Skin peeled off. Bones stretched and twisted. Faces split open, cleanly and with a conspicuous lack of blood, like bananas being peeled.

  From all this emerged piles of mechanical parts. Registers and engines and oil wells stacked on top of one another like cars heaps in a junkyard. Cables running along the sides of them like dead, tainted blood vessels. Nuts and screws sticking out of every surface like the quills of a porcupine. It was all carefully put together to keep any of these parts from detaching and falling off, but at the same time, it was slipshod with no sense of symmetry or balance, like the parts had been thrown together and only managed to stay together due to some unnatural force. Lucy shivered, remembering the royal guards and the dark, sinister energy that recombined their armour during their inevitable, hideous resurrection.

  Despite the utter chaos of the machinery’s arrangements, each of the four heap piles distinctly resembled human figures, matching the height and overall shape of each person they had emerged from.

  Each person.

  Each live person.

  They had come out from live people.

  Lucy went deaf, her eardrums bursting from an impossibly loud exclamation that she quickly realized was her own. When she came back to her senses, hearing the hum of the conveyor belt in the distance and the whirring and creaking that she could only guess were from the newly-minted machines, she could no longer see.

  Her light had gone out.

  “No!”

  She grabbed her Ideal with both hands, raising it up in front of her face, gripping so hard it hurt in a futile attempt to steady her hands. But try as she might, her light would not return. The darkness, which had gently lapped at the edges of her vision like a lazy tide during her conversation with the four lost souls, now seemed to be shifting and pulsing in her vision, hiding others in its depths, others that were ready to leap out at Lucy at a moment’s notice without her having any way of knowing.

  What do I do what do I do what do I do?

  Her mind was racing fast enough to break the sound barrier and her heart could batter down the walls of Troy with its pounding—and why? It was because of this darkness, this stubborn veil that had claimed Lucy’s sight and whispered in her ear, over and over again, that she had no idea what was lying in wait in front of her.

  But Lucy did know what was in front of her. Or, at least, what had been there moments ago.

  Despite the roller coaster her body and emotions had just gone through, barely a few seconds had passed since her light had gone out, so those four machines couldn’t have gone far. And if they had, she was sure she would have heard their loud, messy forms thudding or dragging across the floor. No such noise had reached Lucy’s ears, so they must have stayed in place, waiting, idle, facing Lucy as if staring at her.

  Like the four people who had just been staring at her.

  “Hello?” Lucy called out before her second-guessing could let her hesitate. “Sorry about the light. But…you’re still there, aren’t you? You’re still…you?”

  “We don’t need a stupid light anymore.”

  The boy’s voice. It sounded exactly like Lucy remembered it, but very clearly off. It was unnatural, furbished not from vocal chords but from a mechanized source of some kind that made the tones waver and tremble at strange spots like a distorted recording. Not unlike the voice Lucy had heard from the enormous death machine just before she was swallowed up.

  “He’s right.” The woman’s voice, now, or at least a crude reproduction of it. “We know exactly where we’re going.”

  Lucy’s veins turned to ice as laughter sounded out immediately after the woman’s statement. Once her mind settled down enough from reeling, she recognized the laugh as the little girl’s voice.

  “I’ve really had enough of listening to you.” The man’s voice rung out, exasperated as ever, but with a fire—of frustration, loathing, or mad glee—underneath it. “We’re going now. And you’re coming with us.”

  A loud clamour of thuds and clangs filled the air, starting distant but rapidly drawing nearer and nearer to where Lucy stood.

  “W-wait!”

  Lucy’s plea was ignored and swallowed up by the darkness, which shifted and vibrated as the sounds drew closer. In her panic, she held her Ideal up in front of her face again and practically screamed at it in her mind.

  Light up light up light up light up light up!

  Perhaps it was because her panicked state had crested so high that it wrapped back around to perfect focus and order, but Lucy’s Ideal shot out its beam of light with such abruptness she almost dropped the weapon out of her hands. Once her eyes adjusted to the light, her entire field of vision was ensnared by the most minute grimy details of mechanical parts, right down to the individual nicks and scratches on their worn metallic surfaces.

  One of them had lunged at her.

  Lucy’s entire body wanted to recoil—but she didn’t. She couldn’t. Time passed, but both herself and her mechanized attacker had gone stock still.

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  Cognizance (I).

  She’d known in the back of her mind that it would activate again if worst came to worst and she was ambushed, but surviving the onslaught did nothing to minimize the utter terror of the situation. In this frozen state, she was staring right at one of the people she had been talking to only moments ago. To a machine that used to be a person only moments ago. It was so quick, so cruel, the transformation in not only their appearance but also in their hostility; were it not for Lucy’s Feat, she would likely have been cleaved in two right now.

  But the man—the machine that had formerly been the man—had said they would be “taking Lucy with them.” What could that mean? If this attack she had narrowly survived wasn’t meant to kill her, then what did they intend to do?

  “What the hell?”

  The man-turned-machine cried out from behind Lucy as time resumed and he phased right through Lucy’s body. From the heavy thud and clangs that Lucy heard, she guessed that he had jumped at her and now suffered from a less than graceful landing that threw him off-balance. Lucy breathed a little knowing he would need a few moments before attacking her again, but still she was in high alert, bracing herself and keeping her Ideal up and ready for a defensive swing.

  More clangs and rattles filled the air in the other direction—followed by a bloodcurdling scream.

  “AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH! What—what’s happening to me?”

  It was the little girl, and she sounded as if she were being burned alive. Although Lucy was still wary of the man behind her, she took a chance and shined her light at the source of the girl’s voice.

  Her machine form was there, small like she had remembered, but now it was becoming even smaller. Parts of her were detaching rapidly, breaking at hinges or snapping from wires as if Lucy were watching a fast-forwarded time-lapse of a decaying junkyard.

  “She’s expiring!” cried the woman-turned-machine, who ran up to the girl and her growing heap of fallen parts. “I’m taking her to the conveyor system right now! While her parts are still good!”

  Conveyor system? Did that mean there was more than one conveyor belt, and they had some purpose besides funnelling all of the death machine’s victims to this location? As Lucy’s racing mind was lost in theories that formed at lightning speed, she nearly jumped when the man spoke up behind her.

  “Go on ahead,” he said. “We’ll take this one. Her parts have gotta be first-rate.”

  The woman-turned-machine gave a sound of affirmation, scooped up the girl and her parts into her tray-like arms, and ran right past Lucy at a speed that made Lucy grateful she wasn’t being chased by her. Lucy had so many questions from what she and the man had just discussed, but right now she was preoccupied with wringing out the courage to turn around and face the man-turned-machine again, perhaps right before he jumped at her with an attack she couldn’t phase through this time.

  Despite all this, a wave of determination washed over Lucy like a fresh breeze. Her mind, her mental instincts already knew what was to come in the next split seconds. So all she had to do was catch up her intent and ensuing course of action, letting what she anticipated and understood guide the way she reacted rather than the other way around.

  That was putting true Understanding above all else.

  Lucy tightened her grip on her Ideal, keeping the sword’s angle straight and true, then wheeled around on her heel while swinging her arms in a wide, sure arc that went from hip level to eye level.

  Metal denting, glass shattering, and wires short-circuiting all crashed over Lucy’s ears as a violent tempest of noise.

  But through it all, she was still standing. Her Ideal was covered in a few loose strands of wire, which she quickly shook off. She shone her light down at the floor in front of her, revealing a hodgepodge of parts broken up into two separate clusters, the line between them recreating the arc of Lucy’s sword passing through them.

  Lucy panted, recovering from the force of her swing. She had put all of her might into it, and she was surprised by how easily her sword had cut through the machinery. It glided through without any feeling of resistance, similar to how it had felt when she was cutting down the disembodied arms from Cole’s Dream. But where those arms were only as reinforced as ordinary human flesh and bone, the machine she had cut through just now was far denser in volume and had layers of metal that should have repelled Lucy’s blade. Excitement and adrenaline pumped through Lucy’s veins as she revelled in her upgraded power. Though she was hesitant to admit it, perhaps putting that extra alignment point into Rebellion had been worth it after all.

  Her light caught on something that caused an intense glare to nearly blind her. Flinching, Lucy angled her sword a bit lower to prevent the glare and get a better view of what had acted as a reflector.

  Two glass tubes sticking out of a metallic dome, with a three-by-three grid of LED lights underneath them. She recognized the dome as the “head” of the man-turned-machine, but the pattern of off-and-on LED lights made her shudder.

  Because they resembled a wide, exaggerated grin.

  All had gone silent. The woman must have ran far enough now that her footsteps were no longer audible. But dread slithered under Lucy’s armour, making her sweat despite how this entire Dream was unnaturally and forcefully cold, like the whole space was engulfed in air conditioning tuned to the max. Something in what the man-turned-machine had said was replaying in Lucy’s mind over and over.

  “We’ll take this one.”

  The boy.

  Where was the boy-turned-machine?

  She cursed herself, not sure how he had completely slipped her mind. Perhaps she had incorrectly assumed that he was also falling apart like the girl-turned-machine, or had decided to tag along with the woman-turned-machine on their way to the “conveyor system.” Or perhaps she had been so caught up in her state of panic against the man-turned-machine that she had narrowed her situation down to a one-on-one encounter, because it was too much for mind to accept being attacked in a two-on-one assault in the dark. Either way, she had made a grave miscalculation.

  Lucy spun all around, shining her light everywhere as rapidly as her eyes could process the information. At one point, she dug her heel into the floor and was about to turn, she found that she was unable to move her foot—because something heavy had latched onto it.

  “Get off me! Get off me!”

  She shone her light directly at her foot, and though it was hard to see due to her whole body jerking and trying to break free, sure enough she found what she had expected: the boy-turned-machine, clinging to her boot like a feral dog.

  Try as she might, Lucy couldn’t get the mechanized imp off of her. In moments, the machine raised its “hands” and revealed ten spike-like protrusions. Lucy’s blood went cold. If he bore them into her leg, then it really would be impossible to shake him off.

  Thinking quickly, and forcing the consequences out of her mind, Lucy grabbed at the top of her boot and shoved it off.

  Just as the boot flew off her foot, the machine brought its arms down and together, driving the spikes right into the golden surface. Standing just a few feet away, Lucy panted violently, the adrenaline becoming almost too much to handle, but as she watched what was happening on the floor she realized she wouldn’t have even a second to relax.

  For the boot she had discarded rapidly deteriorated, the fine gold stretching and twisting and re-configuring into completely different compounds, until what was once a shining golden boot transformed into a pile of disparate mechanical parts.