Mishka woke to the smell of ash, a tang of metal, alcohol, and sweat.

  She frowned and sat up, blinking around at the small room. This wasn't the one she'd stayed in the previous night. It was messy and clearly lived in, with clothes – her own mixed with others, littered over the floor, and aethergrams of a few alfish people stuck here and there. There was a mostly empty bottle of some kind of strong smelling alcohol on the small table by the bed, on top of a stack of paperback novels.

  Frowning, she stood up and frowned at her reflection, raising a hand and touching a few love-bites on her neck. Who… who had she slept with? She couldn't remember anything after investigating the cage. Had she been drugged?

  No, no: there were very few chemicals or potions that could do something like that to an Ursulans' bio-alchemically engineered body. And those that could do it would have left a noticeable shift in her blood stream. Whatever had happened, she had been conscious for it… but while she could attribute a slight lapse in memory to stress, even if she wasn't sure why exactly she was stressed, she didn't just forget sleeping with people.

  She knelt down and rummaged in her skirt for a few moments before finding her magnifying glass and peering at the bottle and glasses. Her finger-prints were on one glass, and there were larger ones on another.

  She inspected the bottle. Some grain alcohol, definitely not drugged. No residue in the glasses either.

  She kept on searching. Analysis with her magnifying glass confirmed her partner had been alfin. Which was… impossible. There were no alves on this expedition, just two humans and a gretchen. She was sure of that.

  A familiar feeling of being blocked by something returned, and she snarled in annoyance, turning back to the pictures. They all contained alves in them, but the composition was… strange. There were blank spaces where you would have expected someone to be. In one, a figure seemed to be throwing their arm over empty space.

  "'I cannot remember what is lost…'" whispered Mishka to herself, recalling the words that she'd seen during her trip into the ruins with Astrid. She was on the edge of understanding, she could feel that, just a little more…

  She looked at her arm. The eight scratched lines had been refreshed in her sleep, but now five were crossed out. That was two more than when she had gone on the trip into the ruins, down from five to four to three uncrossed lines. Yes, now she was sure something was wrong with her memory. Her subconscious was screaming at her, trying to overcome what had to be some kind of external, psychic block.

  Eight. Five, four, three…

  What did she have? A strange set of quarters, clearly lived in; a phantom partner who she had drunk with and passed the night; a sabotaged transmission relay, and possibly the greenhouse systems too; a recipe written by another person who didn't exist; and a cage designed to hold some kind of twisted creature of the Beneath…

  A cage that had been empty.

  She frowned. The cage had been empty, but…

  But whatever was happening, it seemed to be affecting memory and perception. And if there had been something in that cage that could alter those two things, then it was entirely possible that Astrid simply hadn't been able to see it when she opened the cage.

  Was that possible? It would need to be a frighteningly powerful psychic to pull it off, but… yes, yes there was no reason that such a creature couldn't exist. Dammit, she wished she'd paid more attention in her Monday morning xenoteraology classes.

  "OK. Assume that such a creature exists," she muttered to herself. "How are its powers manifesting? And what might it have done?"

  Firstly, she couldn't see direct evidence of it, not consciously. She was seeing secondary evidence or perhaps tertiary, the absence things had left behind – and with significant difficulty at that. Even as she considered it, she could feel the urge to just dismiss the idea, laugh it off – a bad night's sleep, a hangover. Go on, it said, ignore everything that is staring you right in the face-

  Mishka's eyes widened as a single shard of understanding managed to pierce the fog in her mind.

  Eight scratches. Eight bedrooms. Eight people. No, scratch that, three people: Charles, Petra, and Astrid.

  "Of fucking course!" she said, rushing from the room, down the habitation corridor, and into the central area. "Listen, I know what is happening! We are all in grave, grave danger!"

  The trio looked up from their breakfast. Charles cleared his throat and looked away, his pale cheeks reddening, Petra snorted, and Astrid seemed transfixed.

  "Three people?" said Mishka. "An expedition like this has three people!?"

  "What are you talking about?" said Petra.

  "And why- why are you, ahem… naked?" said Charles.

  "Who cares about that, listen to me!" said Mishka, gesticulating wildly. "No one, not even an absolutely bananas' capitalist company would send out three people on a mission like this! And if they did, they certainly wouldn't give you five spare bedrooms. Which, if you look in, you can clearly see have been lived in by people!"

  "Huh? What? No, we use them for storage," said Petra.

  "Can you please, go and put on some clothes on first?" said Charles, holding up a hand to screen his eyes. "Before you regale us with this nonsense?"

  "I don't know, I find this mode of storytelling quite compelling," said Astrid, sipping at her coffee. "Maybe it's how her culture does performances? We should be culturally sensitive."

  "I agree," said Petra.

  "Please put some clothes on," said Charles.

  "Ugh, primitives!" said Mishka, stomping back into the room and pulling her clothes back on before returning. "Better?"

  "No," said Astrid and Petra at the same time.

  "Yes, thank-you," said Charles. "OK, so what's this about… rooms?"

  "They are full of personal effects," said Mishka.

  "Yeah, storage," said Astrid. "We use them for storage, like Petra said."

  "No, you don't – think about it," said Mishka. "Why are there eight sets of sleeping quarters for a crew of three? Why not just have empty space if you needed storage? Lockers?"

  "What does… what does it matter?" said Astrid.

  "Captain," said Mishka, changing tack. "On missions like this, every kilogram is cost – right? More fuel to get here, more acceleration and deceleration needed – right?"

  "Yeah," said Charles, nodding. "Yeah, of course. No excess – that's why we have the Greenhouse."

  "So then why do you have five extra bunks and five extra shower units?" said Mishka. "And the composition of your team, it doesn't make sense."

  "What do you mean?" said Astrid.

  "You're an archaeologist," said Mishka, pointing at the human woman. "That makes sense, this is an archaeology mission, after all."

  "Well, I'm glad I'm allowed to be here," said Astrid.

  "Petra is a doctor – that also makes sense, people get sick," continued Mishka. "And Charles is the Captain, and I guess he can probably pilot a ship? Also important."

  "Right, everything we need," said Charles. "Someone to get us here, someone to keep us healthy, and someone to do the actual research. Mishka, you really need to stop-"

  "No, no!" said Mishka, fighting through what she could now feel was a block in her mind that was trying to tell her this was a perfectly reasonable explanation. "Surely you can see that how weird it is that, on a multi-year mission, you have no one who knows how to fix such any essential system? What if the air-shell broke? Would you be able to fix it?"

  "Well, no, not me," admitted Charles. "Astrid?"

  "I don't think so," said Astrid. "I took introductory enchanting at university, but I can only fix like, a lightstick-"

  "And what about the Greenhouse," continued Mishka, speaking over her. "That is your only source of food. I'm not from a capitalist society, but a mission like this would have cost a lot, and two extra salaries for a druid and an enchanter would have been a rounding error by themselves – especially when you already are carrying all the extra weight for the quarters they'd need."

  "But there has only ever been the three of us," said Petra. "I remember!"

  "No," said Mishka. "You don't. Because something is suppressing our memories of all the people who should be here."

  She held up her arm and showed them her marks.

  "There were eight crew members in total, and we have forgotten five of them," said Mishka.

  "That's- that's preposterous," said Astrid. "There'd be evidence."

  "And there is," said Mishka. "But whatever is doing this, it is making your mind try to gloss over the clues, ignore them, brush them aside. My people engineered ourselves to have very strong psychic defences, and even I can feel myself trying to abandon this line of thinking."

  "Because it's nuts!" said Astrid. "You know, you think you're so much smarter than everyone else just because you're from an advanced culture, but you know what-"

  "Shh!" said Mishka, putting a finger to her lips.

  Astrid's mouth opened and closed several times before she managed to recover from the mild psychic suggestion. "And stop doing that to me!" she said. "I'm not a child!"

  "Listen," continued Mishka. "Let's star with broken circuit I 'found,' yesterday. Except I didn't find it yesterday, it just turned up in my hand. I don't even know where the transmission relay is located, and somehow I was having a look at it while meditating? I don't think so. Someone gave it to me, and now we can't remember them."

  "Next, the scratches. I woke up yesterday, and I'd made the marks – two or three crossed off, I can't be sure. During the trip to the containment facility, you remember, I tried eight point five and five point eight aetheric frequencies, thinking that it might be a signal I could pick up. It wasn't. There are now five crossed out this morning.

  "Today I have love bites on my neck, and a mostly drunk bottle of alcohol with two glasses – one with prints that aren't mine. I know none of you were with me, and I sure didn't kiss myself on the neck. So where did all that come from, eh? From someone we've all forgotten."

  "And do you remember what we found 'City for millions,' 'All alone,' 'forgets in the dark,' and 'I cannot remember what is lost.' The ancient Corvidians, or perhaps Corvidian who made that cage, they were trying to warn us. Because in that cage there was a creature that cannot be remembered, and cannot be directly observed, and makes you forget its victims."

  "There was not anything in the cage!" screamed Astrid. "You saw the reports! You saw them!"

  "Stars above, primitives!" growled Mishka, tapping the side of her head. "Think! At least try to use those underdeveloped brains! If we are facing a creature that can alter memory and perception, then it could be in this very room and none of us would be able to see it!"

  "Then why aren't we all dead, huh?" snapped Astrid. "Not that this made up thing is real! You're just a narcissist who got drunk last night and has made her confusion everyone else's problem!"

  Mishka considered for a few moments. If it had killed whoever she had slept with in the night, they would have been with her at the time. And, creature of the Beyond or not, any fight between her and it would have at minimum put a few holes in the walls. But it hadn't. Although the room had smelt of ash and burnt metal, like…

  Mishka gulped as her memory yanked her far into the past, back when she'd been in the Ursulan Ascendancy Forces.

  Lightning crackling between her fingers before leaping across the shattered street and striking down the screaming and begging alien, adding to the already overwhelming stench of ash and lightning in the air…

  No. It hadn't killed whoever she was with.

  "We're not dead for the same reason it couldn't kill the last Corvidian that managed to trap it and write those warnings," said Mishka slowly. "It uses people to kill each other, and then it makes them forget. Maybe it's not strong enough to harm others, or maybe it can't hide when its puppeting other people – I don't know. But it makes us kill each other, and then it makes us forget."

  "You're- you're saying that we killed these people?" said Petra.

  "You didn't," said Mishka, taking a deep breath. "One of your crew killed the first person. But the others… the… four others…" Mishka exhaled. "They were killed by me."

  "What? How can-"

  "Do you remember me complaining about an ashy and metallic smell?" said Mishka.

  "Vaguely," said Charles, slowly inching away from her.

  Mishka raised a clawed hand and summoned lightning, bathing the room in a crackling blue glow for a moment before she snuffed it out. The others reeled back in shock.

  "That is the smell that is made when a person is hit by a bolt of conjured lightning," she said, a tear rolling down her cheek. "If I felt I was threatened or if I wanted to kill someone, driven into a rage maybe, Lightning is what I would use; what I… have used."

  She shook herself.

  "I smelt it in the Greenhouse on my first day here, when I went to bed the first night, then when the scratches on my arm went from five to four yesterday, once we were back from our trip, and then this morning, when I woke up after spending a night with someone whose name I can't even remember."

  She closed her eyes and took another deep, shuddering breath. It had been quite some time since she'd found someone she liked enough to be intimate with. And although she couldn't remember him, her, or hir, she was now sure she had killed them. It was strange to mourn for someone she had no recollection of, but all the same, she felt it in her old and weary heart that heady mixture of guilt and sorrow called grief.

  Grab it, stuff it in a box with all the rest, push it away…

  The others had all gone pale, and were leaning away from her.

  "You- you're a monster!" said Petra, gripping a butter knife in hir hand so hard hir green knuckles were turning white.

  "No, the monster is whatever was in the cage," said Mishka. "I do not kill people."

  Not anymore.

  "We should have told you to get lost, minute we saw you," said Astrid angrily.

  "I didn't release this creature, you did," said Mishka in an irritated voice. "But pointing blame isn't going to help us anymore than getting angry is."

  "You seem to have come out of everything just fine so far, which is more than we can say for the rest of these… these forgotten people!" said Astrid. "For all we know, you might be the monster! We only have your word that it started before you got here!"

  "And if I wanted you dead now, do you seriously think I couldn't just fry you all right where you're sitting?" shouted Mishka, losing her temper. "I am an Ursulan! A trained battlemage from a warrior race who were so fucking good at fighting wars that we killed off anyone who was even remotely a threat to us until we had no more worthy opponents.

  "I can bend space and time with my mind; I walk the universe without the need for ships; I can think of a dozen different ways that I could wipe this base away in a matter of minutes. None of you are a threat to me, and you never were – I'm trying to help you because I'm being nice!"

  Astrid was breathing heavily. Petra looked petrified. Charles was frowning.

  "Why you?" asked Charles after a moment.

  "Why me, what?" said Mishka.

  "You say you have been involved in each kill except the first," he said. "Why would such a creature be targeting you specifically?"

  Mishka tapped her foot. Tap tap, tap tap-tap. "Perhaps it can sense that I am at least partially resistant to it?" said Mishka. "That I am the most dangerous? It knows it can't take me in a fight?"

  "Hold on, we don't seriously believe this?" said Petra. "Do we?"

  "I don't think we can afford not to," said Charles, who seemed to have finally come round. "She's… she's right. I don't know why I never noticed, but three is too small for a mission like this."

  Petra gulped. "Oh shit…"

  "Alright…" said Charles, visibly trying to pull himself together. "Nobody panic. Mishka, how do we fight this thing? Stop it? If it could just make you go homicidal at any moment, why hasn't it done so?"

  "I don't know…" said Mishka, tapping her lip. Tap tap, tap tap-tap. "There must be some kind of hard limit to how many people it can influence to violence. Two, maybe? If so, we just need to stick together."

  "And then what?" said Petra. "Wait out the months that rescue will take?"

  "No… no," said Astrid. "Mishka has a ship!"

  "I don't have a ship," said Mishka. "But even if I did… I can't risk Voidwalking either. If this thing got onto a populated world, it would do what it did here there."

  Astrid deflated slightly. "Fuck," she whispered.

  "We're all going to die!" wailed Petra, putting hir face in hir hands. "She's going to go nuts, and she's going to kill us all!"

  "No one is dying," said Charles firmly. "There must be some way to fight it. We can't see it, but we can see the effects it makes – the damaged systems. Can we, I don't know, pour water on the floor and look for footprints?"

  "We haven't noticed doors opening and closing, and presumably it's been moving about," said Mishka. "It must be able to disguise its direct effects on the world from our perceptions and memories. It's not invisible, its imperceptible."

  "So basically, we're fucked?" said Astrid.

  "No, because there are clearly limits," said Mishka. "The water isn't a bad idea, but we need something where we can see its presence from a tertiary effect, rather than just a secondary one. Like the note, or the way the circuit was broken. Maybe…"

  Mishka crossed the room to the kitchen and rummaged around a for a moment before finding a large ball of corded string. She grabbed a fork and tied it to the end, and then let out some length, before beginning to spin it slowly around herself.

  "How is that going to help?" said Charles. "Even if you hit it, you won't notice – it'll be 'secondary.'"

  "But you might see me stop and have to pick it up to start swinging again," said Mishka. "That should count as 'tertiary.' Captain, can you lock down the doors?"

  "Yeah, no problem," he said, crossing the room and tapping a few buttons.

  "Lockdown engaged," said the crystalline voice of the base.

  "What if it's not physical?" asked Astrid.

  "Then, yes, we're fucked," said Mishka. "But I don't think it's intangible – it was in a cage after all. That suggests too big to fit through bars."

  Mishka slowly made her way around the room, her arm whirring around and around.

  "Anything?" she asked after a third, increasingly fast lap.

  "Nothing," said Charles.

  Petra and Astrid shook their heads.

  "Alright, then it's probably not in here," she said. "We'll go together, through the base, one section at a time, clear it like that. When we find it, we corner it, and-"

  "Warning," came a crystalline voice from the central console. "Air-shell failing."

  All around them, Mishka began to hear a faint hissing sound as air began to escape from the far from perfect seals around the windows and doors. There were enchantments that held things together to a degree, but hermetically sealed, the base was not.

  "What!?" said Charles, his hands flying over the buttons. "The- the air shell! It's gone offline!"

  "It knows we know!" wailed Petra. "It's going to suffocate us!"

  "Nobody panic!" said Charles, clearly trying hard to abide by his own instruction. "We have enough air in here to last us an hour before it starts getting bad, and we have suits through there with several hours more. And Mishka can fix anything – right?"

  "Yes… I mean, yes, an air-shell, no problem," said Mishka. Worst came to worst, she could just make a new one. Perhaps not large enough to cover the base in one hour, but enough to cover a room. "On the roof?"

  "Yes, right above us," said Charles, pointing directly up. "You'll need to go outside the access it though."

  They moved together down the habitation wing, and into the large storehouse, locking the doors behind them – although Mishka wasn't sure it would hold it, if the thing could sabotage air-shells, then it might be able to open the doors even with an agreed upon code.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  In the storehouse, however, they ran into another problem.

  The environmental suits were destroyed. The helmet's port-hole-like faceplates smashed into a million pieces, the air hoses torn to shreds, and the pressurised tanks fully open. Perhaps the creature wasn't willing to risk a direct confrontation with any of them, or perhaps it was just Mishka it was scared of, but it clearly could damage things if it needed to.

  "What do we do?" said Astrid.

  "I have my own air-shell," said Mishka, tapping her bracelet and activating it. "I can still go out."

  "You'll be out there by yourself," said Charles. "What if it attacks you?"

  "I've been alone plenty, it won't do that – it knows I'm too dangerous," said Mishka. "And there are three of you, so far it has only incited homicidal rage or whatever it does when people are in pairs. Go back to the central area, there is more air there. I'll come back when I'm done, and we can search together – find it, then kill or trap it."

  The trio looked worried, but agreed to her plan. She didn't really blame them, there were a lot of unknowns. It was only conjecture that the creature had to wait until two people were alone together, and it was clearly intelligent and just a bit desperate now that they had uncovered it. She hoped she wasn't making a mistake.

  The 'airlock,' which was far from absolutely sealed, almost knocked her off her feet when the door, only partially evacuated of atmosphere, opened. If she every found what which lazy, corner cutting idiot had done such a slapdash construction, she was going to slap them silly.

  The sun was getting low in the sky above as she clambered up the wrought iron ladder on the vertical side of the central pavilion. Although she was fairly confident it wouldn't attack her, it was eerie knowing that the thing was probably out there with her. Even though she knew that its perception manipulation had to be close to foolproof to have been totally missed, she kept on imagining that she saw things in the corner of her eyes. Shadows that might have moved, rocks of strange shapes that her mind thought might have been something worse.

  "Home base to Mishka," came Charles' voice as she reached the top of the pavilion and began to walk up the large, diagonal wooden beam towards the metal and crystalline pylon at the apex. She glanced down through one of the large windows either side of the thick wooden beam to see Charles looking up at her. "Can you hear me? What is the status of the shell?"

  "It's very badly damaged," she said, slowly walking around the object, which had been gouged and raked by vicious claws. This time It had been much less delicate, and not bothered trying to disguise its sabotage at all. Which meant Petra was right, and it must have heard that they had realised its existence. That was… not good. An imperceptible, un-rememberable monster was bad enough, but an intelligent one? That was terrifying.

  "Can you fix it?" asked Charles.

  Mishka rummaged around underneath it for a moment in the guts of the pylon, shifting shattered pieces of crystal, ripped thaumically conductive wires, melted cogs, and mangled runed wafers.

  "Yeah, I think so," she said. "It will be close though – how much air have you got left in there?"

  "Forty eight minutes," said Charles.

  "Better get to work then," said Mishka, reaching into her pocket and pulling out the engraver she had kept after fixing the Greenhouse. "Be careful, I think we can confirm Petra's theory that it knows we know about it."

  "Right… understood."

  Repairing the air-shell was rather annoying work. In part, because she had to figure out some of the crazed design choices the primitives who had constructed the thing had made, and in part because although she knew how to make all the essential components that went into an air shell, those parts didn't always play nice with the very rudimentary systems that she was trying to salvage to save time.

  Still, Mishka worked well under pressure, and she managed to overcome her tendency towards perfectionism in favour of making something that would last long enough for them to kill, or perhaps contain the creature.

  She was almost done when the comm on her bracelet pinged again.

  "Yes?" she said. "I'm almost done-"

  There was the sound of a scream and a crash through the open link.

  "It's here…" said a hoarse Charles. "Help!"

  Mishka swore and turned, looking down into the central hub through the thick glass section of the roof. She saw Charles, slumped over the central console, and next to him, some kind of dark, hideously bulbous pink, fleshy shape. Charles twitched once or twice, and then grew still-

  The hideous Thing was alone next to the central console: a little bit smaller than a person, it's slug-like fleshy pink body covered in sores. It had two, preying mantis-esque scythe-like arms, an ugly, misshapen head covered in dozens of irregularly sized, pitiless black eyes, and a huge, distended jaw full of horrible thick, flat, gnashing teeth.

  It stared up at her with its alien, black eyes. Perhaps she was imagining it, but it almost seemed like It was… mocking her?

  Then it shifted, and she followed its gaze to Astrid and Petra, who were screaming and shouting and trying to kill each other with knives from the kitchen. Of course, she'd thought it had to reveal itself in order to dominate people! It had realised there were two people alone together-

  She caught herself. There were two, but there had been three. If she couldn't remember them, then whoever the third person in there had been had died.

  "Fuck!" she swore.

  Her first impulse was to unleash a blast of lightning straight at the creature, but that would shatter the glass and kill Astrid and Petra. Also, although the Corvidians hadn't been able to beat her people, she was sure they would have tried killing it via conventional means before resorting to a cage.

  Swearing again she ran down the sloping timer and jumped, weaving power together to stop herself breaking a limb as she plummeted towards the rocky, uneven ground. Her spell slowed her speed just enough that she only staggered for a moment before breaking into a sprint back down the habitation spoke towards the 'airlock.'

  Mishka had no idea how the last Corvidian had managed to capture the creature in the cage, but if either Petra or Astrid managed to kill each other, then, if her theory held, the minute Mishka got near the survivor she would black out, kill them and then be trapped on the asteroid, unable to leave without risking letting that Thing follow her into the breach, and then, perhaps, back into another world.

  She wasn't sure of the exact limitations of creatures like that transiting too and from the Beneath, but it had clearly gotten out once before, and could maybe do so again – especially if it had someone to follow.

  She got through the airlock, and raced across the storage room. Ahead of her, the doors shut, the light above them turning from green to red.

  "Lockdown initiated," said the voice.

  "Oh no you don't," said Mishka, summoning power and unleashing a sustained blast of aetheric lightning. Metal warped and twisted, and sparks of wild magic surged from the locking mechanism as the system shuddered and died.

  She kicked the smoking and smouldering door in and rushed towards the next one. Cursing all the time. She checked her memories. Yes, there were still two of them. Not dead yet. She still had time.

  The door to the inner section was more reinforced than the first, and would take longer. She summoned more lighting and checked on the existence of the crew again.

  "Astrid and Petra. Astrid and Petra," she muttered. "Astrid and… Astrid and…"

  She froze, the magic around her hands dying as she stared at the door ahead of her.

  There was only one person behind that door, her memories told her – even as her other, 'meta' memories told her it was totally impossible. That no multi-year expedition consisted of a single lone archaeologist. There had been more, but they were dead, and now she could only remember Astrid.

  Mishka knew that the minute she went through that door, she would black out and come to alone and with the smell of ash and metal in the air, and then she would spend who knows how long trying to hunt down a creature that could not be seen nor remembered, never daring to leave the asteroid for fear it would follow her.

  Or perhaps she would grow bored and angry and callous as she had once been? She knew very well how wide her dark streak was, and no matter how hard she tried to push it down she knew it would always still be there, waiting. Maybe a few primitives wouldn't feel like too high a price to pay for her freedom after a few dozen years…

  She shook her head. It was not the time to re-litigate the past for the millionth time. Astrid was still alive, for a little while longer at least. That meant that there was a way to beat the Thing. Because there was always a path to victory – that was virtually her people's motto. They had carved themselves out a bloody pedestal at the top of the galaxy's hierarchy by always finding a way to beat any and all opponents, even those with bigger armies, and more advanced magic and technology. Her people weren't the largest or the strongest or the bravest, they were the smartest, that was their edge.

  No, she couldn't be in the same room with Astrid, not without killing her, but clearly the thing needed them to be close in order to send them both into a rage. So she'd just have to not be in the same room as Astrid. She could do that.

  There was also the fact that she knew where it was now – it was behind the locked, sealed door. That gave her a very small window to kill or trap it, necessitating nigh perfect timing and perhaps a bit of luck. But a small window existed nonetheless.

  "Astrid?" she said, tapping her bracelet and drawing out her magnifying glass, pressing it against the locking mechanism and setting it to begin breaking the encryption. "Astrid, are you there?"

  "Mishka?," replied Astrid in a shaky, confused voice a moment later. "Yes… I… I'm alone? That- that means… that means I killed someone, doesn't it? It… it must…"

  "You didn't kill them, that Thing did," said Mishka, waiting for the beep from her magnifying glass and a click of the lock going before turning and rushing back into the store-room. "Now, listen to me. You need to stay where you are, OK? The minute we get near each other, it will make me kill you. Keep the lockdown in effect until I tell you otherwise. No matter what, understand?"

  "What- what are you going to do?" said Astrid.

  "I'm going to make a deal," said Mishka, clearing her throat as she reached what she was looking for. "Well then, Thing? I know you can understand me. That's how you knew to sabotage the air shell, you knew we'd figured you out."

  Silence.

  "Come on, speak to me, let's make a deal," said Mishka, raising two fingers and conjuring a jet of superheated plasma and pressing it against the end of one of the cage's bars. "Come on! What are you afraid of? What have you got to lose?"

  There was a pause, and then another voice came through the speaker on her bracelet. It was cold like the grave, and coarse like gravel. It evoked images of cloying darkness, primal fears that her people hadn't quite managed to fully bio-alchemically engineer out of themselves in her vestigial hindbrain.

  "Why should we deal with you, Ursulan?" It said. "The last time we did so, your kind stranded us here."

  Her kind…? Had they used it as a weapon? Deployed it against the Corvidians? She'd known her people had gotten up to some unbelievably heinous things in their blood-soaked history – xenocides beyond counting, crimes for which they could never atone – but this… this seemed low. Even for them. Low, and dangerous and with the potential to massively backfire.

  "And I alone possess the means to get you off this rock," said Mishka, continuing to work. "I don't want to be stuck here anymore than you. So, what do you say – I open a portal into the Breach for you, you return home, and I let the seven people you've killed slide?"

  "You do have that power," It said. "But why would we wish to return to the Old when we have tasted the New? We enjoy this universe, we enjoy its flesh; we shall not leave it willingly."

  "Because this is the only option I'm giving you," said Mishka. "Leave peaceably, or I will spend however long it takes finding and trapping you, and then I will do a hell of a lot better a job at making sure you never get out than the Corvidian did. And you know what, I do try to be a good person, but after what you've done, after stranding me here, I think I'll probably be vindictive about it. Maybe I'll make the cage indestructible and throw you into the sun – I imagine that would be painful, even for you."

  "More like this one will come, to see why their base went silent, and then I shall have a ship," It replied. "We are patient."

  "I'll shoot it out of the sky first," said Mishka.

  "Mishka!?" came Astrid's voice. "It- I- I can see it! It's across the room from me! Oh- oh spirits, it's horrible!"

  "This one is weak, we do not need our powers to feast on it," said the Thing. "We will savour the agony, the fear. We will make you listen, Ursulan."

  Mishka made it through the top bar, and immediately moved onto the bottom. More time, she needed a bit more time.

  "Hold on!" she said. "Don't- don't hurt her!"

  "Why not? Why not, little Ursulan?" said the Thing.

  "Because I love her!" said Mishka. "And- and if you don't hurt her, I'll- I'll take you to another world."

  "Mishka, you can't!" said Astrid. "And what are you-"

  "Astrid!" hissed Mishka in an annoyed voice. Damn primitives, couldn't they understand a ploy when they heard one?

  "I- I mean- my love, you- you cannot do it!" said Astrid in what might have been the least convincing voice Mishka had ever heard, although it was mostly lost underneath the sheer terror in her tones.

  "I'm sorry, but I just can't lose you!" said Mishka.

  "The soft ones… they are weak," said the Thing, its terrible voice almost speculative. "Hmm, interesting. You care for this one? Enough to let us feast on others? Interesting… But how do we know you do not lie?"

  "I'll give you anything you want!" said Mishka, as she finished cutting the bar free. "Like, for example, the Greenhouse."

  There was a pause.

  "We do not understand," said the monster. "Why would we desire such a thing?"

  "Oh, you know, it's a very useful thing, the Greenhouse," said Mishka as she took a deep breath and prepared to do something rather stupid. She drew on her power, suspending the bar between her two palms and weaving together what could charitably be called a 'temporarily contained plasma cell.' "Its a place where you can unlock your full potential, when you're ready for it. Which I think you will be, in about… fifteen seconds."

  Golden power surged between her palms, twisting up and over and around as the bar began to spin within a lattice. Sweat beaded on her forehead as the power built. Most of the heat of the spell was pointed inwards, but no shield was perfect, and some leaked out, sparking painfully against her skin as she carefully walked back towards the central hub.

  She reached the door and waited, staring at the red light above the frame as she began to crush the melting metal within her metaphysical grip, using her arcane might to force the metal to buckle and shatter in on on itself. Her hands trembled, and she felt a stab of pain behind her eyes letting her know that she was pushing herself too hard and rapidly heading towards magical burnout trying to keep the massive energies involved contained.

  Come on Astrid, take the hint.

  It flickered green. Mishka began to count down from five as the overflow from her spell became positively scalding and the metal within finished liquefying.

  "Treachery!" snarled the creature. "We will kill the soft one!"

  She heard the faint sound of a door closing on the other side. Now or never.

  She kicked the door's control open, and the heavy reinforced wood slid back to revealing an empty room. Or, perhaps, a maybe empty room; or, better, a hopefully not empty room.

  Mishka's mind flew through some quick calculations. There wasn't that much of the super-heated metal, which meant she'd have to be precise when aiming. Aiming at something that wasn't there- no, it was there, she just couldn't perceive it.

  No more time; she introduced a flaw into the containment of her spell, aimed it, turned her face away, closed her eyes, and hoped.

  The incredibly hot, ultra-compressed metal that she had been pushing to the edge of fusion detonated outward in a conical blast of molten metal. Her bracelet, which she hadn't turned off immediately engaged emergency heat and light shields, which took the brunt of the blast before fizzling, but a wave of scalding heat still washed over her, and even with the dimmed light she could see white behind her eyelids.

  But the blazing heat and blistering light vanished as quickly as it had come, and she turned her head back to the scene to see…

  There, standing across the middle of the central hub, making for the far door, encased a perfect metal shell was the outline of the large, horrible slug-like creature with its frozen, scythe like arms, a hideous flat-toothed maw, and dozens of evil looking, spider-like eyes. Mishka had hit it dead on with the blast of metal, and although she couldn't hear anything she was willing to bet that if the creature could feel pain, then it was screaming inside its metal tomb.

  Most of the central hub had caught fire, but it was mundane and not that difficult to deal with, and it flowed across the room into her outstretched palm, dying as she closed her fist.

  "Yeah!? You thought you were a match for me!?" said Mishka, bearing her teeth. "I'm…"

  She trailed off as ahead of her she became aware of two bodies: one larger, one smaller, both blackened by the force of the heat of her blast. The larger was slumped over the control system in the centre, and must have been the one who warned her that the creature was inside the room with them. They were partly covered in metal and hideously burned.

  The second was smaller and feminine, and was on their back, blackened by the heat and with a knife through their eye. The last two killed by the creature. Two she had failed to save…

  "Fuck," said Mishka, rubbing her sweaty face. "Fuck!"

  Ahead of her, there was the sound of a door opening, and she saw Astrid hesitantly step into the room, her eyes bulging at the creature's encased form.

  "Is it- is it dead?" said Astrid.

  "I don't think anything can kill something like that," said Mishka, exhaling and sliding down the wall.

  "But we won?" said Astrid. "We're safe?"

  Mishka looked at the two dead, charred figures. Two of the seven corpses they'd doubtlessly find when they explored the base. One of whom she had clearly felt not small affection for…

  She banged her head against the wall, thinking back. Stupid, stupid, stupid – all the clues had been right there. She should have figured it out at the start of her second day! But she hadn't, and now a whole load of people were dead because stupid Mishka couldn't put two and two together like a dumb little primitive.

  "Does it look like we won?" asked Mishka bitterly.

  She rubbed her face. No, she was being too hard on herself. That thing had slain a whole city of millions and millions of people. It had messed with her head. She had done her best and, as was often the case, best sometimes came up short. It was just something she had to live with, she'd learnt that long ago. She'd saved one person, and she'd be able to make sure that thing never touched anyone ever again for as long as the stars burned.

  "Warning, air pressure reaching critical levels," slurred the console from the centre of the room, where it was encased in a thin layer of metal.

  "Come on," said Mishka, giving the trembling human woman a stained smile and offering her hand. "I can at least save you."

  A.N. This is an episodic work, structured as several standalone-ish novellas of around 15k works that string together to form a longer narrative. My is four chapters/one month ahead of other places for

  Shattered Moon, which you can read here on Scribblehub or as a free member on my .

  Lions after Slumber which is currently only up my which has the first chapter up for free members, and four additional chapters for supporters

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