As a fan of cinema of all types, I was pleased by the timing as I made my ascent from the river to a loading nozzle that was resting near the surface of the pier.

  Scaling the piling took more effort than I had predicted, the projection of Sewer Teeth I was inhabiting not well suited for the task. But that gave the crew of the helicopter time to spot me and shine a spotlight on me. I felt the photons as they fshed across my back, while I hugged wood. And I imagined what that would look like from their perspective.

  I had an interesting adaptation that helped me make the climb. At least a little. To prepare myself for the possibility of being swallowed, I’d manifested little sharp proboscides in every pore of my hide, instead of hairs. Normally, they’d remain hidden in the yers of simuted epidermis and fat. But pressure would cause them to protrude, and I could also maneuver them with the same muscur actions I used to undute my body. They dug into the wood of the piling and helped to keep me from slipping into the river. They would also help me move through the chutes and pipes above me.

  Their primary purpose was to help me eat Chord faster than he might be trying to eat me.

  Still, it took me several minutes to make it to the surface of the pier and start galumphing over to the easiest chute to enter, which ended about three meters off the ground.

  The one nearest me came all the way to the concrete sb that the supports for the structure were bolted to. I could have used that, but I would have had to bend the metal up with my snout and then I’d have to contort even more to fit through the then twisted and creased chute. And now that the helicopter had its spotlight on me in the deepening dusk, I wanted to give its crew a little show.

  It certainly had humans on it, who were probably recording the event on all sorts of instruments, and that would lead to some interesting and arming developments ter. Probably something Chord was hoping to leverage, I imagined. But a gnce at it using my monster senses also showed that it was host to several minor enthalpiphages, as helicopters often are, numerous epialivores in the crew, and what I guessed was a teratovore btantly pretending to be a human being.

  I was still not occupying the Strands, and so I would not trigger anyone’s sense of them, like Sewer Teeth might have done. The only clues to the monster I was stalking that something was up were the sounds of the helicopter and the small procession of military trucks coming down the drive to the silo.

  The monsters might have been communicating with each other somehow, but I didn’t detect anything like that, and Milk had taught me how.

  There were definitely hints of anticipation coming from the emanants all around me, though I wasn’t close enough to truly feed on any of their emotions yet. The monster in the grain silo was alert to the action, even if it might not know what was going on.

  The pn was for me to confront it and draw it out into the open where I could see if I had what it took to take it down on my own. And, if not, then Cassy would join in. I thought I might do this by suddenly squeezing most of myself into the strands when I was up next to it, and then running.

  It was at the point where I was stretching up toward the nozzle above me that I started to have second thoughts about the whole thing. Well, more second thoughts than determination. I’d had second thoughts since formuting the pn, but I’d been deliberately holding them back. I thought I’d considered them and given them plenty of voice in shaping our schemes and contingency pns, but I was wrong.

  Bancing on my fluke and bracing my cwed flippers on the supporting girder, I had the tip of my snout inserted firmly in the human-shoulder wide chute above me, when I momentarily froze with indecision. That portion of me was enough to start unduting my hide and squeezing up into the chute, but every wavicle of my being seemed to want to just run to the other side of the world. Or maybe find a nice rocket to hitch a ride on to spend some time in orbit. If I truly was an enthalpiphage, if for no other reason than that I was now a child of Milk, then I should be able to make that work.

  I could spend some time in a remote pce absorbing absurd amounts of energy, and regain what I’d lost, at least.

  Part of what threw me for a loop was that I could see that this Supraliminal in the grain silo wasn’t even the size that just one of those flying boars should have been after sharing equal portions of my energy.

  That meant that that energy was somewhere else out there, and not where I could recover it. And if Chord had taken it for himself, facing him would be particurly dangerous, since that would combine my old strength with his cunning. I had no idea how old he was, after all, but he seemed much older than the boars, and probably older than Felicity, at least.

  And if I were him, I would have taken that energy.

  Also, I hadn’t gotten a signal from Cassy, nor sensed her in any way.

  Though, she was probably staying away because of the military presence.

  A sudden pinch in my left haunch got me moving again. And as I moved, I felt two more, and just barely noticed the repeated report of a rifle over the sounds of the vehicles around me. Even before that part of my scraped against the side of the chute, dislodging them, I could tell that I’d been hit with darts.

  Just like Sewer Teeth, I wasn’t using eyes, but I did have a sense of vision that I’d concocted via other means that worked better than the limited range of vision of humans that I’d been imitating before. It was simir to when I had been a cloud of eyes. I saw the shape of the projectiles as they hit. And I could feel the fluids that the darts had pumped into me flow and diffuse through my odd projected physiology, doing absolutely nothing.

  I’d been startled into running from the chopper, even though it posed no real threat to me, and now I acted as if I was once again committed. I thought to myself that I might as well learn everything I could about the situation, and that meant investigating the bait.

  So I wormed my way up the chute at a very satisfying pace, watching the dimly lit opening above me grow bigger as the one below me grew smaller. And when I reached the top, I squeezed past a rge and horizontally aligned auger to find myself in a covered work area that amounted to a long and thin building atop the girder scaffolding of the dock. The auger was set in a u-shaped, open topped chute that ran from one end of the building to the other, with machine controlled gates at each of the vertical loading chutes. A walkway, to the right of this from where I was oriented, must have allowed workers to observe and operate the machinery.

  The walls were lined with windows that began halfway up the walls and extended to the ceiling, and it was dark enough out now that the helicopter was shining a searchlight in through them at me, illuminating the space I was in.

  It was moving to try to get a better angle, probably so that the gre of the light didn’t bounce back at it from the gss in the windows.

  And this brief moment of rest and its illusion of safety gave me a moment of increased crity.

  I noticed the dust that covered everything. I saw it dancing in the light where I’d disturbed it with my movements and presence. The pce still smelled of musty old grain, even though it had been over a decade since its use, but also of oil and metal. I heard almost everything going on in the property outside the building, but muffled now that I did not have direct contact with the outer surface of the tube I’d been in. And I saw that I’d have to go down to the far end to find the right chute to navigate to the silo bin I wanted to get at.

  But I also saw the whole situation for what it was, what had led up to it, and my pce in it, so much more vividly.

  I wasn’t going to get that feeding frenzy I was maybe hoping to trigger. That wouldn’t happen.

  There was too much control being exerted locally. Not just over the popution of the emanants, but also humanity.

  From the very start, from that initial wink, Felicity had been maniputing me on behalf of Chord, who had been working with Fate Vine to control Gresham completely in preparation for a broader regional move.

  And to do that, Chord had been operating with the permission of the Overlords of Portnd, hiding much from them, in order to remain safe. I knew this because I was now also Fate Vine. Milk had left me those memories, or enough of them that I could see all of this clearly.

  If I let myself, I knew almost entirely what his pn had been, and how Fate Vine thought Chord would act now.

  And I saw, too, that since this was a trap set for Sewer Teeth, that if I approached it like Sewer Teeth at all, I’d be caught in it.

  Cassy, who was now also Felicity in the same way I was also Fate Vine, hadn’t given me her signal, which meant that we hadn’t crossed paths, and that I was on to my pn C. And my pn C sucked. It didn't actually exist.

  I felt a pang of worry that Cassy had been hurt, and almost berated myself for letting me help in this foolish endeavor. Except that I’d already come to the conclusion that there had been no way to stop her from helping without hurting her somehow myself. And, I had felt I needed the help.

  Still, it was all a bad idea. A really, really bad idea.

  I was smaller than I had been in millions and millions of years. I was weak and vulnerable. But I also had some abilities, flexibility, and a whole bunch of knowledge that none of the other emanants around me had.

  The most important thing I could do was anything and everything to preserve that knowledge, so that ter I could use it to do more than just survive.

  And what I was in the middle of now looked a lot more like a foolhardy and rash act of sabotage, performed in a false sense of desperation.

  But now I was in the middle of it.

  I suspected that Milk had also maniputed me, and that I was doing exactly what it wanted me to do for some reason it had not divulged. I was, after all, at this point, its creation.

  It had eaten the st of me to preserve my memories, and then cimed to have given me all of those memories when it recreated me. It hadn’t even implied that it hadn’t given me more than that, such as false memories, and it hadn’t occurred to me to ask.

  But while I was thinking about this, I found myself moving down the walkway anyway.

  Which was… arming.

  I’ve had plenty of times where I’d felt somewhat apart from myself, as if I was watching myself do things. I’ve imagined, once I’d learned of the human concept of a subconscious mind, that I probably had one, too. But in this particur circumstance, after everything I’d recently been through, while questioning the validity of my own existence, experiencing it now was especially disconcerting.

  I wanted to take the time to analyze my situation more and pn my next moves better, but I wasn’t giving myself the opportunity to do that.

  Instead, I found myself working my way through the chutes and ducts of the complex, past more augers and gates, valves, and such, to come to the top of the silo bin the bait was residing in. It was a top loading and unloading bin, with an auger running down the middle of it to remove the grain that it had once stored.

  I managed to stop myself before reaching the end of the duct I was in.

  I had full lucidity again. Less falsely acute awareness but full control of my actions. And I had a choice.

  The old pn was to do a hit and run. Basically sp the other monster and then dash away. A really stupid idea.

  If I could push myself to run now, to find a pce to hide and regain my power, I could reconfigure myself to do some pretty amazing and powerful things I’d learned from Fate Vine.

  But I was here, now.

  I had the opportunity to learn something more.

  This close to the other monster, who seemed to still be waiting for something while radiating the simple emotion of anticipation, I could examine it in more detail.

  I saw how it filled the Strands almost perfectly evenly, and how its presence in the monster realm was rger than necessary. Unless I poked my nose over the lip of the chute I was in, I couldn’t see how it filled the silo bin, however. It smelled like a teratovore, but I didn’t know if that was one of my genuine senses or just a hunch I had. And there was something else about it that felt odd, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  I didn’t have any fingers at the moment, anyway.

  In my current existence, I was a child of Milk. I had inherited its set of abilities, and what it could adapt to being. And, although I’d tried to reconfigure myself to be what I’d been before, plus some new abilities, I just didn’t know what my actual limitations were anymore, or if I was remembering anything correctly.

  I couldn’t trust myself.

  Were my long set of memories telling me I usually ran in times like this mine, or was that something that Milk had given me? Was my impulse to charge right in regardless of what I was thinking something that Milk had given me? Or was it something I’d always had that was now unfettered by some governing trait that Milk had withheld?

  And while I thought I knew which memories I had were actually Fate Vines, I couldn’t be certain. Did any of my current behavior come from it, even if I thought I was fighting those impulses and reflexes?

  I couldn’t really get any reliable information from what I already knew. I needed to learn more to help me figure things out.

  And here I was, surrounded by emanants and human military agents, facing a monster that was too small to have been more than a tiny portion of my former self, and yet that dwarfed me in my current state.

  This left me with one final, reasonably safe thing I could do to gather information here before moving on.

  “Do you talk?” I asked the other monster.

  I could feel its emotion switch from anticipation to determination.

  It spoke, “No.”

  theInmara