As we ran inside, everything changed—except us.

The four of us found ourselves still fully human, sitting on lushly upholstered leather seats that nearly wrapped all the way around the small room suddenly appeared inside. Glass panes ran along the continuous seating, just above and behind their headrests, giving a view of our surroundings.

Ileene turned to her side and looked out through the window of the empty seat next to her. "Uh, Dr. Howle…?"

She looked me in the eyes.

Sometimes, a person's vision would be so overloaded, that it would take a moment for them to process what they were seeing.

That's certainly what happened here.

Standing up, I took a single step toward one of the windows, and then stood in place and stared.

I'd made an error, possibly a very significant one. Despite my first impressions, it turned out we weren't in a room, not quite. No: we were in a car, flying through the air in a city pulled from a dream. City, city, city, as far as the eye could see, in a three-dimensional urban grid.

The grid was streetless; who needs roads when you have air? We flew through the vacant space bordered on either side by fantastical buildings that stabbed the underbelly of the high blue skies. They were like temples, shining and sleek. Others were concrete curtains suspended in lattices of metal struts. Regardless of how they looked, they all kept going, stacked on top of each other, down and down and down, merging into a vanishing point hidden in the dark, neon-lit depths below.

It made Elpeck seem like a backwater podunk.

Suisei stared at our surroundings, just as awed as the rest of us. "This is an ecumenopolis," he muttered. "I suppose I can check that off the list of things I've yet to see."

"A what?" Mr. Himichi asked.

"An ecumenopolis is a city that spans an entire planet," Suisei explained. "It's not uncommon to find them in works of science-fiction."

Ileene pointed and screamed.

And once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it.

Columns of smoke billowed up in the distance.

To our left, an explosion blossomed in a glass building.

"This isn't a dream," I muttered. "This is a nightmare."

&alon was here. This place—this world—was infected, just like mine, only slightly less ripe.

Cars flew past us in rigid lines, making paths at right angles to one another. But, as we watched, one by one, they veered off course and became improvised torpedoes, impacted targets at high speed.

Buildings. Bridges. Corridors in the sky.

Even one another.

&alon's bark and sporestacks grew from the buildings, branching out of the glass and metal, pumping death into the air.

Our surroundings became more and more corrupted with each passing second.

We must have been heading toward one of the infestation's hotspots.

"What's going on?" Ileene asked. "Why are we here? And, for that matter, where is 'here'?"

"Treefather Stone explained that the Network held both Archives and the Vyx's memories," I said. "Since this place doesn't look very safe, that would make it—"

"—A memory, I think," Mr. Himichi said, interrupting me.

Suisei nodded in agreement. "It does feel as if we're just… passing through."

Suddenly a blue holographic rendering of the upper half of a human woman appeared at the front end of the vehicle, near a steering wheel and what looked like a dashboard and control panel. The seat standing behind the wheel was built into the cabin's floor.

"We are proceeding toward Sather Terminal," the hologram said. She had long hair, and wore a silky robe. "If you desire to go somewhere else, please say so, and I will happily modify our heading. Or, if you have a valid license, you may drive the vehicle yourself."

Ileene locked eyes with me. "Do you have a valid license?"

I shrugged. "How am I supposed to know?"

Mr. Himichi gestured toward the seat. "I suppose there's only one way to find out."

Rolling my shoulders—I think all this stress was giving me a cramp—I walked up to the steering wheel. The hologram watched my approach, not disapprovingly.

"Please drive with caution," she said.

Lights flickered on across the dashboard and the steering wheel. A series of beeps followed as the steering wheel slightly extended itself from the dashboard.

Then the hologram disappeared, only for the peanut gallery to arrive—the very, very angry, homicidal peanut gallery.

Stolen story; please report.

"Eradicate! Eradicate!"

Even with the flying car's well-insulated interior, the sounds of the AVU's movements—metal, grating on metal—scraped the insides of my ears.

"Genneth!" Suisei yelled.

All around us, moving in tandem with the car, ripples broke out in the air. AVUs spilled out from them seconds later. The geometry swirling around them whirled around and gathered together into a churning, pincer-like structure.

The AVUs quivered, and then launched themselves at us.

Mr. Himichi stared through the rear-view mirrors and tightened his grip on the back of my seat. "Drive!" he yelled. "Drive!"

I put my butt in the seat and grabbed the steering wheel.

At this point, all I could do was guess, and hope that the control systems of at least one of the sci-fi racing games I'd played in my life was similar to these.

I pushed forward on the steering wheel while turning to the left. The car mirrored the movements, tilting downward and veering to the left. Gravity tugged at my chest, pulling me forward.

AVUs hurtled past overhead. I saw them through the glass panes in the car's roof.

Then, behind me, Suisei yelled. "Wyrm!"

"Fricassee me!" I muttered.

A fully transformed wyrm shot up from the lower reaches like a flying spring, its body twisting into a half corkscrew. I turned the steering wheel hard right, banking the car. Extensions rose up from either side of the chair to keep me in my seat as the vehicle tilted at a 45° angle.

Suisei grabbed the back of my seat, alongside Mr. Himichi. "Pull up!" he yelled. "Pull! Up!"

I did.

We zoomed upward.

Mr. Himichi leaned forward. "Stop pulling up! Stop!"

I looked up through the windshield. Suisei did, too.

"Oh my…" I muttered.

"They're like… shooting stars," Suisei said.

The view of the sky high above the spires of the city's peaks was filled with Vyx. The largest starships—the motherships—hung high overhead, literally overseeing the countless squadrons of modules—the flower ships—descending toward the city, red lights angrily building at their noses.

"Fudge…"

Seconds later, the sky was alive with death rays. A rave's worth of coruscating lasers swept through the city, slicing buildings open and frying fungus to cinders. Several beams were angled downward at steep enough of an angle to hit the sky-street we were driving down.

It scoured the sky corridor like the Hallowed Beast's breath. Flying cars exploded like cherry bombs all around us. Here and there, green rays reached out from the passing modules and engulfed vehicles or sections of buildings, pulling the affected objects toward them. Angling upward, the modules towed their harvest along with them as they flew back to their motherships.

"Left!" Ileene screamed. "Turn left!"

I did, and just in time, too, banking the car around a corner right as two flower ships barreled down toward us and blasted death rays at an incoming wyrm, who mustered up a massive cone of spore breath in response.

"ERADICATE! ERADICATE!"

The AVUs hurtled toward us from either side. I pulled back on the steering wheel, angling the car upward, g-forces pressing me into my seat. Suisei held on to my chair, while Ileene and Mr. Himichi stumbled backward and landed in the seats in the back of the car.

"Genneth!" Suisei yelled.

Three flower modules were flying right at us. I turned to the right, nearly rolling the car out of the way, but there was a horrific crunch as one of the AVUs bashed into the car's rear, tearing through it and casting off a sizable chunk of the trunk and fenders, sending the vehicle into a wild tailspin.

I grabbed the steering wheel and held on for dear life, squeezing as hard as I could to fight against the reckless spin. Meanwhile, wyrms, AVUs and Vyx modules came at us every which way.

Then, with a low hum, green light enveloped the car, which started to rise of its own accord.

"What's happening?" Mr. Himichi asked.

"I think they have us in a tractor beam," Suisei said. He shook his head. "I can't believe I just said that."

"What's a tractor beam?" I asked.

"Science-Fiction's favorite way to grab objects in outer space," he explained. He moved to the middle of the car and looked up through the glass ceiling. "Dammit! Genneth, they're pulling us in!"

Looking up through the windshield, I could see the Vyx module whose tractor beam had us in its grasp. I tried everything I could to break free. I pushed the wheel, pulled it, spun it around, but none of it did anything.

We kept on rising. Clouds whisked past us as the blue sky darkened, a Vyx mothership looming larger and larger with every passing second. Minuscule details on the ship resolved into glowing lights, windows, and entry bays as we approached.

"What happens now?" Mr. Himichi asked.

"I…—"

Then a wyrm crashed into our car and everything exploded, and the next thing I knew, the four of us were back in the maze, having just staggered out of a portal.

"ERADICATE! ERADICATE!"

These guys were giving a whole new meaning to the phrase "bitter clingers."

The AVUs spun around to face us, metal swarms swirling around them like clashing knives.

Since they were about to kill us, I didn't need to worry about giving away my position by using my mental abilities, so I sped up my thoughts, hoping it might help me make sense of where we were and what was happening before it or anything else killed me.

Curiously, I had to set my thought processing speed all the way to its maximum setting just to have any noticeable effect on my perception of time. I guess that meant the Vyx themselves were pretty brainy too, which made sense. They were living machines, after all.

As things slowed to a stop, Ileene turned to me in shock, jostling her dark, auburn hair. She looked around fearfully. "What did you do!?"

"I used my powers to—"

"—I thought the Treefathers said not to do that!" she snapped.

"Only when we were trying to hide from the AVUs," I said.

"We're near the edge…" Mr. Himichi muttered, staring down at the floor.

"What?" I asked.

"Look." He pointed with one hand, while bracing his black beret on his head with the other.

He was right.

In getting booted out of the ecumenopolis, we'd been spat out of a portal near the edge of the "room" that the anti-virus units had created by demolishing so many of the maze's walls.

We weren't far from the edge of the flattened, shard-strewn area, where the hallways resumed. I pointed at one of them. "Let's keep going," I said. "We might be able to outrun them!"

Even with time slowed to the max, the AVUs were still moving, albeit slowly.

We didn't have much time at all.

"And if we can't outrun them?" Suisei asked.

"Then we keep going through the portals," I said, "until we get back to the module we started in."

"ERRRRRRRRRAAAAAAA—"

I let time snap back to normal, and then yelled. "Run!"

"—DICATE!"

The hallway nearest to us branched left and right. We ran down the right branch; I pushed off the wall, thrusting myself forward.

"There!" Ileene cried.

The hallway around the corner had a portal in the middle of its wall.

We dove in, and emerged in fog. You would think that, having spent most of my life in Elpeck—a city famous for its fog—I'd have been able to handle a little inclement ground-cloud, but no, not like this.

This was advanced fog. It was thick as cotton and heady with the stink of mud, mod, and sweet, burbling rot. And it w

The shrieks weren't nearly as loud as before. I attribute this to the flying car's well-designed, sound-insulated interior.E

as warm, suffocatingly warm; a humid armpit of a world, whose ground squelched and shifted beneath my feet.

I heard things… gurgling.

Like with the ecumenopolis, there was no sign of the portal we'd used to enter this place, and I was thankful for that.

It gave us a bit of a head-start.

"What now?" Ileene asked.

"We keep moving," Suisei said. "Watch your step."

He took the lead, and we followed.

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