We decided to make a move before the Presidential inauguration, because the presence of Federal agencies investigating monstrous activity was already a problem, but one that was reasonably predictable under the outgoing administration. We thought.

  After the 20th, things could get really chaotic, and if we could have Chord out of the way by then, maybe we’d be able to weather it all better.

  Both Cassy and I thought the Federal agents and military presence were part of Chord’s trap, though, and nobody argued with us about that. But bringing that up made Greg and Ayden so nervous that they wanted to stay out of town until it was all over. Which I was completely fine with.

  The argument that arose was whether or not either Cassy or Milk would assist me, and how. And we were each personally conflicted on the matter, including Cassy.

  Milk was adamant it was going to participate, but unclear if it would be helping or even traveling to Gresham with me.

  I asked it to eborate.

  It said, “No.”

  “Why not?” I demanded.

  “Secrets,” it replied. “Memories. Uncertainty.”

  I scowled at it, visibly to the others.

  “What’s wrong?” Ayden asked, now used to watching me interact with Milk.

  “It’s being mysterious and opaque,” I told him.

  “Milk is usually opaque, isn’t it?” Greg asked.

  “Not like that,” Cassy said, gesturing at the other monster. She’d heard and understood it, too.

  Greg jerked his head up, “Can we trust it?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, making my voice tense, directing my voice at Milk. “Can we?”

  “You cannot,” Milk replied, and then it seeped away into the Strands before I or Cassy could react, and was gone.

  And that rattled Greg and Ayden significantly, even though they couldn’t hear its response. The way that Cassy and I reacted, almost jumping at it, informed them enough of what had happened, and watching a gss of Milk empty itself without being drunk or spilled was disturbing.

  To me, it was like seeing a squid squirt a cloud of ink and jet away.

  For a few minutes after that, we all felt like our pns were completely derailed and nearly called them to a halt.

  But Greg wanted us to regurgitate what it had said exactly, and when he heard “Secrets. Memories. Uncertainty.” he scowled and nodded. And it having said that we couldn’t trust it seemed to clinch his assessment for him.

  “It’s security,” he said. “We’re all messing with things that can py with memories, steal them, rework them, alter them, read them, and all that. If either of you get eaten, whatever pn you’ve made between the two of you is sunk. If Milk is going to help you, to be backup, it needs to hide how it’s going to do it. Or even whether or not it will.”

  Ayden pointed at him, jutting his finger in Greg’s direction a few times, “But. If it’s been setting us up, it’s gotta hide that as well.”

  Greg scoffed. “If Milk saved the st of Synthia from Chord’s st trap, then why would it be setting us up?”

  I sighed, “To catch Cassy for Chord. It really doesn’t track with what I know about it. But, I don’t know that much, and I’ve already been burned by someone I thought I knew. And Cassy is special and weird, and hard to recognize. And she’s dangerous. And Milk really wanted to meet and examine her, which it has now done. If we want to be cautious about it, that’s what we’ve got to look out for.”

  Cassy slid back into her corner and looked down at the table with hooded eyes, pouting and rubbing her palm over the table top. Her feelings were more curiosity than fear, though. “What happens when I die? I mean, when my body dies?”

  Both Greg and Ayden looked suitably uncomfortable with that question.

  “No one really knows,” I said, before either of them could speak. “As an emanant, that you’ll be free of your body’s bonds is anyone’s most obvious guess. Someone out there probably knows that for sure. But I’m guessing you’re asking about your own personal inner dimension and any chance you might unlock adaptations. But, if you don’t just, like, become your own separate little universe, cutting yourself off from this one, you’ll probably be a lot easier to eat.”

  She grimaced at me, blinking repeatedly, “And I bet anybody who knows about me is hoping they’ll be able to do that.”

  “I guess you’ll have to trust me when I say not me,” I replied to her.

  She smiled sadly and said, “Felicity read you well enough that I do, actually.”

  “I’m not the same person I was before I ate Fate Vine, though,” I reminded her.

  “That’s. Not. Getting us anywhere,” Greg scolded us.

  “Look, I feel trapped here, now,” Ayden spoke up, adjusting how he sat, eyes full of fear. “Like, Greg and I are just human beings, but you care about us, right? I want to be able to go home and can’t, but I’m worried about staying here alone now, too. Can’t we be used as leverage against you?”

  “Then we go somewhere else without telling these two where,” Greg said. Then he pointed at me and Cassy in turn. “And you two, think of some backup pns for if the other gets taken, eaten or not. And don’t tell each other. We stay here until you say you’ve figured it out.”

  Cassy nodded, emanating mollified emotions, and then smirked with pride and amusement at Greg, “Synthia and I each have millions of years of memories of survival and political strategy. Mine came from Felicity, but I’m getting a grip on it. And you just cut through our crap with the obvious.”

  “Less bullshit to confuse me,” he grunted.

  “And we thank you for it,” I told him.

  “Also, it’s elementary infosec,” he added. “It’s what Milk just did.”

  We nodded solemnly in acknowledgement, and then we all did what we said we’d do, and more.

  And I decided to take a fun little disguise that probably wouldn’t fool anyone who looked at the Strands.

  Chord started getting signals from his thralls that Sewer Teeth was in town again and on the move, headed right for his kill box.

  He decided he needed to close the trap himself, so he started following.

  Considering how small and weak I was, I really shouldn’t have been the bait. But, we needed bait, and it wasn’t going to be Cassy or anyone else.

  However, Milk had helped me to prepare for this.

  I was a nasty little killing machine, which I deeply hated being. But, if I kept my focus on how I was going to survive a cunning ambush by a highly successful predator, I remained functional about it.

  Getting Cassy into town without Greg or Ayden helping required the bus. So, we sprang for a ticket with my talents instead of actual money, and I tagged along in the luggage compartment. The hirity of it was that we went from Salem to Portnd on the bus, then to Gresham via the MAX, and we passed by the site where the bait for us was supposed to be.

  It allowed us to case the pce briefly. We both saw the Supraliminal residing there. There was definitely something there.

  It was also informative to see the liminals that were riding the MAX shy away from it as we rode by. They didn’t leave the train, but they definitely swayed in pce. And not all of them did. Only about nine in ten were affected by the Supraliminal presence. And neither Cassy nor I triggered any of them, of course.

  On the MAX, I was riding in Cassy’s backpack. She’d let me out in a toilet somewhere in downtown Gresham, and then head off in her own direction to make her way back to the Portnd site. She’d probably get there before me, but we weren’t communicating with each other about those specifics.

  Pn A was that I would do all of the work, if I could. Pn B would be that she’d be my backup. But we had worked out some signals to use if we got near each other, so if we didn’t see those signals we’d each keep our Pns C in mind.

  Milk was Pn X. We weren’t relying on it at all, and we were even allowing ourselves to think of it as a potential threat, and worry over it. An intensity of emotion could make a particur memory more prominent, if it should be absorbed.

  Fear would keep us both alert, too.

  Fear was healthy.

  And holy shit was I afraid.

  Taking the form of Sewer Teeth didn’t really assuage that fear, nor my discomfort upon being flushed down a toilet. Even without eyes, and with a sembnce of Sewer Teeth’s nose, I still had all of my senses as I’d configured them before taking that form. And those senses were acute.

  My sense of sight instead came from every surface of my being, resulting in a simir experience to being a cloud of compound eyes. But also, the sewer smelled like a sewer. Not that I perceived that like a human did, either. Feces are not a threat to me. But since I like to pretend I’m a human, I don’t like the smell anyway, and being surrounded by utter darkness in a cramped space was disconcerting.

  It all felt like arming danger. And I had to rely on my other senses to get around.

  Also, as a reasonable facsimile of Sewer Teeth, I could elongate and squish myself like a Stretch Armstrong, and I felt the inner surface of the pipes pressing against my sides and back. And if I didn’t move with the water, I affected its flow, even if I let some of it flow past and around me.

  This, of course, just made my presence more authentic. And I traveled through the sewers until I found a decent exit point in a bathroom somewhere else that was closer to Portnd than from where I started. I burst forth from a gas station restroom and galumphed very publicly toward a storm drain, which would afford me a better path to where I was going. And from there, I’d occasionally surface to get to a different part of the storm drain system.

  This scared humans and emanants alike, and may have alerted the government presence to my movements. But I figured it was something Sewer Teeth might do as a way of taunting Chord, just like I wanted to do myself. I didn’t think Sewer Teeth had been ignorant and thoughtless, exactly. I thought it had been cunning, if maybe a bit full of itself. Milk had suggested as much.

  And that’s how I drew a troubling train of potential assaints and enemies toward the rows of massive tanks, snaking pipes, and encompassing walkways, all rendered in concrete and steel just off the east side of North Steel Bridge. If you’ve ridden the MAX across Portnd, you’ve seen it, and you know what I’m talking about. And if you look on a satellite map, you’ll see it as a long thin building at an angle near the waterfront, surrounded by other structures attached to it.

  And there was a monster in there waiting for me. A monster I was fairly sure had been constructed from one or more bloated flying boars.

  Milk had warned me that if Chord had set that pce up as a trap, he’d have to have done it with permission from the powers that held Portnd. So, I’d be surrounded by those at least somewhat loyal to our target. But whether they’d jump in if needed, or just sit and watch with amusement however it went, we really didn’t know.

  I want to be clear, I wasn’t doing this out of any sort of altruism or concern for the world, or even just Gresham. I was ultimately doing it for myself, because I didn’t want the world that Chord was trying to make. And if he was to succeed, ceasing to exist sooner rather than ter seemed OK to me.

  But also, I’d already ceased to exist once. The idea bothered me less than it used to.

  I hardly recognized myself any more, and I wasn’t sure when and how I’d finally passed that point of loss.

  I managed to skulk through the city drainage system right up to the corner of North Interstate Street and Rose Quarter Terrace, basically smack in the middle of the Rose Quarter Transit Center. And by the time I got there, it was nearly dusk, the golds and pinks of a sunset painting the buildings around me.

  Even before I erupted from the storm drain to consider my options, I could see the bulk of my target filling the Strands below me.

  I did make quite the scene. That was, after all, part of my pn. I wasn’t being subtle or a surprise. And cars and pedestrians panicked and scattered around me as I completely ignored them.

  I had this idea that if I could trigger a feeding frenzy, I could draw the Supraliminal out to be picked off by a swarm of other teratovores, while I then ran away. Or, maybe I could lead the feeding frenzy right into the industrial complex to where the Supraliminal waited.

  All a terrible idea, but I was weak and small and very experienced at running and hiding, even if I hadn’t really been doing much of that tely.

  Unfortunately, the crowd of pursuers following me were likely loyal to Chord and part of his trap, but I was hoping to leverage them, too, to make the frenzy more likely.

  And if Chord was here himself, I guessed I’d just try to turn the tables on him and eat him myself.

  The idea repulsed me as much as ever, but I didn’t really see that I had much choice. I could use the energy, too. I’d lost so much.

  But now I was presented with a question, a set of choices.

  The abandoned industrial site was a concrete grain silo with forty bins in a double row under a peaked roof, with a tower of processing bins at the north end. It had a set of walkways, conveyors, and chutes on the water side, over a set of train tracks. The chutes were designed to empty grain into either the ships that would have docked in the river there or train cars. They could be switched and configured for either purpose.

  And my target was sitting in one of those forty bins, a single huge cylinder the size of a multistory building itself situated near the center of the row nearest the river. Ten stories tall, or something like that. I just gnced at it.

  I could just charge across the streets and down the steep, bramble covered embankment, and then across the train tracks below, bringing chaos with me. Or, I could dive back into the drain system to make my way to the river, and sneak up through the chute system to drop into the occupied bin. Or, maybe I could make a dash for a nearby restroom and try to access the pce via the sewers. The complex certainly had bathrooms in it.

  The ridiculous boldness of my pn and my current stance in the middle of the street both telegraphed a heedless dash across open ground.

  But I was struck with my own well worn reflexes, and I hopped back down into the storm drain.

  The helicopter that had been following me flew low overhead in a rush of bdes.

  theInmara