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“Look at him. This is an emergency.” Holiday strips her datapad and tosses it to me. A call is going through to another device. Blinking blue on the display, waiting for the other side to answer. As I turn it in my hand, a hologram of a spiked sunburst helmet suddenly blossoms into the air, small as my clenched fist. Red eyes glow out balefully from the helmet.

“Fitchner?”

“Guess again, shithead,” the voice warbles.

It can’t be.

“Sevro?” I almost whimper the word.

“Oy, boyo, you look like you slithered out of a skeleton’s rickety cooch.”

“You’re alive…,” I say as the holographic helmet slithers away to reveal my hatchet-faced friend. He smiles with those hacksaw teeth. Image flickering.

“Ain’t no Pixie in the worlds that can kill me.”

He cackles. “Now it’s time you come home, Reap. But I can’t come to you. You gotta come to me. You register?”

“How?” I wipe the tears from my eyes.

“Trust my Sons. Can you do that?”

I look at the brother and sister and nod. “The Jackal…he has my family.”

“That cannibalistic bitch ain’t got shit. I got your family. Grabbed them from Lykos after you got snagged. Your mother’s waiting to see you.” I start crying again. The relief too much to bear.

“But you gotta sack up, boyo. And you gotta move.” He looks sideways at someone. “Gimme back to Holiday.” I do. “Make it clean if you can. Escalate if you can’t. Register?”

“Register.”

“Break the chains.”

“Break the chains,” the Grays echo as his image flickers out.

“Look past our Color,” Holiday says to me. She reaches a tattooed hand down. I stare at the Gray Sigils etched into her flesh, then look up to search her freckled, bluff face. One of her eyes is bionic, and does not blink like the other. Eo’s words sound so different from her mouth. Yet I think it’s the moment my soul comes back to me. Not my mind. I still feel the cracks in it. The slithering, doubting darkness. But my hope. I clutch her smaller hand desperately.

“Break the chains,” I echo hoarsely. “You’ll have to carry me.” I look at my worthless legs. “Can’t stand.”

“That’s why we brought you a little cocktail.” Holiday pulls up a syringe.

“What is it?” I ask.

Trigg just laughs. “Your oil change. Seriously, friend, you really don’t want to know.” He grins. “Shit will animate a corpse.”

“Give it to me,” I say, holding out my wrist.

“It’s gonna hurt,” Trigg warns.

“He’s a big boy.” Holiday comes closer.

“Sir…” Trigg hands me one of his gloves. “Between your teeth.”

A little less confident, I bite down on the salt-stained leather and nod to Holiday. She lunges past my wrist to jam the syringe straight into my heart. Metal punctures meat as the payload releases.

“Holy shit!” I try to scream, but it comes out as a gurgle. Fire cavorts through my veins, my heart a piston. I look down, expecting to see it galloping out of my bloodydamn chest. I feel every muscle. Every cell of my body exploding, pulsing with kinetic energy. I dry-heave. I fall, clawing at my chest. Panting. Spitting bile. Punching the floor. The Grays scramble back from my twisting body. I strike out at the chair, half ripping it from its bolted place in the floor. I let out a stream of curses that’d make Sevro blush. Then I tremble and look up at them. “What…was…that?”

Holiday tries not to laugh. “Mamma calls it snakebite. Only gonna last thirty minutes with your metabolism.”

“Your mamma made that?”

Trigg shrugs. “We’re from Earth.”







They escort me like a prisoner through the halls. Hood on my head. Hands behind my back in unlocked manacles. Brother on my left, sister on my right, both supporting me. The snakebite lets me walk, but not well. My body, jacked with drugs as it is, still feels slack as wet clothes. I can barely feel my busted toe or feeble legs. My thin prisoner’s shoes scrape the floor. My head swims, but there’s a hyper speed to my brain now. It’s focused mania. I chew my tongue to keep from whispering, and to remind myself that I am not in the darkness like before. My body is shuffling down a concrete hall. It is walking toward freedom. Toward my family, toward Sevro.

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