough to be mounts, but are they going to listen to us? And I don’t know the first thing about riding dinosaurs.” The more he thought about it, the more barriers there were to the na?ve idea of simply acquiring one of the ikiski mounts, but on the other hand, their shoes were in tatters and there was no telling how much further they had to go.

  “We can at least try,” Sarah said, shifting the focus of her attention to another alcove that had a much larger silhouette inside. “Between all of us we can manage one of the riding dinos, right?”

  “Only if we can determine how to release them,” Lia pointed out, blinking her enormous eyes as she studied the panels in question. “I doubt simply smashing things would result in anything good. Savage, might I trouble you for that translation now?”

  “Fine,” Savage grumbled, settling down on his haunches. Isaac watched curiously as the moonie stepped over and withdrew what looked like a marker to sketch actual runic sigils on Savage’s armor in a silver-white ink. The runes flared with power, lights streaming up and into Lia. While he understood Lia wasn’t the most powerful magic user, the ability to do practically anything was a power in and of itself, and being able to grab an entire language was just incredible.

  The incomprehensible light show only lasted a few minutes, during which Savage looked more than a little annoyed, but eventually the power crystallized. The light condensed into strands, winding down Lia’s left arm to etch a new tattoo with a sizzle. She flicked her left hand toward Isaac and Sarah, ghostly copies of the tattooed rune appearing and flying toward their faces. Isaac flinched back, but the rune sank into him and there was a strange itching sensation in his head for a moment.

  “What the hell?” Sarah asked, a fraction of a second ahead of him.

  “Translation spell for ikiski,” Lia explained. “It won’t last forever, but should linger for long enough.”

  “Thank you,” Isaac said, after a moment. He would have preferred a warning, but Lia had been helping and Dolores had made sure every one of the foster kids knew how to properly respond to people who wanted to help. Sure, the lesson didn’t stick for everyone, but Isaac wasn’t an ingrate.

  Looking around, the various colors and sigils resolved themselves into something understandable in an odd way, not a physical change but an almost conceptual overlay. He suspected that however the translation magic worked, it was actually something special even for moonie magic. Though it was obvious that any Lunarian that wound up on Earth would be unusual.

  Of the forty or fifty things in stasis, most were not, in fact, mounts. There were the pets, which he was nearly as tempted as Sarah to try and free, and there were various farm animals, and one that might be an actual ikiski, which was confusing enough that Isaac didn’t bother to form an opinion. But there were seven that, according to the translation magic, were mounts of appropriate size.

  “Right, hope this works,” Isaac said, shoving inertia into himself and his clothes before delicately putting a thumb against what the translation magic designated the activation portion of the stasis control panel. The crystal went from translucent to transparent before vanishing, revealing a large bipedal raptor with blue and green scales, clad in topaz barding and saddle with thin gemstone wings floating at rest on either side. It was probably twice Savage’s size, and when the stasis vanished it shook itself in an almost doglike manner before swiveling to regard their group.

  The eyes were far more intelligent than Isaac would have guessed, but hopefully not fully sapient the way Savage was. Its gaze swung from Isaac, to Lia, to Sarah, and then to Savage, where it cocked his head, but after a moment it simply hopped down and, with no apparent aggression, stepped over to Sarah. After what had happened with the miniraptors back in the jungle, it was obvious something about her was just more attractive to the species. So they had good taste.

  “Well, hello there,” Sarah said, peering up at the raptor from under her broad-brimmed hat. It leaned down and snuffled at her, the topaz armor encasing its head shifting and ejecting a little gemstone rod. The dinosaur tilted its head slightly so Sarah could take it, and after she withdrew it, the piece of crystaltech wrapped itself around her wrist like a bracelet and her eyes went wide.

  “Oh, that is weird.” She ran her fingers over the bracelet before looking up at the mount again. “Like car keys, only it’s a link of some sort? Anyway, I shall call you Astoria.” Isaac almost laughed, since he recognized the reference. The unicorn mount of Blazar Comet, one of the biggest animated magical girl properties to exist.

  “That went better than expected,” Isaac said, watching Sarah happily scratch the newly-named Astoria’s muzzle. For all that it seemed to be entirely friendly, those were some really big teeth, and he was sure that the dinosaur would be entirely vicious when need be. He’d seen how rough traffic was in the Deep Kingdoms.

  “They have good taste,” Sarah said, understandably smug. Isaac laughed and pressed the panel on the next one, revealing a riding raptor with bright red scales and ruby crystaltech. It took one look at them and growled deep in its throat, a bassy rumble that vibrated the floor, and Isaac hastily slapped the button again to seal it back in its alcove.

  “Hot rod dinosaur,” Isaac said after taking a moment to process the overall look and attitude of the thing. It wasn’t just a joke; the dinosaur had reminded him of the foul-tempered – if beautiful – machines that some people used for street racing. He had occasionally fantasized about owning one, but his better judgment had kept it to hazy imaginings.

  Now more cautious, he moved to the next one, revealing a slightly larger specimen in greens and grays, with what looked to be obsidian crystaltech. He still didn’t know if the type of crystal mattered, or if it was all just aesthetics. The Iksiski clearly took pains to match and complement colors, so it was hard to know what was form and what was function. Regardless, that particular raptor eyed them with disinterest, idly swishing its tail and not bothering to come out of the alcove.

  “I’ll take that one,” Lia said, stepping up and reaching out to offer the raptor her hand. It didn’t seem too interested, but after a sustained staring contest it followed Lia out of the alcove and let her take the crystaltech ‘key’ from its cranial armor. That only left Isaac—though it was amusing to imagine Savage trying to ride atop another larger raptor.

  The next two alcoves had another hostile mount and a raptor mannequin, a clear outline that showed some of the ways the crystaltech barding and armor were integrated into the biology. Which was a little bit stomach-churning to contemplate, as the stuff was clearly grown into the mounts, but any kind of cybernetics worked that way. With only two remaining chambers, Isaac was a little anxious when he opened the next. Inside was raptor with green scales, blue stripes, and sapphire barding, with the same hovering wing panels as Sarah’s.

  “Hey, girl,” he said, going by instinct and trying to suppress the nervousness that he felt. “You want to come with me?” The raptor made an inquiring noise deep in her throat, leaning forward to snuffle at his hair, and he had to clamp down on the impulse to duck away from a mouth that could open wider than his head. After a moment, she leaned further down and Isaac could pluck the blue, pencil-thick rod from the cranial armor.

  It wound about his wrist of its own accord, and with a jolt he became aware of the raptor in a strange, sideways manner that was difficult to describe. He understood exactly what Sarah meant, as the wrist covering gave him a definite sense of authorization, like a key, but he also had a vague sense of control. It was, in a lot of ways, in the same direction as his power. A sense outside his body but still understandable, though in this case it was an awareness of the raptor’s location, condition, and general demeanor.

  “So what are you going to name her?” Sarah asked, walking over with Astoria in tow.

  “Shay,” Isaac said after a moment, taking inspiration from Sarah’s own name and using a comic reference. Admittedly, Adventures in the Hollow Earth was a bit bloodier than Blazar Comet’s issues, but everyone liked animal sidekicks. “We’re probably stealing someone’s reserved mounts, but oh well.” He didn’t really feel that bad. If anything, part of him was uncomfortable leaving the rest of the animals in stasis, but under the circumstances it was probably better to let someone with actual expertise and supplies retrieve the rest.

  “I am certain that people will understand, under the circumstances,” Lia said, and Savage just shrugged, which looked odd on his frame.

  “Let’s grab whatever we can find lying around and go,” the cyber-raptor said, clearly eager to be away from the livestock holding pens. The place clearly stirred some unpleasant memories, and Isaac hardly blamed him for wanting to go.

  “On it,” he said, running his fingers along the smooth scales of Shay’s muzzle, getting a vague nudge from the wristband that sent him to scratch at the base of her jaw. She made a happy clicking noise, and he surveyed the room because if dinosaur dealerships were anything like cars, the stock was sold with only so much in the tank. Lia was the one who found the proper button, however, a rushing noise heralding water flooding a trough, and a whirr dispensed what Issac could only think of as dino kibble next to it. He directed Shay over to the fill-up, realizing only then that the distant sounds of the crystalline entity had ceased. No vibrations, no shrieking.

  He hoped that meant that someone had taken the thing down before it wrecked the entire city. It was absolutely selfish, but mostly he was worried about his tinkered costume station, whether it was still intact and nobody had made off with it. Of all his possessions, that was the one that really mattered to him, and it was tempting to try and go back rather than forward. But taking Gratin at his word, that would only end badly.

  Besides, their goal was not to traverse the entirety of the Deep Kingdoms, just to make it to a city or settlement where they could beg for aid. And the sooner they got going, the sooner they’d be able to return to the surface and get people apprised of the situation underneath. Maybe one day there’d be communications between Star City and the Deep Kingdoms beyond physical couriers, but there was barely a connection between the Five City Alliance and other countries. The only long-distance communications were from special tinker-made or magical artifacts that weren’t subject to the vagaries of environment or other supers.

  The sound of the water cycling pulled Isaac from his thoughts, and he joined the others in taking their own drinks from the trough. Isaac scooped some up with his cupped hands and splashed some over his face in attempt to refresh himself before turning to go. A mental nudge to Shay kept her at his side as he led them all back to the hot and humid outside.

  “Alright, Shay, let’s see about riding,” he said aloud, eyeing the built-in saddle atop of the raptor, embedded into the crystaltech barding. It didn’t look all that comfortable, since it was made of blue crystal, but he didn’t have much of a choice. His raptor crouched down slightly, the floating wing-panels reconfiguring into steps, and Isaac raised his brows before simply walking up and settling into the saddle. “Thank you, Shay.”

  The pulse of acknowledgement sent back through the crystaltech wristband – probably psionic, if the stories were true – was disconcerting, but not as much as it should have been. At least, not as much as he expected it to be, though maybe that was just because he was marveling at actually riding a big, crystaltech-augmented dinosaur. No red-blooded man ever truly gave up on the childhood fantasies about dinosaurs, especially not with the Deep Kingdom around.

  Shay rose to her full height, and Isaac had a moment of disorientation as the raptor swayed slightly, in a manner very unlike a car. Maybe more like a motorcycle, though the closest he’d personally been was riding his miricycle. Sarah and Lia followed suit, while Savage merely stretched his legs, augmented claws scratching at the stone of the compound’s floor.

  “On you, Savage,” Isaac suggested, letting the cyber-raptor take the lead. He was, after all, far smaller than the riding raptors, but with the cybernetic augmentation he might well be faster. And unlike the rest of them, he’d already been walking for hours.

  “Hmph,” Savage said, flexing his claws as he turned this way and that, then started running across the tiles. Isaac nudged Shay to follow; there were no reigns, but scanning the saddle with Lia’s translation spell implied there were ways to add armrests or otherwise reshape some of the sapphire barding, but he couldn’t figure out what to push to make anything happen. Even without it, Shay’s pace was smooth enough that it didn’t feel too precarious, and soon enough they were off bounding through the jungle.

  It was actually exhilarating, far more enjoyable than the trudging drudgery of before, as the riding raptors could bounce off tree roots and veer around ferns – or crash through them – as if they’d been born to do it. Which they probably had been. For a little bit, Isaac just enjoyed the ride, and through the wristband link he could tell Shay was enjoying the run. At the same time, he was displaced, disgruntled, unable to focus on the thing that he had been hoping for — time to work on his power. Not to mention at least some time without having to deal with either Star Central or some maniac wielding Mechaniacal’s lost technologies.

  “We’re being watched,” Lia said abruptly, a couple hours after leaving the compound. She had been scrying for roads, which they had yet to run in to, with the side effect of also steering them around some of the larger predators that wouldn’t care about Sarah’s smokescreen. They’d heard the roars in the distance, deep and bone-shaking.

  “By whom?” Isaac asked, bringing Shay to a halt next to Astoria as he and Sarah looked around. Savage came to a halt, fins on the back of his cyber-armor making the air ripple as they visibly shed heat. In answer, Lia pointed upward, past the canopy of the trees, where small silver spheres glinted against the backdrop of the green, upward-curving horizon of the Deep Kingdoms.

  Mechaniacal’s drones.

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