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“AndIknow you’ll make the right call,” Rightmost countered, “my…fierce little… canopy lemur?”

Okay, that one was kind of cute.

“I heard voices! This way!” Zyl’s shout rang from above, followed by racing bootsteps.

With the fuse running short, Vela pulled the trigger. The true Kalis gasped, eyes rolling back as he fell limp to the floor.

“I was counting on your good judgement,” Fyn said with a tellingly nervous laugh.

As badly as Vela wanted to shoot him, there was no way she could drag him from the scene. Not before her rivals caught up.

“Shut up and follow me.” She grabbed his arm and tugged him toward a metal door with a foreboding yellow triangle plastered on the front. Darkness waited beyond the threshold, too dense for even the strongest visor to filter.

Any other exit would have been preferable, but the encroaching bootsteps narrowed her options to one. She pulled the Wanderling into the shadows and jarred the door shut behind them. The deadbolt slid into place right as Kalis’s crew burst into the basement.

chaptersix

The default settingof a Central-issued stun gun could knock a grown man out for an hour. Vela had adjusted hers to keep ’em down for three. After listening to Kalis’s lackeys bicker beyond the door for several minutes, it became obvious they intended to linger until their leader shook off his stupor.

“Holding hands in the dark is romantic and all,” Fyn’s whisper tickled Vela’s ear, “but we should probably search for another exit.”

Vela released the Wanderling’s arm, grateful the darkness hid her flushed face. The shiver of excitement she felt at the brush of his breath unnerved her. “Are you suggesting we feel our way to safety?”

“Only for a moment.” Fyn placed a hand on her shoulder to guide her through the shadows, and she felt along the walls in an attempt to keep her bearings. Rough stone scraped beneath her glove, and the tangs of mildew and moss grew stronger with each step, sure signs they’d left the Visitor’s Center behind.

After a few twists and turns, Fyn withdrew his hand. Light flooded Vela’s vision, blindingly bright. She blinked the blear away to find that he’d shifted again, this time to a Pherenese man with pale lilac skin and fiber-optic hair. Males of the species were far smaller than their feminine counterparts, but Fyn still dwarfed Vela in both height and heft. He was not about to make himself easy to capture.

He tossed prismatic tresses over his shoulder. “In case you doubted my ability to brighten a room.”

“Pity this isn’t a room,” Vela replied flatly, scanning their stony surroundings. The tunnel stretching out before them was too irregular to have been bored mechanically, though the lack of fresh claw marks and scat hinted at old age. “We’re in an abandoned burrow, or at least the neglected wing of a warren. Probably the work of a rock gnawer or an anglerbeast.”

“Good thing the architect’s long gone. Neither option sounds particularly friendly.”

They weren’t herbivores, that was certain. “Don’t let your guard down just yet.” Vela scraped her boot on the ground, smearing a serpentine trail of soil. “Deserted dens often attract squatters of the toothy variety.”

“So you’re saying I should keep close?” Fyn looped an arm around her waist and pulled her flush against his chest—an act that, bizarrely, threw off the rhythm of her pulse.

She slipped away with a startled scowl. “I’m saying you should keepquiet.”

“Shame.” He pouted. “Here, I thought you’d have follow-up questions about the job.”

Thenerveson this one. “Why ask about a job I’m unwilling to take?”

“Curiosity.”

He had her there. “I’ll get the details from Central after the interrogation.” She stepped aside to wave the Wanderling forward. “For now, I insist you walk ahead of me. For the obvious reasons.”

It was hard to identify eyerolling in people without pupils, but Fyn somehow made it obvious. To his credit, he obeyed without much fuss. Vela followed as he wound through the tunnel, keeping well within the cast of his prismatic hair. They marched along in blessed silence for some time before he froze in place, arms splayed in an obnoxiously protective manner.

“There’s something up there,” he breathed.

Vela peered around him to see lights twinkling in the darkness—long strings of them, tangled together like noodles. Elated, she ducked beneath Fyn’s arm. A heartbeat after she arrived at the edge of a hollow, his light spilled past her to fall on a nest of slumbering sky eels.

“Wait here,” she whispered, tiptoeing forward.

“Wouldn’t dream of following,” came the bewildered reply.

Upon locating a juvenile eel, nearly two meters long, Vela crouched for a closer look. The creature was even more magnificent in reality than the illustrations—smog gray and sleek as an oil spill, with pockets of phosphorescence pulsing from gills to tail. A short, crimson dorsal ridge ran the length of its spine, and tiny pectoral fins of the same hue sprouted from its sides.