The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere

Inner Sanctum First Floor | 11:00 AM | Third Day

After this, things moved quickly. Yantho, who had previously been relatively relaxed, jerked up sharply, his eyes scanning the entrances.

"Sure sounded like it," Seth spoke, alarm in his tone. "From the entrance hall?"

"Possibly, or one of the chambers peripheral to it," Linos said, nodding with anxiety. "The lounge, the old printing room--"

"Should we go check it out?" Ptolema interjected, looking flushed.

But that was the question, wasn't it?

"We can't," Kamrusepa said, rising from her chair. "If we leave - or split up our group, for that matter - we're giving the culprit precisely what they want."

"Miiiight not be the culprit," Fang said, holding up a finger. "They don't have masks, remember? We left those notes, but the golems might've found them anyway."

"Even so, they could be watching," she replied firmly. "We can't take the risk!"

"We can't just do fucking nothing, Kam!" Seth exclaimed. "She could be getting her face ripped off right now!"

"Be rational!" She retorted, pointing at him. "Perhaps you've become comfortable over the course of the past two hours, but need I remind you that the last time we left the briefest window for them to act, they took one of our classmate's life. I'm frightened for Lilith and her mother, but we need to act prudently for _everyone's_ sake!"

"So we sit around and let the same thing happen again?!" Seth replied, raising his voice further still. "Is that prudence?"

"What's going on out here?" Zeno asked as she stepped out from the hall, her expression irritated, but also carrying a subtle note of worry.

"It's Lilith's mother," Linos explained. "We think-- We think we might've heard her cry out."

"Oh." She considered this for a moment, then shrugged. "Well, that's it then. The two of them are probably dead meat already."

"Dead meat?" Seth echoed incredulously. Off to the side, Kamrusepa's expression flattened slightly, as if she was suddenly embarrassed to be associated with this level of inhumane apathy, despite her own feelings.

"Weren't you testing some golem in there with Sacnicte, for scouting around?" I asked. "Couldn't we use that?"

She blinked, seeming surprised by the fact I'd picked something up from their earlier conversation. "We were looking into the possibility, but it's not remotely ready to be deployed right at this moment."

"Oh," I said. And I was feeling kinda proud of myself for coming up with that idea on the spur on the moment, too.

"T-This feels wrong," Ophelia said, fidgeting slightly. "We need to do something..."

"Yeah," Seth said. "Yeah."

'A group is only as strong as its weakest link.' It's one of the most basic concepts you learn about in any sort of social or organizational theory, whether it's about tug-of-war or how people decide where to go to dinner. So long as everyone is working in tandem, then most individuals will defer to the group and set their own intuitions or preferences aside.

But if just one person breaks ranks...

"We don't have time for this," he said suddenly, picking up his pistol. "I'm going."

"On your own?" Kamrusepa said. "Are you insane? You could be killed!"

"Yeah, well, so could Lilith, and she's like 13," he replied, not turning to face her. "Figure I've had a few more years than her. Decent tradeoff."

"I'm going too," Ptolema said, taking up her rifle and following him.

"Me too," Ophelia added. "Even if it's dangerous, we have to do something... I mean, she's just a little girl."

"All of you are being ridiculous," Kamrusepa said, her eyes wide. "You don't even know how to use those things, for goodness' sake!"

But they were clearly beyond persuading, already moving towards the door.

Like I said before. Despite liking to think of myself as a fairly rational person, that's actually pretty far from the truth, and that's doubly true when it comes to split decision-making, where I'm usually driven by a kind of manic sentimentality that results in a mix of selfless and selfish outcomes. In this particular instant, I felt sharply frightened by the idea of a third of our group - and three of the people I'd come to consider my friends - being gone, and not being even able to verify what happened.

I stood up, moving quickly towards the sofa. "R-Ran, she's right. None of them know how to shoot. If they end up fighting something.--"

"Yeah," she said, tense and quiet. "I know."

"Could you go with them?" I asked, my voice shaking a bit with fear as I realized what I was doing. "I mean-- Could we both go?"

"Su!" Kam said, so taken aback she almost sounded hurt.

Ran stared at me for a moment, gritting her teeth, closing her book. "Alright. Safety in numbers, I guess."

I nodded, fishing out the pistol I'd picked up. "Good."

"You guys are coming, too?" Seth said, looking back. "Come on, then-- We gotta hurry."

"I'm rooting for you!" Fang called out at our departure.

We rushed after them, Kamrusepa's mouth practically hanging open as she watched us move.

"A-At least remember to trigger your bloody bracelets should anything happen!" she cried out, just as the door was shot. "Good gods."

She was almost certainly right about this being a terrible decision. It felt like we'd been surprisingly lucky to maneuver ourselves into the position we were in to begin with, where we had an ostensible solution to the dilemma we were in, were largely together, and had as close to absolute safety and numbers as we could get. And now we were flushing it all down the toilet. Certainly, if I were the culprit, the most logical course of undermining that would have been to use Mehit and Lilith's absence to divide us.

In retrospect, we should have reached a decision on how to respond if this had come up in advance. Now that it'd happened, though, there was nothing for it.

We stepped through the western doors out into the main hallway of the first floor, swiftly making our way towards the entryway, where I'd first met Anna two days prior. Our weapons were raised and pointed ahead as we walked, but to be honest, I felt a little ridiculous - more like a child with a realistic toy copying what she'd seen in some drama than someone actually prepared to shoot someone. Zeno's five minutes of 'training', if you could even call it that, had taught me effectively nothing but where the safety was, and I wasn't even confident I'd remember that much if things really went to shit.

I couldn't explain how much I was missing the comfort of a scepter in my hand.

"With this many, we might actually have a shot if somebody jumps us," Seth opined more optimistically, his breath now having grown heavy as the situation set in more deeply. "Ran, you actually know what you're doing with that thing, right?"

"Yeah," she said, then hesitated. "Well, kind of."

He raised a worried eyebrow. "'Kind of'"?

"I took classes for a couple months when I was looking to getting into Xattusa Grand Alliance Military Academy," she explained. "Didn't work out, but I wasn't bad at it."

He hummed agreeably. "Still a hell of a lot more experience than me. Can I trust you to watch our back, then?"

"Yeah," she said, turning accordingly. "Sure."

"I just hope we're not too late..." Ophelia said anxiously. She, as I would've expected for maybe the least violent person I could imagine, was holding her pistol with even less confidence than I was mine, on top of - or perhaps in part as a result of - having taken up the role of lantern-bearer. The halls on this floor were much wider and more traditional-looking, and had I not already been familiar with the layout, it really would have felt like we were lost in some underground ruin.

We quickly made it to the entry hall, the stairwell towering over us on either side, but there was no sign of either Mehit or her daughter, nor anything else to speak of.

"Lilith! Mrs. Eshkalon!" Seth cried out.

"Is anybody out there?!" Ptolema shouted, in the opposite direction.

No response came but an anxious silence.

"Damn," Seth said, clenching his jaw.

"W-Wait," Ophelia said, holding up a hand. "I think I can hear something."

"Hear what?" Ptolema asked, apparently not considering the self-defeating nature of the inquiry.

"Over there, at the right door," Ophelia said, pointing.

We listened. Sure enough, now that I was paying close attention, there was a sound, albeit a quiet one, coming from further to our north. It was a... Scuffing, or maybe a scraping noise, so regular that you could mistake it for a machine if you weren't paying attention. But hearing it closely, there was an organic quality to it as well, something twitchy and labored.

"Let's go," Seth said urgently, without hesitating. He raised his pistol and advanced on the door.

As he thrust it open, the source of the sound became very quickly obvious. Two doors down - at the entrance to the printing room Neferuaten had showed off during the tour - were two of the serpopard's, clawing manically at the wood. Futilely clawing, I should add, since they barely had claws to begin with, producing only weak scrapes and making no progress towards their presumed goal of tearing through. It felt like a grotesque echo of the sort of behavior you'd see from a dog excited at the front door as their owner returned home, their movements unceasing and hyper-focused in a manner that was clearly unnatural. They didn't seem to notice, or were at least apathetic to, our presence.

To their left and going some way to explaining the situation was a fallen Tui She, its logic engine pyramids blown out from what looked like refractor rifle fire. One segment of its body seemed to be missing, with only four sets of legs splayed on the floor.

"What the heck...?" Ptolema said, her brow contorted behind her mask.

"Look," Ran said, pointing downwards.

My eyes followed her finger. I'd missed it a moment ago in the darkness, but now that I was paying attention to the floor, it was clear. A big splotch of blood - one stain, maybe two - marring the area near the doorway. There were other signs of rifle fire, too, along the walls.

"Oh, goodness..." Ophelia said, her tone fraught with concern.

"It looks like they got into a fight with one of the golems, like Fang said," Seth said grimly. "Goddammit. I knew we should have tracked them down first..."

"Wasn't one-sided, at least," Ran said, pointing to the fallen mass of legs and bulky torsos.

"Yeah, I guess Mehit managed to take it out with just Linos's pistol," Seth replied, and snorted. "So much for next generation military technology."

"What are those things doing...?" Ptolema asked, pointing to the serpopards and their sisyphean efforts.

"Trying to get inside, looks like," Seth said.

Ptolema frowned. "I know that,­ you doofus. I mean-- Why are they throwing themselves at it instead of going through a window, or something?"

"They must not know how to act independently without the Tui She broadcasting instructions," I guessed. "It probably ordered them to go after Lilith and Mehit, but then broke down and they locked the door... Zeno said they're only really meant to harry people while the real damage comes from the turrets on the main unit, so they're probably too disposable to process anything complicated."

Pretty sloppy work, by Neferuaten's standards, I thought. She probably realized how pointless the whole idea was.

"You mean, Lilith and Mehit should be in there?" she asked.

"I mean... Presumably," I said.

Though really it was more like 'hopefully'. That was just the most obvious scenario that had leapt into my head, and it was just as eminently possible they'd been split up outright in the crisis and we'd find one of their corpses waiting for us further down the hall.

"We need to get inside," Seth said, "and I'm guessing there's no way we could turn them off by screwing with that things chassis."

"Maybe with a logic engine expert," I said.

"Heh, that's ironic," Seth said, smirking weakly before hesitating. "Is that irony? Since we're looking for Lilith?"

"I think the word you're looking for is just 'frustrating'," Ran said flatly.

"Probably," he said, his forced smile quickly fading. "So, Ophelia. You're pretty big on animal Biomancy. What are your thoughts?"

She frowned. "...there's probably no way to get them to stop without having access to the Power, or proper tools," she said sadly. "They're probably commanded by olfactory or high-pitched auditory signals. If it's the former, we could perhaps dig through the body of the bigger golem and try to find where the chemicals to produce the right smells were stored, but... Even then, without knowing their scripting..."

"Gotcha. Sounds like a bust." He sighed. "Thinking in more direct terms, then. What's your call on if those things will go after us if we shoot at them, so long as we're still wearing these masks?"

She winced a little bit - violence against animals, even artificial ones like these, wasn't something Ophelia was fond of - then considered it for a few moments with a sad expression, raising a finger to the underside of her chin. "I suppose it would depend on a few things... The most common way to design creatures like these is to have a very simple biological logic engines as the basis for executive function, but still retain a diminished version of the ordinary brain and brainstem for physical function and reflexes. With, um, that in mind... It's possible, lacking new commands, that their more fundamental instincts might take over if we make ourselves an explicit threat..."

He nodded slowly, his eyes narrowing. "In that case, do you think we could take them out with our first round of shots? Before they could go after us?"

"I'm not sure," she said, frowning.

"I saw a lot of the golems Neferuaten worked on the years when I studied under her," I said, cutting in. "She was specialized in making things that are-- Well, really hard to kill, above everything. Even without using Thanatomancy, I can't imagine that'd change."

He clicked his tongue. "Not great..."

"You're overthinking this," Ran said, peering ahead. "They're not big, and not armored. If we set the lenses to make our shots wide and aim for the torso, it won't matter how many redundant organs or muscles they have. And we can walk right up to them, so we won't have to worry about missing."

"Right, of course we can." He rubbed his brow under his mask for a moment, closing his eyes. "Stress must be getting to me if I didn't think of that."

Warily, we stepped closer towards the doorway, passing by one of the logic engines embedded in the walls. The serpopards showed no response. Up close, their hairless, grey bodies seemed even more bizarre when engaged in this sort of frantic movement, like my brain couldn't quite decide whether to interpret what it was seeing as an animal or not.

"Why the torso?" Ptolema asked. "Their necks are just like snakes. Couldn't we just clip their heads off, or something?"

"The, um, brains... They're probably not in the heads, I don't think," Ophelia said, tilting her own head to the side. "That's considered poor design for creatures which will get in close-quarters combat. In this case, since there aren't any eyes, they're probably just there as part of the... Combat application."

"Oh," she replied. "Creepy."

Seth cautiously knocked on the door, stepping around the creatures. "Mehit? Lilith? You in there?"

No reply came. He pressed his ear up to the door.

His eyes widened. "I think I hear somebody breathing in there," he said. "Heavy breathing."

"Crap," Ptolema said.

"We need to hurry," he said, taking a few steps back. "Ran, can you tell us what to do?"

She nodded. "Raise these two lenses, then lower these two here," she said, glancing to the sides to make sure we were following along. "That should lead to the broadest scope, highest impact shot you can get without starting a fire. If we spread out our targets a bit, that should be enough to cook these things' innards in one go."

"How close can we get?" Ptolema asked.

"Don't fire any closer than four feet. For something like this, that'd risk overheating the barrel." She glanced at her. "You can hit it from four feet. It's nothing."

Ptolema didn't look quite so confident, but nodded.

"Ptolema, you have a rifle and some extra power to your shots, so you and Su can take the one on the right. The rest of us," she glanced briefly at Ophelia, "will take the one on the left."

There was a lot I - though probably not anyone else - was able to infer from that brief glance. Ran was worried that Ophelia would hesitate and not pull the trigger, so she was put on the side where she'd be redundant. It was a sensible decision, even if I wasn't exactly thrilled at being paired with Ptolema.

We spent a few more moments fussing over what parts of the beasts we were each supposed to be targeting, and then we were ready to go, our rifles raised.

"Alright. I'm going to count down from five," Ran said. "And remember to shut your eyes for a second when it happens. It's gonna be pretty overwhelming."

"Should we fire on one, or...?" Ptolema asked.

"No," Ran said flatly. "Fire when I say 'fire'."

"Oh," she replied. "Okay."

My heart was racing. In spite of how apparently simple the task felt, I was still afraid of somehow screwing it up.

"Alright," Ran said, taking a deep breath. "Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Fire!"

I shut my eyes and pulled the trigger, hearing the sound of the refractor beams firing and penetrating flesh, and feeling the burst of heat and very subtle recoil from my own. When I opened them...

I saw that the serpopard on the left was keeling over dead, its entire midsection looking scorched and in two clear spots outright penetrated from the rear. Ours on the right, however, only appeared to be scorched at the rear, its upper body intact. More notably, it was still moving.

I looked, for just a moment, to Ptolema. She was wearing a confused expression.

Oh gods, I thought incredulously. ­Did she really find a way to screw it up?

After this, things happened so quickly that I was only really able to make sense of the progression of events in retrospect. The thing finished turning and, despite its hind legs being half-ruined by my shot, threw itself at me with the power of its front ones alone at startling speed, the jaws of its poisoned serpentine mouth opening wide.

At this, I felt a spike of absolute fear, and I truly believed for a moment that my death was certain. However, some animal part of my brain seized control of my body, and before I knew it - in what must've been a ten-to-one shot at least - I'd grabbed hold of the golem's spindly neck with both hands, letting the pistol fall straight to the floor.

However, doing this did nothing to stop the momentum of the body itself. So, still by instinct, I pivoted my whole body at an angle, swinging the monstrosity around like I was arcing a whip. But because I wasn't close enough to the wall, instead of coming to a stop, I just kept going until I'd made a whole 360 spin, like I was in a hammer throw competition.

"AAAAAHHHHH!" I screamed in terror.

"Su!" Ran cried out, alarmed.

"Oh, fuck!" Seth exclaimed.

I eventually ran out of the initial momentum and slowed down, but the thing was still moving, its legs scraping and scaly body writhing underneath my fingers. I could feel it trying to crane its neck around so it could bite my wrist, and ended up whipping it in whatever direction was opposed to that action, its head flying back and forth as I threw its body in varying directions.

After maybe four or five seconds had passed, I finally (and mostly accidentally) worked my way towards the wall, slamming the thing's torso against the stone in a decisive motion with a satisfying, fleshy thunk. But though the creature was strangely light, it was apparently far from fragile, and this didn't seem to have any effect whatsoever, its manic movements still continuing as the others looked on in horror, unable to get a clear shot.

"HELP!" I pleaded, as I repeated the action, smashing it against the edifice repeatedly with no clear effect.

"Whadda we do?!" Ptolema asked with childlike desperation, fingertips in her mouth as she stared with petrified concern.

No one seemed to know. I even caught a glimpse of Ran looking frightened herself, her eyes wide.

Suddenly, with a decisive look in her eyes, Ophelia stepped forward. As the serpopard impacted the wall for the fourth time she - with, despite it being a simple motion at its core, surprising calm and directness - grasped hold of it by the midsection with arm. Then, with a troubled but firm expression, she withdrew a syringe, popped the seal off quickly, and injected the golem in its back.

It thrashed for a few more moments, then went limp. I let go, my arm shaking and soaked in sweat.

"There, an anesthetic," she said, her tone troubled but resolute. "Now someone else can... Finish things."

A moment passed as everyone stared at her and absorbed what had just happened. Then, with the rigid sort of movements that come when recovering from panic, Seth stepped forward and quickly shot it twice in the unharmed part of its body.

I breathed heavily, almost falling to my knees, overcome with the adrenaline. I realized, slowly, that the area around me - the wall, the floor, parts of my own clothing - were now covered in small chunks of charred animal tissue and a few streaks of blood from the wound I'd managed to inflict. It wasn't great, and neither was the smell it had left in its wake.

After a few moments, I managed to look back up.

"What the hell, Ptolema?" I asked, with more anger than I'd normally have in me. "Why didn't you shoot?"

"I-I did!" She protested. "The stupid thing didn't do anything!"

Ran stepped over to her, taking a look at the rifle. Her eyes narrowed. "Fuck," she said, after a moment. "These lenses haven't been put on properly. One of the amplifying ones has been swapped with a dampening one. I should have checked..."

So it was no-one's fault. Even though nothing had come of it, that still irritated me, somehow. I wanted to blame and yell at somebody for having to go through all that.

Still, a different part of my mind thought. I've never seen Ophelia like that before, especially when everyone else was practically falling apart. And why is she even carrying around anesthetic syringes?

I looked at her. I couldn't see much, behind her floral mask, but her eyes looked troubled.

"It's okay," Seth said soothingly. "We didn't have time." He swallowed. "We still don't have time. Let's go inside."

I pulled myself back upright, taking hold of my pistol again, and nodded along with everyone else.

Finally, he opened the door to the printing room, and we stepped inside. For a moment, I thought it was empty and this had been a bust - I saw the tall windows looking out into the garden, the tables for assembling the type, and the hulking machine itself, but no human figures. However, I quickly realized that I could hear the breathing Seth was talking about, and followed it along with the others.

There, up against the press's left side and facing the greenhouse, was the collapsed form of Mehit, Linos's pistol laying on the floor nearby. She was unconscious, and had clearly been shot or otherwise severely wounded in the chest, blood pooling around her in all directions. Her complexion was fading, and it looked like she was struggling to breathe.

Lilith was sitting a few feet away from her, drawn inward and holding her own knees. Her wide eyes were staring dead ahead, as if fixated on some non-existent horizon.

"Mehit!" Seth said, rushing forward as he caught sight of her.

"This doesn't look good," Ran said, almost under her breath.

It didn't. There were at least two pints worth of blood on the floor in this scene alone, and the wound was right in the middle of her upper abdomen. Next to the heart, head or throat, it didn't get much worse than that. And without the Power...

Seth started ripping away her clothes to reveal the wound while Ophelia moved to check Lilith. As he did, the nature of the wound was revealed - twin energy weapon wounds, right around the liver and pancreas area, still fresh. One of the two looked relatively manageable, but the other was bleeding at an outstanding rate.

"It's gone through her portal vein," I said, horrified.

"Yeah," Seth said, his tone suddenly distant. "Looks like it." I saw his hand go for his scepter, but then twitch as the realization struck. "Right, uh. Damn. Uh..."

He's panicking. That was how a lot of younger healers reacted when forced into difficult medical situations without access to the Power. There had been tests I'd taken at the Academy, or before that at the House of Resurrection, based around that exact premise. Anyone at that level of education had obviously had some amount of straightforward medical training - advanced first aid at minimum - and were theoretically qualified for a situation like this, but the fact was that, when you got used to treating flesh and blood as something you could swing a stick around and have dance to your bidding, retaining that information felt redundant... Let alone seeking out practical experience. It's one thing to know how the body works and how problems are fixed or at least forestalled, but quite another to perform the physical feats that go in line with that training.

Don't get me wrong; there was a reason I was standing around aimlessly, which was that I was no exception. I'd practically flunked those assignments, and the only reason it hadn't impacted me much was that it wasn't taken particularly seriously at an institutional level, either. There was a kind of elitism surrounding healing in arcane practice that I often saw play out within the academy itself, since it trained both arcanists and exceptionally gifted doctors. That if you'd gone through everything required to use the Power, you were above this stuff. That playing with needles and bandages was for those without the intellect or will to get that far.

Fortunately, we had one person specialized to buck that sort of trend with us right now.

"Get out of the way, idiot," Ptolema said, practically shoving him.

He shifted, still seeming stunned, and she quickly set to work examining the wound, her face getting in very close. She took Ophelia's lantern from where she'd left it resting on the floor.

"Ugh, I knew I should've brought my tools," she said, biting her lip. "On the left, puncture of hepatorenal recess, internal burns, mild hemorrhage to surrounding tissue... On the right, major hemorrage to the portal vein, liver, and cystic duct-- No, it's cut all the way through. Severed cystic duct, still losing bile. Severe internal burning everywhere."

I looked to Ophelia. She was trying to talk to Lilith, but the child didn't seem to be responding, her eyes still fixed in that position. I realized that she had her logic engine in her hand, fingers clenched so tight that her knuckles had paled.

"This is really bad. She's not gonna last long like this," Ptolema said, ripping a segment of Mehit's dress off from the fabric and wrapping hit around her torso. "We gotta get her somewhere where we can use the Power, but first we gotta stop this bleeding. Ran, you can use a refractor pistol to cauterize a wound in a pinch, right?"

"If you're careful. I'll get the right lenses up," she said, stepping forward. "Su, can you watch the door?"

I nodded, and looked towards it, holding my own pistol tightly.

"Gods," Seth said, running his hands over his face. "This sure has turned into something, huh. At least it didn't end up being the killer, after all."

Despite the horror of the situation, I had to agree with him. It could have been a lot worse. We really had found Lilith and Mehit, neither of them were dead - well, not dead yet - and we hadn't been attacked. If we could just get back to the main hall, everything would have gone our way. Maybe this really would turn out to have been the right call...

I smelled the burning flesh behind me as Ptolema continued her work.

"This might be doing more harm than good," she said, sounding tense. "But it is slowing it. As long as we can get her underground, that's what matters." She reached into her pockets, withdrawing a needle and thread. "I'm gonna do a quick stitch of the artery, then we'll move."

"You carry surgical thread around with you, Ema?" Seth asked. Apparently he felt more comfortable directing questions like this towards her than Ophelia.

"No, this is for clothes n' stuff," she said, glaring at him. "I was fixing my tunic earlier. This'd be a really bad idea if things were normal, but if we're gonna have to move her without a stretcher, the artery might tear. Better anything than that."

He nodded, his breathing still heavy.

My eyes went back and forth between the door and Ptolema's work. I had to admit, for all the ways she seemed unqualified among the rest of us, it was fascinating to watch her work with her hands. Except for the tiny movements in her fingers directing the needles in perfect arcs through the impossibly tiny entry wound, her whole body went so still that she might as well have been a statue. It was impressive from a standpoint of sheer physical elegance, like viewing a professional dancer.

"There," she said, after a shockingly short amount of time. "Now we gotta carry her back." She glanced around the chamber. "It's not great, but it's probably our best bet to put her on a chair. If we try to hold her flat, even with four of us, it's too easy to twist her in a direction and for things to go wrong. Seth, can you drag one over?"

"On it," he said, dashing over to the other side of the room.

"You and Ophelia should probably be the ones to carry her, since you're tall," she went on. "You both okay with that?"

"O-Of course," Ophelia said, nodding as Seth returned with the chair and him and Ptolema began very carefully moving Mehit onto it. "Come on, Lili," she said soothingly. "It's time to go..."

But the girl would not go, even as she tugged at her. She stayed stuck to her spot, almost motionless.

"What's wrong with her?" Ptolema asked.

"Maybe she's in shock?" Seth suggested. "Or maybe not. I mean-- It's Lilith."

"We really gotta go," Ptolema said. "Su, could you-- Could you carry her?"

I blinked. "Why me...?" Ran glanced at me oddly.

"Uh, well, you're tall, too," she explained.

That doesn't mean I'm strong! I internally protested, but realized otherwise that this wasn't the time to make a stink about something like this. So, my lips tightening, I stepped towards the child.

Carefully, but really knowing what I was doing, I wrapped my arms around her small body and it up. She didn't protest - or react in any way - but her limbs were rigid, and it was a struggle to force her into a new position. Mercifully, at least, she was surprisingly light even for her size, not doing much to strain what passed for my physical capabilities.

While I'd been doing this, the others had finished preparing, too. Mehit had been hauled upwards at an angle, her arms dangling on either side of the chair as a steady amount of blood still leaked from her chest.

"Let's get back," Seth said urgently.

We left, stepping over the bodies of the golems and retracing our steps. Down through the corridor, and then back through the entrance hall. I found myself running out of breath very quickly, realizing I still hadn't truly recovered from the ordeal with the serpopard. I longed to have something to drink, and smiled at the imminent return to the calm of the past few hours.

We turned the corner, arriving at the hallway leading back to where we'd begun. My eyes wandered in the opposite direction--

...and there, I saw it.

Standing at the far end of the hallway, silhouetted in shadow against the window, was a figure. It looked humanoid, but its proportions were wrong. It was tall, its hairless face looked long and strange, and its long arms were visible under a dark coat that looked like a pair of broad black wings.

It stared at us, the faint glint of our torch reflecting in its eyes.

...at us? No, that's not right.

It stared at me. I felt a horrible spike in my gut, and I knew, somehow, that I was exactly the one it was looking for.

Suddenly, it started to advance.

I pointed my finger, calling out. "S-Something's there!" I said, maybe managing to sound even more frightened than before.

The others jerked their heads in the according direction at once. Seth's eyes went wide.

So I'm not hallucinating. It's real.

"RUN!" Seth shouted.

We ran for the door, all thought to Mehit's condition momentarily abandoned as she thunked up and down in the chair. My lungs burned with the effort as my feet slammed into the stone flooring with a force I didn't think I was capable of.

Within a few seconds, we'd made it, Ptolema in the lead. She threw open the doors, and I all but dived in after Seth and Ophelia, before Ran slammed it firmly behind us.

The light of the multiple lanterns dotting the room felt almost blinding after our excursion, and I almost missed the fact that several people, most notably Kamrusepa, had been pointing guns at us, presumably having been taken by surprise by our rather sudden return.

"You're back! Gods, I almost bloody shot you," she said, looking between us. "What's going on? What happened to Mehit? Who was screaming earlier--"

"We need to barricade the door!" Seth shouted urgently, setting the chair down against the side of a bookcase in a much rougher manner than ideal. "Keep a gun pointed at it!"

Obviously confused, Kamrusepa nevertheless acquiesced, raising her rifle again as Seth grabbed a nearby table and dragged it over, propping it against the door handle. Then he, too, took a step back and pointed his weapon at the door frame, her eyes focused.

And we waited.

And waited.

...and waited.

When a couple minutes had passed us by, and it became clear that nothing was going to happen, he lowered his weapon. "I guess it gave up since we made it back here," he said, somewhere between relieved and troubled. "Figures."

"What are you talking about?" Kam asked, sounding like she was losing patience. "What do you mean, 'it'?"

He took a breath. "We saw--"

And then, as if we hadn't had enough unpleasant surprises in the past minutes, there was one more. A shrill sound, loud enough to make everyone in our whole group jump. We were lucky that nobody accidentally pulled a trigger.

It was a moment before I processed what it was: The logic engine's whistle going off once again from the center of the room.