---
Gerry did not announce his decision.
He simply put his foot down.
The car surged forward with the immediate, committed response of an engine that had been idling at readiness and was now being given permission to be what it actually was. The vehicle's exterior — dark, unremarkable, the kind of sedan that disappeared into traffic — had been a deception. Beneath the hood, something else waited. Something that had been tuned and modified and cared for by hands that understood momentum as a language. The engine note changed from a quiet murmur to a low, purposeful growl, and the wheels bit into the hill terrain with a grip that seemed to surprise even the ground itself.
The hill terrain received this decision with the indifferent honesty of terrain that does not negotiate. Loose gravel sprayed from the rear tires, rattling against the undercarriage like handfuls of flung stones. The wheels found purchase on the uneven ground through a combination of mechanical grip and Gerry's particular relationship with momentum — the relationship of a man who had learned to treat unpredictable surfaces as a language rather than an obstacle. He read the slope in the way his hands adjusted on the wheel, in the micro-corrections of his steering, in the way he let the car drift slightly into the ruts and then pulled it out again.
The vehicle moved.
Behind them, at the pit, the three threads continued their rise.
The inferno had not diminished. If anything, it had grown more settled — the flames finding their rhythm, consuming the Warcoffin's remains with the steady appetite of a fire that had fuel enough to last. But the threads were no longer part of that consumption. They had cleared the pit's rim now, climbing into the hill air with the slow, patient deliberation of things that were not in a hurry because hurry was a concept that belonged to things with limited time.
Their translucence caught the firelight without reflecting it, giving them a quality that was difficult to look at directly — the way a heat haze over summer asphalt makes the world behind it waver. They moved in filaments that stretched and contracted, searching, orienting themselves toward something that the human eye could not see but that they could feel.
Frequency. Vibration. The presence of living things nearby.
---
Tyla had the phone before anyone told her to.
The movement was pure professional instinct — the same instinct that had calculated the jump distance from a moving vehicle, that had directed greed-frequency into a raised fist at the precise moment required. Her hand found the phone where Gerry had left it in the centre console, her fingers closing around its warm casing, and she turned in her seat.
The seatbelt pulled against her shoulder as she twisted. She reached between the headrests with one arm, angling the phone's camera toward the rear window. The angle was awkward — her wrist bent at a degree that would ache later — but she held it steady, giving the lens the widest possible view of what was behind a moving vehicle on a hillside at speed.
On the screen, Elijah's face changed.
Not dramatically. Not with the theatrical shift of someone encountering something they have no category for. It was the specific quality of a person who has a category for it and does not particularly like what that category contains. His eyebrows drew together by a fraction. The corner of his mouth, which had been pulled into a smirk, relaxed into something flatter. His eyes tracked the feed from Tyla's camera with the focused attention of someone reading fine print in bad light.
The Wonko window opened in the lower corner of his display.
Small. Present. Watching the same feed. The window's outline shimmered faintly — that barely-there quality that suggested a presence not entirely bound by the physical rules of screens and pixels. It sat in the corner of Elijah's display the way a second pair of eyes might sit at a table, watching, waiting, processing information at a speed no human could match.
"Tell me," Elijah said. His voice had dropped from its earlier register — the cheerful provocation gone, replaced by something more operational. Flatter. More direct. The voice of someone who had stopped performing and started calculating. "That those are not what I think they are."
The Wonko window said nothing for a moment.
Inside the window, the shimmer resolved into something that might have been a face — or might have been the suggestion of a face, the way a constellation suggests a shape without committing to it. The pause stretched long enough that the silence in the vehicle felt heavier than the conversation that had preceded it.
Then: "They are what you think they are."
Elijah exhaled through his nose.
A short breath. Sharp. The kind of exhale that carries the weight of a confirmation you had been hoping not to receive.
"The Orrhion chips." He said it the way a man says something when he is thinking faster than he is speaking. The words came out in a stream, not quite a question, not quite a statement — the verbal processing of someone assembling information into a shape he could work with. His eyes did not leave the feed. The three translucent forms moved across the hillside behind the vehicle, their thread-bodies warping with each change in terrain, and Elijah watched them as if he could learn their patterns through sheer intensity of attention.
"I thought — okay, I was under the impression that Orrhion chips were not exactly standard issue. That the programme was selective. That the kind of integration required was — I don't know — specialised." He gestured loosely at the screen, a flick of his fingers that conveyed frustration more than direction. "Are they just — are they growing these things like cabbages now? Because apparently even a handful of mid-level Mysterium Third Division transfer agents are walking around with vessel chips and I would very much like to know when that became the situation."
The Wonko window's expression shifted.
The shimmer contracted, then expanded — a movement that mimicked, in some abstract way, the rolling of eyes. The entity within the chip was processing Elijah's question and finding it, at some fundamental level, irrelevant.
"Mmm," Wonko said.
The sound was noncommittal. A placeholder. The kind of noise a person makes when they are deciding how much of their patience to spend on the current conversation.
Then, quietly, in the tone of someone repeating something back to themselves before discarding it: "'Are they growing these things like cabbages' — absolute —" A pause. The shimmer flickered. "— that is not the point."
"It feels like a point —"
"Your pieces," Wonko said.
The flat precision of the interruption cut through Elijah's protest like a blade through cloth. The entity's voice carried no anger, no frustration — just the immovable certainty of something that had identified the necessary course of action and would not be diverted from it.
"Are currently in a vehicle on a hillside being pursued by three lower-entity oracle vessels that have just been released from their hosts. The question of agricultural Orrhion production can wait. Whether those people survive the next four minutes cannot."
Elijah looked at the feed.
At the three forms, which had cleared the pit now. They were fully emerged, their translucent thread-bodies moving across the hillside terrain with a speed that had no biological reference point. They did not run. They did not glide. They simply — progressed, their filaments stretching and contracting in a rhythm that ate distance without visible effort. They belonged to things which did not have muscles or mass in any conventional sense and were therefore not constrained by what muscles and mass could manage.
"Right," Elijah said.
---
The terrain was not kind.
The hillside ran at an angle that communicated clearly it had never been asked to serve as a road and had no intention of beginning now. The ground was loose in the way that hill ground is loose — the surface layer of pebbles and compacted earth shifting under the wheels with each directional change, the larger stones appearing without warning at intervals that required either fast reaction or a tolerance for impact. Gerry had both.
Scrub grass grew in uneven patches between the rock outcroppings, dry and brown, bent by the wind that pushed across the slope. The stalks whipped against the undercarriage as the car passed, leaving faint streaks of green-brown residue on the metal. Somewhere to the left — beyond a shallow ridge that had appeared ten seconds ago and would disappear in another ten — the land opened into a broader flat. It was the kind of terrain that might have been useful for a number of things. But what it was currently being used for was a pride of lions, who had apparently decided to conduct their afternoon in the specific location that was most inconvenient to a speeding vehicle on an unplanned escape route.
They came out of the scrub grass without particular alarm.
Large. Tawny. Their coats carrying the dappled light of the overcast morning, their muscles shifting beneath their hides with the easy power of animals that had never needed to run from anything. They moved with the magnificent disinterest of creatures that have not yet been introduced to the concept of a vehicle coming at them sideways down a hill at speed. One of them lifted its head. Another continued licking its paw. A third watched the car with the slow, lazy tracking of something that was curious but not yet concerned.
Gerry saw them.
His eyes registered the lions in the same moment his hands registered the wheel. There was no visible startle. No sharp intake of breath. Just a recalibration — the rapid, automatic adjustment of a man who had been presented with new information and was already recalculating his approach.
He adjusted.
He adjusted slightly too late for the one on the far left.
The lion had chosen its trajectory without knowing a car was coming. It had simply moved, the way lions move, from one patch of shade to another. Its path intersected with the space Gerry's front-left wheel was about to occupy. There was a sound — a thump, soft and heavy, the sound of something large being struck at low speed. Then a bump, as the wheel rolled over something that was not meant to be rolled over.
Gerry glanced in his mirror.
The lion was already getting up. Shaking its head. Looking at the retreating vehicle with the expression of a creature that had just been introduced to a concept it did not appreciate and would remember for later.
"My apologies," Gerry said, to no one specific.
His voice was calm. Almost conversational. The apology was offered the way one might apologize to a pedestrian after a near miss — not deeply felt, but socially necessary.
Then, returning his eyes to the terrain ahead without any change in speed: "Terrain has lions."
He said it the way a person notes a road sign.
And continued driving.
---