The mechs lunged forward, swinging their wrist-blades into the oncoming fliers, tearing frost across their bulbous bodies. The creatures' wings froze and cracked. Biting currents struck at the fliers overhead, ensnaring their struggling wings and roping them in.

The monsters' shrieks rippled through the air like fireworks.

The mechs followed up their attacks with more shots from the blasters on their elbows.

Suddenly, in the corner of Brand's vision, a bright light flared like a second dawn. He turned his head just in time to see the centaur gallop at the mechs. An electric moon sparked in the centaur's hands. Keeping its torso erect, the centaur held its arms up, gripping the center of the coruscant crescent.

A bow and arrow? Brand thought.

Screaming a war-cry, the centaur pulled one of its arms back, muscles bulging in chrome, nocking an arrow unlike any other.

The fliers turned toward it, lining up. The downed ones crawled in a frenzy across the pavement, skittering ahead by the tug of their tentacles, or spilling forward like boulders.

They converged on the centaur.

The archer dug his hind legs into the spore-dusted earth. He reared up, front legs kicking. His bow burst into sparks as let his arrow fly.

The mechs darted out of the way in long, low strides, just in time.

The arrow was light and lightning, a glory of morning, bound together in a crack of thunder. It pierced the ravenous fungus, shredding the fliers as it passed through them. They splattered like broken meatballs.

The centaur leaped, dropping onto all fours and galloped around, weaving in between the lumbering mechs.

The walkers raked their frigid blades across the ground, slicing through the writhing debris, mincing them into frosty slivers.

Fuck… Brand thought.

There was no denying these guys were freaking awesome, just like there was no denying that he and the other wyrms were probably screwed.

He made a note to tell me about it in the near future.

Pulling his snout back into the building, Brand lowered himself even closer to the hallway's floor.

Why do we have to be enemies?

The current situation was a perfect microcosm of why Brand disliked fighting. Yes, fighting could be very cool, and gave for some of the best demonstrations of badassery in history. At the same time, it also meant that people who might have otherwise been working together and being even more badass than they could have been working alone would, sadly, be kept apart by stupid things like hate, religion, or territorial disputes.

As cool as fighting could be, getting answers to questions was even cooler. Brand really, really, really wanted to slither down to the courtyard and start asking the Strangers all sorts of questions, and was very angry with them, &alon, and the whole situation he was in for making that infeasible.

He was practically drowning in curiosity.

How did their vessels stay airborne? What manufacturing processes did they use to make that armor of theirs? What materials went into it, and into the chicken-walker mechs? Were the walkers piloted, or were they autonomous combat units? If piloted, what sort of interface did they use? Tactile? Bioelectric? Direct neural interface? A fucking joystick? Were any of them made of silica? If their physiology relied on amino and nucleic acids, did they use the left and right isomers, respectively?

And how did they do that bit with the thunderlight bow?

He could have been spending his time learning the answers to these and many other wonderful questions, but noooooo, people were always shooting at one another.

It made Brand want to punch someone, though he settled for huffing out a short spore spurt. Thankfully, though, just then, several more Strangers filed into the Garden Court, and Brand's curiosity made him lose interest in being angry.

He had to know what they were doing.

As a couple more arrived, Brand realized a second squadron had entered the Garden Court. This one had only one walker mech, and it was pretty beaten up, too. One of its wing-arms was missing, and much of its legs' armor melted—or blasted—away. If he squinted, Brand could zoom in his vision enough to just barely make out the twitching, fuzzy activity at the rim of the damaged sections.

It looked like it was repairing itself.

Hell, they had nanotechnology, too?

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Brand, what is that?" Mistelann said. The spirit floated forward, phasing through the wall, pointing at the wagon-like object the second Stranger squadron had brought with them.

"How is it floating?" Karl muttered, poking his head out the door.

Brand would have replied with the quip, "How do we float?", but he didn't have time for that.

The… hoverwagon, as Brand had just decided he would call it, looked kind of like the back half of a pick-up truck, without the front, or the wheels. Hovering preternaturally, it thrummed with a soft hum that rippled gently ripples to Brand's second-eyes. Some kind of energy field covered the top of the hoverwagon. It shimmered like a backlit pool.

Seeing movement over by the Internal Medicine Building, Brand turned his head. Armored Strangers walked out of WeElMed's buildings, carrying a bewildering farrago of different things in their arms.

"What are they doing?" Yuth muttered, slithering up behind him.

"It looks like they just went to a garage sale!" Charles said.

Brand saw some PortaCons, a couple of paintings, jackets, hats, video games—still in their packaging—Church-approved action-figures, an altarpiece from one of the hospital's chapels, a plastic orchid, and Angel-knows-what else.

They chucked it all into the hoverwagon.

To Brand's shock, the stilt-legged hexapod from the first squad emerged from General Labs carrying a potted plant sealed in some kind of capsule. The shocking part? The plant wasn't infected! It was downtrodden, wilted, and its leaves were discolored, which actually made quite a bit of sense, all things considered.

It must have been locked in a box, or something.

Stilt-legs seemed to be as impressed by the plant as Brand was. The Stranger's legs jittered with excitement as he hurried forward and lifted the capsule for everyone to see.

A couple of the Strangers approached him, while several others stayed behind to guard the hoverwagon. The stragglers kept pointing at the artifacts in the wagon. Some even gesticulated at one another.

"Are they arguing about what they found?" Brand said, in a sporey whisper.

Brand had a suspicion that this was more than just an ordinary disagreement. One of the Strangers went so far as to reach in and pull out a painting, and then shook it while pointing at it with vigor. The painting depicted a group of people relaxing at a park.

The argument got fierce enough that one of the mechs felt compelled to intervene. It stepped forward with a hydraulic crunch and then, slightly lowering itself to the ground, spoke in a loud, crowing language unlike anything Brand had ever heard.

Moments later, a laser beam shot out from one of the holes in GL's front wall, and the Strangers dropped their argument altogether.

Was it some kind of signal?

Whatever it was, the Stranger responsible for it emerged from a gaping hole in the General Labs building's third floor and then clambered down the wall and jogged up to the hoverwagon on the other side of the Garden Court.

From up above, sounds swept across Brand's second pair of eyes.

He looked up and watched a flower ship rise up from between the streets. It released a swarm of mechanical pixies. The faceted, ever-moving things whizzed through the air, rapidly approaching the General Labs building, slowing to a stop several feet in front of it, and then spreading out like a widening net.

They shot out green beams, scouring the building with the sweeping rays. Within seconds, the beams coalesced at the hole where the Stranger had fired the signal.

All the Strangers turned in attention. They moved with military unity, and watched with solemn dignity as whole chunks of the wall of General Labs jiggled loose and lifted away, rising up in the green beam. The beam picked up any nearby debris, as well; everything from broken window panes to used syringes floated up in its influence. Brand saw metal groan as more of the wall got ripped away, and then, with a snap, a forbidding metal door floated up out of the hole view, followed by a human being.

The man was shoeless and thin as a rail, with disheveled business casual wear and a volcano of unkempt, curly hair. He floated up out of the hole, trembling and screaming.

The pixies clustered around him, englobing him. The beams narrowed their focus; all the debris—everything but the man himself—dropped away.

Brand inhaled sharply.

Yes, humans weren't exactly an uncommon sight, but this man—whoever he was—was a true rarity. He was the proverbial needle in the haystack.

He wasn't infected.

Brand opened his third pair of eyes all the way, thickening the wyrmsight that they brought him. But no matter how much he looked, the result didn't change.

The man was not infected.

Was he immune, or just stupidly lucky? Had he been cowering in a closet this whole time?

Brand both absolutely wanted to know, and yet also acknowledged that, at this point, it wouldn't make a difference one way or the other.

The old world was gone. And yet…

At first, Brand worried the Strangers would harm the guy. Instead, they held him aloft with their green beams, the individual pixies clustering around his body like bees on honeycomb. Fibrous lacework emerged from their flanks, meshes overlapping and interlinking, metal flowing into metal in spurts and starts. Crystals crawled and creaking as the swarm merged, encasing the uninfected man in a grain-of-rice shape, like the drop pods that had fallen from the flower ships. Funnels sprouted at the bottom of the levitating grain; hazy blue propulsion kindled on its underside, piloting the pod up to the ship overhead, gently pressing it against the aircraft's hull. The jets went dark as the pod merged with the flower's hull. Then the flower zipped off and soared away.

It seemed to be returning to the motherships.

The Strangers on the ground saluted it as it flew away.

"They are taking people who are not infected…" Mistelann muttered. He floated back into the hallway, facing Brand.

That was what the green beams were for. They were scanning for the uninfected.

But then, the artifacts they were gathering…. the potted plant…

"It is like they are making a museum," Mistelann said.

Meanwhile, the handful of pixies that hadn't sacrificed themselves to become the man's containment pod got to work searching for more survivors. They roved over WeElMed, humming with power.

Mistelann looked on nervously.

"They are coming this way, Nowston Brand."

The green search beams passed over the Pediatrics building. Suddenly, they froze in place. The search beams coalesced around the broken windows on the third floor.

Right where Brand and the others were.

Brand pulled his head all the way into the hall, but it made no difference.

The pixies' green lights still turned an angry red.

"Shit…"

Brand's whole body went tense. He started to slither around, ready to yell when the pixies turned their bright red anger about face, toward an exit ramp leading out from the garage.

The Gatherers around the hoverwagon broke out in shouts.

"Fucking hell…" Brand muttered.

Ibrahim and Larry had just slithered out onto the Garden Court.

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