No one dared to say goodbye as Karl and the other group took flight. Dr. Rathpalla took the lead, guiding them on their journey.

Karl ended up drifting to the back of the group. He was just so nervous, twingeing with worry time whenever he saw Dr. Rathpalla so much as wobble mid-flight. Even the slightest mishap could be a sign that what had happened to Larry was now happening to Ibrahim, and Karl dreaded that to his core.

The wyrms flew low to the ground, hugging close to the land, so that they could hide among ruined buildings at a moment's notice. Even though the Strangers' skyships appeared to be keeping their distance, Karl and Mrs. Elbock expressed their worries that the Strangers might decide to bring their battle back to Elpeck if they saw a group of wyrms flying across the city.

But that was hardly the only worry Karl had to deal with.

Everyone was affected by the sorry state of the city. The rampant destruction stamped misery on them all. Karl had never even been to Holy Elpeck in his own time, yet, seeing its future's wreckage filled him with a deep sadness for all that had been lost.

It was while these feelings were in the air that Dr. Derric asked a fateful question.

"So, I take it Ani is with Genneth?"

He'd asked the question of Dr. Marteneiss.

Karl and Dr. Nowston were flying level with one another, which made it easy for the spirits riding on the wyrms' backs to speak amongst themselves. Though Karl could have easily broadcast his spirits' words to Dr. Nowston's through song, the spirits obviously enjoyed being close and seeing each others' faces. Karl knew he would have wanted the same, had their positions been reversed.

It helped them forget their deaths, if only for a little while.

Karl glanced up at where Dr. Marteneiss sat atop Dr. Nowston's back—Brand's back. Dr. Nowston had asked him to be less formal.

All Karl could do was try his best.

The instant he saw the look Jonan's question brought onto Dr. Marteneiss' face, though, Karl knew trouble was brewing.

Jonan saw it, too.

"Dr. Marteneiss, why the fuck are you making that face?" Dr. Derric spoke slowly. Karl knew he was fighting to keep his voice from breaking.

There were tears in Heggy's eyes. "After Letty ate you," she said, "there was a massive battle down at the Melted Palace."

"What?" Jonan asked.

Heggy nodded mournfully. "Yeah.Verune and his cronies claimed they had a cure for the Green Death. They offered it to everyone who came." She shook her head. "But their 'cure' was death; you got eaten by one of the Last Church's wyrms, nothing more, nothing less."

"So, Ani's trapped inside a snake-shaped nutcase, is that it? Damn it, Heggy!" Jonan scoffed. "For a second there, you had me really scared!"

"Jonan…"

His lips pulled tight, as if it was the end of all wind.

"She got shot, Jonan. I saw it. A stream of bullets made her skull into pulp. Though Genneth absorbed her body, I…" Heggy lowered her head in shame. "I don't think that whatever was supposed to happen when that happens happened for her."

"Wh-what…?" Dr. Derric was in shock.

Karl could feel the spirit's panic like a hot poker even as the ghost trembled against his mane.

"He said they killed her soul," Dr. Marteneiss said.

Jonan stood up on Karl's back. "No…" His pain sparked into an all-consuming bonfire.

Jonan screamed, and his scream was his fury. His cry was heartbreak, busted and bloodied. His rage made the nuclear weapons seem like matchsticks by comparison.

"Karl!" Bever said. "Do something!"

Dr. Derric ran off Karl's back and stampeded into the sky.

It took all of Karl's strength to dismiss the spirit and send Jonan back to his mind-house. After a moment's hesitation, Karl gave Jonan near full control of the mind-world, hoping that Dr. Derric would be able to work out his anger however he wished.

Dr. Rathpalla had shown him that trick.

There was a long silence after that.

"What happened to him?" Heggy asked.

"I… gave him space," Karl said. He glanced at Ibrahim, up at the head of the flight.

Even now, Karl could feel Jonan's pain throbbing in his mind.

"Don't blame Karl, Dr. Marteneiss," Dr. Rathpalla said, "he's just following a treatment plan I'd recommended he use for a situation like this. Unless we can find proof that Ani is A-okay, I don't think there's anything any of us can do right now to help Dr. Derric other than to leave him to his grief, at least for the time being."

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Karl thought back to his own struggles with grief: his despair at losing his humanity; the betrayal he felt when realizing the hero he worshiped wasn't quite a knight in shining armor.

"He needs… time," Karl said. "…just like I did."

"We all do," Brand said.

Dr. Rathpalla pointed at a group of buildings and gardens gathered on a hill down below. "Alright, we're here," he said. "Everybody, get ready to land."

Karl couldn't help but notice Ibrahim's arm quivered as he spoke.

From the air, Elpeck Polytechnic reminded Karl of the hospital. Both facilities were places built from many different times, though the Polytechnic didn't have nearly as many as WeElMed did.

Shiny high-rises gripped the hillsides surrounding the university's noticeably older core. The buildings in the core were a mix of styles, from grid-like structures with many arched gallerias, capped in gently slanted roofs and cupola domes, to broad, wide-winged halls with pitched roofs and simple white walls, and imposing gray blocks ornamented with fine façades. One building even had a clock tower standing tall above its front doors.

Everyone followed Dr. Rathpalla's lead, landing on a small plaza paved in patterned flagstone.

From above, even a quick glance of his third eyes showed Karl the clusters of fungus aura riddled through the school. The sights were even more gruesome at ground level, like a Cheldmas festival gone wrong. Fungus blossomed from the corpses littered across the plaza. &alon sent out roots and shoots, spreading across the flagstone in a network that visibly pulsed with slow, continued growth.

The building Dr. Rathpalla had landed beside was clearly old. Karl felt like it would have belonged in his own place and time, what with all the lancet windows in the many arches on its façades. He just wished the fungus hadn't been growing in glowing, pipe organ clusters from the cupola on its gently sloped roof.

The spirits floated off their wyrms and onto the ground, while Brand slithered up alongside Dr. Rathpalla.

"This is the science building, I take it?"

"Yes," Dr. Rathpalla replied. "The labs are on the second basement level."

"Good to know," Brand said.

Geoffrey took several steps back and admired the view. He nodded shakily. "This is… beautiful."

"It was built not long after we kicked the Munine out of the country," Mr. Elbock said, briefly flickering into view at his wife's side.

Geoffrey nodded. "Perhaps our country turned out better than I first thought." He pointed at the building. "You see this, Karl?"

Karl nodded. "Yes, sir."

"This is what we fought for," Geoffrey said. "A new Trenton—a better one." He smiled.

But Bever shook his head. "I don't think the folks in there would agree with your assessment, Gof." The axeman pointed his weapon at the entrance.

The entrance sat atop a short, five-stepped staircase recessed into the building. The original doors were fixed in place, permanently swung inward, with a pair of double-doors made of see-through glass to serve in their place, though now, only the edges of the glass' frames remained. The shattered crystals were scattered over the steps.

"I'm willing to put up with everything else as long as some equipment is intact," Brand said. Flicking his tail across the pavement, Dr. Nowston skulked up the staircase. The glass shards crunched softly beneath his scutes.

The others followed after him, with Karl going in after Dr. Rathpalla, but with Merritt slithering behind him and Kurt following up on the rear guard.

Late afternoon sunlight streamed in through the windows and the skylights high up on the walls of the science building's main hallway. But the illumination didn't make the sight any less grim.

Zombies had grown into the hallway walls. Some of them could still move, not that there was much left to move. Eyes, sometimes. Maybe a moaning breath through cracked, oozing lips.

Geoffrey muttered a prayer under his breath. "Not even a wicked child would treat a doll as cruelly as &alon treats her victims," he said.

One poor soul, embedded in a fungal crust on the walls, moaned wordlessly as the wyrms watched helplessly.

Karl found it hard to not stare.

Dr. Nowston took the lead, turning onto and slithering down the stairwell up ahead at the side of the hall. The wyrms used their claws to slice up the bodies on the steps into pieces, which they fed on, splitting the meat equally amongst themselves. Of the group, only Karl and Mrs. Elbock bothered bringing the infected flesh up to their snouts before "eating" it. The others simply laid the pieces on their body and let their bodies take care of the rest, wriggling filaments and all.

It made Karl feel more than a little awkward.

But then Mrs. Elbock nodded at him. "Good for you, Karl," she said, "it seems we're the only ones here who haven't forgotten our table manners."

Then she flexed some of her front-most nostrils in what Karl was pretty sure was supposed to be a smile.

The group continued onward.

The next floor down was even bleaker than the first. There was less light, for one, not that that helped much. To Karl's wyrm eyes, what he'd once thought of as darkness turned out to be an absence of the forms of light he'd been able to see. To a wyrm, hardly any place was truly dark. The Night was the only exception. Looking up at it brought back the feelings of what it was like to look into darkness with a human's eyes.

Corpses huddled against the hallway walls. Death had frozen their last embraces into place. Gardens had sprouted from their bodies, bearing bulbs that glowed in gentle greens and golds. Their light would only get brighter come sunset.

Dr. Nowston led them down the hallway, and then turned and entered through a pair of double doors with the word Labs written over the doorsill.

Karl had to imagine away all the fungal growth just to get an inkling of what the place must have looked like when the world was still alive. It seemed to have been a long hallway lined with doors to the "Labs". The labs had window panes looking in on them, a lot like what he'd seen in the General Labs building back at WeElMed.

But now, all of it was in ruins. Worse than ruins, even.

It was all overgrown.

"Oh God…" Dr. Rathpalla muttered.

Unlike the other hallways, this one had more than enough room for everyone to slither in at the same time.

Demolished walls helped expand spaces like that.

It took a moment for Karl to make sense of what he was looking at. The hallway—not much of the space beyond the destroyed walls on its left-hand side—was covered in tall, thick, sprawling roots that broke through the floor. Off to the left, the sprawl came together, rising up in a trunk so broad, Karl mistook it for a wall. To get a better view, he carefully floated over the roots and into one of the broken-down laboratories.

Karl exhaled a single spore plume.

"Whoa…"

The fungus had grown into a great tree. The trunk and branches broke through the ceiling, up to the first basement level, and—at its core—through the ceiling above that. Globules emerged from the branches and their tips, shining a gentle light, while clusters of sporestacks jutted out here and there, pumping out spores. The way the spores caught the sunlight as they rained down on the blackened, pit-studded floor was nearly beautiful.

And he looked around, he realized he could make out the remains of human faces staring at him and the other wyrms from within the tree and its roots and branches and trunks, the fungus blossoming from their holes like gargoyle spouts.

"By the Godhead…" Geoffrey muttered. "What happened here?"

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