A single bead of blood grew on the Radio's cloth speaker. "Owen had a sudden feeling that Sean was ready with his power source."

"Don't do that anymore, okay? Don't hurt yourself just for a news update."

"I'm sorry, Owen."

"Yeah, you know better. Ezra, are you good to go?"

He nodded. "It'll be a lot to get running, but…we found a way to network and increase my capacity, right? The Mean Machine Array now has–"

"I know what you've been doing, Ezra. Elanor, help him out with being quiet."

The tall girl hauled Ezra close, dipped him like they were dancing, smothered his grinning face with kisses.

"I'm part of the grid myself," Elanor said proudly. "We both came up with the layout. It's strong on the Y, but even stronger on the W axis–"

"All right, everyone's smarter than me, I get it. Where do I stand?"

"On the ground," they said in chorus. "Otherwise everything goes kablooie," Ezra added.

"Very true. Taylor, are you ready?"

He nodded silently in his armor. He stood, picked up a cloth sack, held it over his shoulder like Santa Claus. He looked at Elanor and Ezra.

Something passed in the air. Tension lessened. I don't know if their souls were connecting or if they'd all just gotten tired of hating, but Elanor said: "Good luck."

"Thank you," Taylor said in there. "Good luck."

Friday fussed around Taylor. "Remember that the guns may still be a factor. They have other things, nonlethal measures but I don't know if it'll work on you–"

"He will suffer," Gary said grimly. "But not die."

"Noted," Friday said to Gary. "Taylor, remember the chart. She won't be in the most heavily guarded part of the base, that'll be where the big five are. I'm hoping you'll just be able to go in and out, up and gone…" He went on and on. I'd never seen Friday nervous.

The markings on my skin were rearranging, drifting and reforming. Runes. Not of protection, not exactly. Certainly not of Stealth or Amplitude. Very simple ones forming a potent ward: No Explosive Devices Relying on Destructive Intent. The effort made me sweat.

And another set of Runes on my back: Agricultural Accelerant. That one made me nearly pass out. I had to take a seat and watch the bustle around me.

Mandy, the Undine, goddess of the sea, was preparing. She was petting Husband Schmendrick, reassuring him that everything would be okay. I came over and scooped him into my arms. Mandy and I surrounded him, hugging him and pretending to bite his big triangular ears. Eventually he demanded to be put down, so that seemed to be enough.

"Good?" I asked Mandy.

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"Good," She said. "Kiss."

We kissed. She left. Time for me to go. Or stay, depending how you looked at it.

Ezra and Elanor did something to the Mean Machine Array. It began humming.

Gary sprayed me with awful stuff. Viruses, spores, tiny seeds. I was a walking biohazard, but only on this side of the Slice. He gave me a belt, one loaded with little pouches of toxicity.

Taylor got the same treatment. Both of us were going in simultaneously, but landing in slightly different locations. He was armored, I wore board shorts.

My Human readers might understand this next sentiment: I said nothing. I didn't micromanage. I trusted my Fools to not turn us inside out or land me in the middle of a busy freeway or horribly combine my body with that of Taylor.

I would greatly appreciate it if someone acknowledged my restraint here. Because it definitely occurred to me to start requesting reassurances.

The machinery groaned, roared. Ezra and Elanor looked like lunatic gremlins with their wires and alien devices. They froze, put their foreheads together. Their machines screamed. Cute couple, no doubt about it. I wondered if they were killing me.

Gary was making some kind of Gardener gesture with his hands. I'll assume it was a hateful farewell, and that was fine. But it's not what grabbed my attention.

Perched in one of his shrubs, watching with interest, was a bird. Shiny black feathers, eyes and beak the color of pearls. The skin of its legs and talons was pale, gleaming with iridescent rainbows.

It was like a crow, but bigger. A strange crest of white feathers on its skull. Feathers? Maybe not, possibly a bony structure like an antenna. Another bird appeared beside it, flickering into existence like someone had simply adjusted its opacity the way you do in Photoshop. Another, and another.

The Mean Machine Array got even louder. And as more of the birds appeared, louder, pitched higher. It was terrifying.

More of the birds popping into visibility. And more. And more.

"Radio, make them feel welcome."

The Radio began squawking and croaking. Then in English: "The Feast of Fools gratefully welcomes the return of the Ari Maspai. Food is available, should you still have corporeal bodies."

The Feast descended, we could all feel it. Heading for the Contact Point. Art Deco produced two metal discs, thin and about the size of manhole covers. One for me, one for Taylor. I thanked Art, patted his metal shell.

The Dome spat us out with an improvised ramp, leading to a tiny sandbar in a part of the Shallow Sea I'd never visited. Nothing was around us, no islands, no clouds. Utterly deserted for a long, long way.

Overhead was the Feast of Fools. My Observatory, my friends in there. My cute, heroic girl with whom I was desperately in luh.

A new addition: black birds were circling it. Clouds of them, tornadoes of them, more flickering into being all the time. If they called or squawked or quorked like the crows I knew, I couldn't hear it. The Ari Maspai. Perhaps they'd been enticed by the Radio's offer of food.

I placed Art's metal disc on the sand. I had to go first. "How you feeling about this, Taylor?"

"I don't know. If it doesn't work … I don't know." His helmeted face looked up at the Ari Maspai, the hovering Feast. "I get tired of the weird shit. Would it kill you to get into football?"

"Very much. What's the big deal? We're dealing with one hundred ninety-seven million square miles here, using tech stolen from dead civilizations and hacked by psychotic teenagers, powered by the goodwill of bird ghosts."

He snorted. "I just wanna break things. Look," he said. "There it goes."

I'd placed the disc on sand. It was now on concrete, bare and pitted and clearly Human-made. The foundational material I'd grown up with: sidewalks, playgrounds, prison yards. Concrete was Human civilization in a nutshell, really.

It was spreading, covering over the sandbar. It was a perfectly flat surface, and sprouted up into walls, rounded walls that grew. I waved to Taylor in his helmet, still out there on the sandbar, unaffected by this.

I was enclosed in a ceiling. The sun was gone.

A concrete room. A humming fluorescent light overhead, two long bars of bare bulb. The room was dark. I smelled disinfectant.

A single door with an institution-friendly handle, OSHA compliant.

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