Karl rumbled, but softly, terrified the Strangers might hear him. The sound made the unbroken window panes shiver in their frame.

"How many times do I have to say this?" he said. "We really, really, really should get out of here right now. Right right now!"

Brand nudged the boy's snout away with a kindly nudge of his hand. Karl tried to nudge him back, but Brand pulled the hind part of his body forward and swished his tail side to side.

"I know you might not know this, Karl," Brand said, "but science requires observation," Brand. "Observation. Hypothesis. Experiment. Publish. Scrounge around for more funds. That's the scientific method."

"But, the Strangers—"

"—Are right there, and waiting to be observed," Brand retorted. "The less we know about them, the bigger the advantage they have over us."

"But they're dangerous!" Karl hissed. "You said so, yourself!" The young wyrm was repeatedly flicking his tail against the wall of the hallway in a nervous tick.

"You know what else is dangerous?" Brand said. "Ignorance."

"I'm… I'm just going to go hide," Karl said, fretfully. He turned away and slithered through a broken-down doorway to a patient's room where he'd gathered some overturned beds and sofas. Karl coiled among them, hiding his head beneath a bed leaning against the wall at about a 50° angle.

Brand rolled one of his eyes in that direction.

No, 50.372°. Margin of error: ± .008.

Brand liked to keep track of his surroundings.

With the distraction gone, Brand returned to his observations in earnest. He lowered himself to the floor as best as he could manage and wound himself in a tight squiggle, keeping his spines folded against his back to minimize the probability that the Strangers might detect him. The tip of his snout was sticking out through one of the Pediatrics building's broken windows, like a dog playing spy; he didn't want to risk exposing himself any further.

Damn, he thought. That simile made him think of Scruffles.

Fuck…

He really missed his dog.

One of the bed-walls of Karl's hiding place fell to the floor with a jarring thud that made Brand clench his claws and freeze stiff.

Thankfully, by a minor non-theistic miracle, nothing bad happened.

The Strangers hadn't noticed him yet.

"Oy," Mistelann said, "this stress will be the death of me." The dead mycologist's spirit stood at Brand's side.

Brand stuck his snout ever so slightly forward. He's scared, Mistelann, he thought-said.

"And you are not, Nowston Brand?"

I'm allowed to be scared and excited at the same time, Mistelann, Brand replied. There's no rule against that.

Finally, the figures emerged from the corner of the street down below.

"Holy shit…" Mistelann muttered.

Brand pulled his head back, glanced down the hallway and whispered. "We have company."

"You've said that before!" Yuth hissed, from her room off to the side.

"Well, this time I've got eye-contact. Eyes-contact, to be precise."

Dr. Nowston stuck his snout back out through the window.

The Strangers stepped into the Garden Court. Massive spore clouds drifted past the sun, painting the scene in an eerie green glow, pockmarked by the shadows of ships and wyrms.

Within a cozy mind-world, Brand gave himself a bottomless bucket of chocolate-drizzled caramel corn to munch on. His life was now, officially, the greatest science fiction movie in history. He was having the time of his life, minus the god-is-dead and end-of-the-world bits.

He turned his attention to the Strangers, crossing his mental fingers as he hoped that wyrms held scientific conferences.

There were a total of nine Strangers. They moved in a vaguely arrow-like formation. Brand hypothesized that the individual at the center of the formation was the group's leader, perhaps some kind of shaman-figure or military commander. Fascinatingly, the individuals standing to either side of the leader appeared to be entirely mechanical. These machine-soldiers had the strong, digitigrade legs—not unlike some of the larger, predatory genera of Benundi theropods—with a blocky cockpit mounted on top. The cockpits had prominent windshields, whose dark, graceful curves obscured any trace of a driver or pilot. Each walker had two short wings jutting from its side, impressively arrayed with munitions. Through his third pair of eyes, Brand watched energy ribbons and lacework swirl around the weapons' heads and barrels. Every few seconds, they fluttered and flared, threatening to explode with their barely contained power.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Other than the two walker-mechs, the other seven Strangers appeared to be organic life-forms, with the exception of their leader, who appeared to be some kind of hybrid of flesh and machine. The mechanical portions of the leader's body made up the lower half of their large, bulky, centauroid form. The seven of them—leader included—wore a highly advanced form of personnel armor, like something Karl and his friends might have worn if they'd come from a thousand years in the future instead of centuries in the past. The armor had interlocking plates reminiscent of an alligator's osteoderms, the gaps between which were spanned by a strong, flexible material that allowed for easy, unrestricted movement. Unlike the helmets worn in the Trenton military, the Strangers' helmets bore no trace of a visor or viewing port, just silver and facelessness.

But, most startlingly of all—

"—Nowston Brand," Mistelann whispered, "these are not of one species."

That's what I was about to monologue, Brand thought-said.

By his estimate, there had to be at least three different phyla of organisms on display, assuming the Strangers' biological discrepancies could be measured in phyla.

What if they came from different worlds?

Several of them appeared to have humanoid body plans, or near enough. Still, that didn't rule out the possibility that the armor was responsible for the apparent similarities. For all Brand knew, beneath the armor, these life-forms could be utterly different from another; one, a fuzzy humanoid, the other, a lichen-like organism, or perhaps something colonial—a super organism, like a colony of bees, or a siphonophore.

Oooh, how would a sapient colonial organism's neurophysiology function?

Brand made a note to ask me about it later.

The cenaturoid in the middle wasn't the only Stranger to have six limbs. Far from it. The shortest, most diminutive of the humanoids had a pair of armor-sheathed wings folded against its back.

Wait, was that a hummingbird?

Brand made a note to ask me about that later.

Another one of the Strangers was supported by four, stilt-like, digitigrade legs, with two, slender, long-fingered arms hanging from either side of its surprisingly human-like torso. It even had shoulders!

Brand wondered if the number nine had any particular cultural or religious significance, or if it was just a coincidence.

He wished he had enough of a data-set to start making conclusions. He just didn't have enough to run a sensible Chi-square test yet, much to his frustration.

How did they communicate? Did they speak a single language?

No, that was highly improbable.

Even if they were raised to speak a single language, physiological differences would make it difficult, if not impossible, for all of them to speak that language, unless they had improbably similar vocal organs and auditory ranges, and that was assuming they even had vocal organs or auditory ranges.

Furniture jostling on some nearby vinyl. The sound made Brand flinch.

He glanced over to Karl's room, and then sighed.

Karl had slithered up to an unbroken window on the far side of his bed-fort.

"What are they doing, Dr. Nowston?"

Brand had barely turned his snout back to the window when the squad of Strangers dispersed. The centaur and the two mech-walkers took point on the old stone of Garden Court Drive while the six other troopers disappeared into the surrounding buildings: three into Central Wing, and the other three into the buildings off Merchant Boulevard.

This was bad.

Brand heard screams—human screams—and sounds of laser-fire.

This was definitely bad.

"What's going on?" Bethany asked, barely above a whisper.

Brand stuck his head out through the window as far as he dared, but it wasn't enough to bring any of the six troopers into view. "I don't know."

He turned back to face the hallway. Wyrms had stuck their heads out of their hiding places: rooms, secondary hallways, half-eaten vending machines

"Well, it's your fault we're in this mess," Bethany said. "I agree with Karl, we should have left!"

"Nowhere is safe!" Charles said. "Nowhere!"

Both of those statements were true.

Karl had been the one to first spot the Strangers' ships flying toward WeElMed. It had happened just minutes after Larry and Dr. Rathpalla had slunk off to go rescue Dr. Derric from Ms. Kathaldri's clutches. From there, it had been a mad scramble to get everyone safely out of sight before the Strangers' arrival.

Not everyone thought that hiding was the best policy, but Brand did his best to make his case to them, both because he genuinely believed it was their best option, and because hiding came with the extra benefit of giving Brand (and anyone else who cared to investigate) the opportunity to study the Strangers up close, or at least as up close as they could safely get.

Really, it was the best option in a bad situation. With those flower-ships patrolling the skies like flying tanks, there was no chance in hell the wyrms could fly to safety. Trying to slink their way down the streets was a mixed bag, with equal probabilities of successful escape and being caught by the Strangers, especially if the Strangers possessed some as-of-yet unknown means of detecting wyrms, in which case, it would be better to confront the enemy on WeElMed's familiar, and far more defensible turf than to risk getting pinned down and cornered, with no way out.

"Did any of them come in here?" Charles asked. "I really, really hope none of them came in here, because fuck, I am not ready to fight them. Not at all. I'm still fighting my own demons. A man doesn't have a mental break and think he's a living chibi mascot because everything's all hunky-dory in his life, now does he?"

For some reason, despite having been turned into a wyrm, Mr. Twist still kept his effete north-Trenton accent.

"You had no problem fighting Letty, or the crazy wyrms!" Bethany said.

"That's not the same! They're not comparable in the least!" Charles said. "Why, if you—"

—There was a cluster of awful shrieks.

All the wyrms fell dead silent. Several of them braved the hallways, slithering out and lifting their foreparts just high enough off the ground to look out the windows, broken or not.

"Oh no…" Brand muttered.

Some fungal fliers had caught wind of the Strangers. A flock of them flew over the smoldering ruins of the Internal Medicine Building and descended toward the mech-walkers and the centaur, tendrils and membranous wings whipping at the air.

One of the walkers stepped back while the other trundled ahead. Meanwhile, the centaur set off in a gallop like a silver lion, maned in plexuses.

The mechs raised their wing-arms and fired their guns. Some of the fliers dodged the white, blazing bolts, but a few got hit in the wings. The lasers punched through their wings like the membranes were tissue paper. Stray bolts left molten cigarette burns on buildings' walls.

The injured flyers swerved toward the mechs even as they barreled toward the ground.

Despite their firepower, the mechs' awkward movements made them easy targets.

Brand wanted to scream and tell them to run. But he didn't, nor was there any need to.

The mechs' wings unfolded into arms with a slick, hydraulic whirr. Energy blades extended from the mechs' arms, sparking into being, bright and loud in Brand's eyes. Smoke wafted off their gleaming, angular tips.

No, not smoke, Brand realized. Condensation. His second and third pairs of eyes told him that the "smoke" was air at a frigid temperature. Sound slowed as it passed through the cold front, like light through a crystal.

It was water vapor condensing.

But that meant—

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