“You done in there?” Sarah called.

  “Just about,” Isaac replied as he dressed himself gingerly, still sore from riding but glad that his newly-laundered robes were no longer so grungy and sweaty. From the band around his wrist, he could tell Shay had weathered the exertions better than he had; the raptor seemed quite content with the hotel’s amenities. Part of him was a little guilty for not properly caring for his riding-raptor himself, given how the importance of proper maintenance had been hammered home by his job as a janitor. People who didn’t maintain things – or people for that matter – didn’t really deserve them.

  That was a skill he’d have to pick up later, however. Being able to crash somewhere comfortable for the night was great, but it was time to head onward to the south pole. Hopefully before Mechaniacal’s surveillance found them. Isaac had seen enough of those drones for a lifetime.

  “Okay, ready to go,” he said, opening the door and stepping out into the room. Somehow, the faint scent of industrial disinfectant clung to the room, the same as hotels on the surface. Some things, it seemed, were universal.

  Sarah smiled at him from under her broad-brimmed hat, leaning into the pulp, post-goth aesthetic more than before. She’d used her talents to recolor her robe into a monochrome, black and gray composition to match her black hat and white kiseru, reminding Isaac of comics from the ‘800s. In a way it was the complete opposite of the vibrantly colored magical girl style that he knew she liked, but maybe she was saving that for a less fraught moment.

  It made his fingers itch, wanting to sketch out further ideas for her—or for his own costume, to match. He knew he wasn’t anywhere near a professional costumer, not like the metas employed by Star Central or the top-level mercenary companies, but it was still something he enjoyed. And it wasn’t like he wanted to involve himself with the so-called professionals anyway. His own clothing was less interesting, but Sarah still reached out to straighten the comm-pin on his lapel before looking him up and down and nodding.

  She offered her arm, and, somewhat charmed, he took it as he opened the door and escorted her outside. Though the pose didn’t last long, given that it was ikiski architecture and they had a ladder just beyond the short hall, though amusingly neither of them actually needed to use to get to the ground floor. Savage was already pacing the hall, his cybernetics humming softly, and grunted at them without bothering to use his voice modulator. Lia appeared a few minutes later, the moonie as unreadable as ever.

  “Breakfast and then transport,” Isaac suggested, finding himself absolutely ravenous. “And maybe find someone to show us how to make those saddles more comfortable.” Even Lia was moving a little stiffly, though that probably shouldn’t have been a surprise if she normally was at a desk job. Not to mention that Lunarians were never meant for Earth gravity.

  “Wonder if they have bacon here,” Sarah said wistfully. Food at the embassy had been with mostly local ingredients, but very Star City preparation, which had meant steak and bacon from decidedly unfamiliar but still delicious sources. Isaac chuckled and headed for the exit to their third-story hall, glancing down as he dialed his inertia to near zero before stepping off. Even so, Sarah beat him to the bottom, reforming from smoke just as he touched down. Lia and Savage had to take the long way, but the moment those two reached the bottom, a pair of the twenty-foot types approached from seemingly nowhere.

  It seemed entirely unfair that multi-ton reptiles could be so stealthy, especially when they had extra bulk in the form of emerald and sapphire augments that looked like armor, integrated into their scales and forming a crest across their heads like a helmet about to be deployed. Some sort of genuine soldier, in other words, and to his inexperienced eye they were a slightly different build and look from the ones he saw in Borealis.

  “Heck,” he muttered, remembering how so many interactions between ikiski involved violence. The towering soldiers looked like they could effortlessly turn any of them into paste, superpowers or not. He nudged Shay through the bracelet, hoping that she could navigate her own way out of the raptor stable, since it looked like they might need to move quickly.

  One of the soldiers warbled something at Lia – the translation spell seemed to have worn off overnight – and moved forward with uncanny grace. Isaac lurched sideways, grabbing onto Lia’s arm as he shoved as much inertia as he could into her, something he never would have dared to try before but seemed absolutely necessary now. Her arms moved in slow motion, but that didn’t stop runes from lighting up and generating a plane of force just in front of her.

  The ikiski’s arm smashed through the defensive magics like a spun-sugar window, the entire situation giving Isaac a flashback to when he’d been accosted by two supers when he was eating lunch. The sudden attack, the mad scramble to put up defenses. The hope that a completely improvised plan would be enough.

  Apparently, it was. That, or the ikiski was deliberately pulling his punches, because the fist hit Lia’s chest with a peculiar wooden sound, and stopped dead. A click and a hum heralded Savage’s more serious weapons powering up, blasters sliding from seams in his cybernetic armor and aiming themselves at the massive ikiski. Sarah’s smoke coiled around them, the tense moment stretching out, before the towering lizardman stepped back and warbled something at them.

  Isaac divested the extra inertia he’d shoved into Lia, recognizing that she could probably not even breathe given that her whole body was resisting any kind of change, and stepped back. She glanced sideways at him for a moment, expression unreadable.

  “We will discuss this later,” she said, before more runes lit, flashing over her silver skin in a pattern he vaguely recognized. The translation spell, which flashed out to him and Sarah.

  “What do you want?” Lia directed the brusque question at the pair of lizard-men, though it was almost a rhetorical question. Anyone could guess that the authorities had taken interest in the surfacer refugees. Whether that was good or bad remained to be seen. The local government could easily hasten their path to the south pole and the surface, or just as easily try and keep them away.

  “Great King Zys requires your attendance.” Though the translation spell didn’t really work word for word, that was about what Isaac extracted from the rumbling reply. There were nuances, but Great King was very clear.

  “Weren’t we told that Great Kings were something that we shouldn’t meet?” Isaac muttered to Sarah, flexing his hands as he considered angles and exits.

  “Yeah,” Sarah said. “And I trust Gratin a lot more than some random goons.”

  “Do you think they realize we can probably bust out of whatever holding cell or transport they put us in?” Isaac asked, and that question wasn’t rhetorical. None of them had a chance against the crystaltech-enhanced giants towering over them, not in raw power, but between the four of them they had all kinds of capabilities that weren’t raw power.

  By herself, Sarah was impossible to keep prisoner. With his abilities, her capacity to turn to smoke might well extend to the rest of them, and that was ignoring what he could do by himself. He’d busted out of Star Central, albeit the minimum-security part of it, and that was before he had started tapping into the metaphysical abilities. He wasn’t sure it would make sense to, for example, make it easier to change the state of being a prisoner, but if he could that would lead down all kinds of avenues. There would be consequences he couldn’t control, and that was one of the big reasons he was hesitant. In hindsight, he had to wonder how much of what had happened back in Star City was a monkey’s paw result of his own inertia, setting things into motion.

  “Probably not,” she muttered back, of course not invoking the translation spell. It would have been the height of stupidity to talk about such things right in front of the people who had so thoughtfully invited them along—assuming they didn’t understand the language of the Five City Alliance to begin with.

  Shay trotted out of the underground stables, flanked by Astoria and Lia’s raptor—whose name he hadn’t yet gotten but was probably something distinctly lunarian. Through the band on his wrist he felt a certain amount of bloodlust and eagerness for conflict that hadn’t shown up in their prior romp through the jungle, but unfortunately for them he didn’t think there would be too much fighting.

  “Go with them now, escape later?” Isaac muttered into his comm-pin, including all of them as their riding mounts arrived. He reached up to scratch under Shay’s jaw, wincing slightly as the motion pulled sore muscles that had only been made more tender by his lunge to Lia’s side. Part of him was almost sick with nerves, contemplating who-knew-what kind of handling from an utterly alien system. The other part was getting ready for violence, or at least some use of his powers, gathering himself up even if there was nothing for him to do just yet.

  “Ask if they’ll give us breakfast first,” Sarah said, more than a little grumpy. He had to admire how unfussed she was about being confronted with armed personnel—but then, she had run with gangs for much of her life. She probably was used to posturing, and in ways he couldn’t imagine.

  “Under the circumstances it might be an advantage to allow the custody,” Lia said, obviously not letting the translation flow the other way. “We are lacking in basic supplies and knowledge.” She was hungry and still tired, was what Isaac figured from her words, and he couldn’t disagree. Sure, they could probably escape from the pair, even as powerful as they were, but that’d only mean double the amount of force at the next settlement they found. Assuming someone didn’t hunt them down in the wilderness, like Mechaniacal had.

  In fact, allowing these ikiski to spirit them away further into the Deep Kingdoms might throw Mechaniacal off their trail. Of the two forces, it was the supervillain tinker that worried Isaac more. Maybe he was wrong about it, but between a Deep Kingdom power that didn’t wield any forces on the surface, and a surface power that could send scouts into the Deep Kingdom, he’d prefer the demonstrably lesser threat.

  “Easy for you to say, you don’t look like one of their pets,” Savage growled, gesturing at the riding raptors. “No telling what they’ll want to do with me.”

  “Treat you the same as us, if they know what’s good for them,” Isaac said, with more than a little sympathy for Savage. Not that he’d ever been in that exact situation, but he’d definitely run into people who treated him as a second-class citizen. Whether that was because he was a dreg, or just because he was a janitor.

  “Then we shall go you,” Lia said to the massive soldiers, who had at least been polite enough to let them discuss things among themselves. More than most law enforcement would have on the surface, though admittedly there was some sway for being foreign nationals. Not that Isaac liked it; he had that same half-sick feeling that he’d suffered through when he was picked up by Mocker at the diner and then driven to Star Central. In a way, it seemed that history was repeating itself — but if that were true, he really didn’t want to see what the equivalent to Gloryfall was.

  One of the big ikiski warbled a response, which the translation spell captured. They were, it seemed, being allowed to use their mounts. Not that a denial would have stopped Isaac. He didn’t feel invulnerable or anything, just stubborn, and unwilling to leave Shay behind. Mounting the crystalline wing-stairs up into Shay’s saddle, he nudged her to be line with Astoria, looking at Sarah and tapping the comms pin to make sure they were ready in case they got separated. She nodded and double-checked hers in turn.

  It didn’t matter if they were separated, not so long as they were even vaguely nearby. He doubted that the ikiski had any idea that they had the comm-pins, especially since the presentation James had intended to make on the new technology had been interrupted by events. Glancing over at Lia and Savage, he reached up and clicked the pin in the same pattern that Justice for Hire used, checking the channel. A moment later it clicked in return, reporting with the familiar signatures.

  Satisfied enough that they could coordinate if necessary, he steered Shay to follow the pair of oversized ikiski, who called their own mounts out. Two massive, heavily armored riding lizards he realized were actually Tyrannosaurus Rexes. Massive bipedal, crystaltech-augmented mounts scaled for something over three times the size of the average human. Just their breathing sounded like the idling of some immense industrial machinery, and the slitted eyes surveyed them with uncanny intelligence. Given how smart Shay seemed to be, he had to imagine these even more highly augmented beasts were as bright as any human.

  Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

  Mounting up, one of the soldiers cleared the way simply by stepping forward. The mere presence of the rex in the street stopped traffic, while the second one only needed to take a step to loom behind them. A fore-and-aft escort was odd, to Isaac’s mind, since it meant that there was nothing to stop them from going sideways, but he had the feeling there were layers to what was going on that he didn’t understand. Not that he cared too much, as he wasn’t intending to do more than take advantage of their hospitality.

  He didn’t know much about the Great Kings, but he was pretty sure a small settlement on the outskirts of the wilderness didn’t have one. They’d be moving, and possibly a greater distance than they could have managed on their own. Escaping from another city like Borealis might be harder, but with Sarah’s illusions and his own ability to give identities a kick, it was entirely possible.

  Part of him was worried that these were Bulwark’s thoughts, not Isaac’s. He’d been careful about how much he invested in his alternate ego, but after all the cycling of his power he couldn’t completely know whether his cover was affecting him or not. Bulwark would want to protect his fellows, but so would Isaac. It was what any good person did, and Isaac’s abilities meant he had an obligation to use them.

  It was something he couldn’t worry too much about, given the circumstances. Just a lingering concern in the back of his head as the four of them were escorted along the road, the tyrannosaurs ahead and behind clearing the street of any smaller ikiski. Shay rumbled something that Isaac could only interpret as annoyance, and he rubbed at her neck as she hurried along in the wake of the deceptively long steps of the triple-sized ikiski mounts. It seemed they were headed for one of the larger, outer buildings, though compared to Borealis there was nothing built for the scale of the twenty-foot types.

  Once they got closer, it was easy to tell what exactly their goal was. The peculiar Deep Kingdom teleportation infrastructure was quite memorable, the arrangement of panels and the massive amethyst spire that pointed off into the distance. It was canted at an angle, and following the invisible line it drew in the air he thought he could barely make out one of the ikiski cities on the upward-curving horizon, hundreds of miles away.

  On one hand, he wasn’t sure he liked the idea of being shoved deep into potentially hostile territory, but on the other, it was hundreds of miles closer to their goal. They’d probably be taking such teleporters regardless of the details, and at least this way they had a chance to see one in action.

  He reached up to fiddle with the comms pin; it was supposed to have a recording function, but the thing was so tiny that actually starting the recorder was finnicky. But he’d seen the first teleporter run by an artificial, technological speaker system, so if he could record this version of whatever song made the teleporter run, they might be able to use it themselves.

  The big guys had to squeeze in to the teleporter platform, taking up more space than the four of them together, the rexes grumbling at each other in short, earth-shaking basso thrums. The pair fell silent as the crystalline panels lowered; pollucite, spodumene, villiaumite, and barite. Gemstones Isaac wouldn’t have been able to name prior to his jaunt in the Deep Kingdom, but were obvious enough now. The panels locked into place around their group, the giant ikiski whistling and warbling to activate the crystaltech, colors cycling in a strobing effect as they were moved from one place to another.

  The gemstones shifted, taking on tones of ruby, augelite, morganite, and orthoclase before opening again. The scents were different, redolent jungle giving way to an air full of the smells of cooking food, meats and exotic spices that made his stomach growl audibly. Sarah snorted, reclining on Astoria with her kiseru sticking out of the corner of her mouth.

  “Ask them if they can get us whatever smells so damn good,” she asked Lia, waving an imperious hand in the direction of the obvious food stalls. It was clearly a bit of an act, but he could see she was getting into the swing of things, acting like a super rather than someone in the vague custody of a foreign power. He’d seen for himself during life in the foster home that even feigned confidence did a lot for people, both internally and externally.

  Lia shot her a dubious look but did translate, the spell rendering out whistles and warbles. The lead rex glanced back and rolled its eyes, which if nothing else confirmed how smart it was, and the ikiski rumbled a reply. Someone would be sent to bring food and drink once they reached their destination, which was a little bit encouraging. Though he still didn’t know why a Great King wanted to see them; he could guess, especially if Mechaniacal’s drones were poking around the Deep Kingdoms, but it was still just speculation.

  Isaac cast longing glances at the big skewers of sizzling meat as the ikiski escorted them away from what seemed to be a commercial area and to one of the larger conical buildings, one that didn’t seem too different from any others at first glance. Only when they got closer were the subtle touches of heavier doors and crystaltech projectors obvious; either a jail or just some sort of VIP house arrest compound.

  “Last chance before we have to bust out,” Isaac remarked, but his stomach growled again. As mundane as it was, getting something to eat and drink was probably worth the risk. He hadn’t had anything since the previous day, and didn’t have any knowledge of how to catch and prepare anything in the wilds — where they might be forced to stay, to keep ahead of lizard-people authorities. It made him consider extending their ikiski disguises, despite the risks involved.

  It was true that they couldn’t really act like proper ikiski, but Isaac knew the way Star City worked, and he wouldn’t have thought twice about a group of weirdos wandering around, so long as they weren’t being aggressive. There were weirdos everywhere, and while some of them were dangerous, others were harmless, and it wasn’t worth trying to figure out which was which if they were merely passing by. Between Sarah’s illusions and his ability to make the disguises more real, for lack of a better term, they might be able to operate right under the noses of the Great Kings. At least for long enough to reach the south pole.

  Like the hotel, there were separate stables behind their own protective crystaltech doors and integrated amenities, which made Isaac feel a little silly for needing to mount up for maybe a hundred feet of total travel. He swung off Shay again, patting the raptor reassuringly as he felt her push an inquisitive feeling through the bracelet. One way or another he’d be coming for her relatively soon.

  That confidence was dented a bit as the two rexes were stabled nearby, as, oddly, Isaac thought those two were more dangerous than the ikiski giants. It might just due to them looking more dangerous, considering their size and feral nature, and given their bulk and the crystalline augmentation the larger ikiski sported they could probably go toe to toe with most supers. But those things were terrifying, and Isaac had learned to trust his gut.

  The pair of twenty-foot ikiski warbled at them, instructing them into a suite of rooms that was very clearly secured, given the thickness of the doors and the lack of any windows. More subtle implications came with the sudden cessation of outside sound and smell, replaced by a cool, sanitized, faintly perfumed atmosphere and scrupulously clean furnishings of the appropriate scale for them. The only thing off was the ceiling and doors were made for the much larger ikiski, implying a lot about the purpose of the place.

  The pair left them alone, the doors closing and energy humming as fields of crystalline force layered themselves over the doors. He appreciated the privacy, but it seemed a poor decision to Isaac’s mind. He was pretty sure that the standard procedure for taking prisoners was to hold them separately. Either he’d misread the situation, or there was something more going on, up to and including a level of confidence in their own power such that they didn’t care if the surfacers conspired.

  Sarah groaned and flopped into a couch-like piece of furniture, and Isaac joined her. Lia took a nearby chair, while Savage took the carpet with a grumble. Isaac did feel sorry for the cyber-raptor; there wasn’t much furniture that was designed for him. He glanced around and, since nobody else seemed ready to speak, broached the subject.

  “I’m pretty sure we can get out of here easily enough if you can get your smoke out. We don’t want to meet the Great King, I don’t think. Any of you know exactly what they’re like?”

  “Yeah, there’s ventilation,” Sarah said, waving her hand at the ceiling. “So that’s good. Great Kings, huh? They’re huge. Office-building large. I think I heard that Glorybeam met one directly, and possibly Administrator Ike? But that’s about all.”

  “Guess there’s no mistaking them, then.” He’d had a hazy thought that maybe Great King Zys would be there incognito, but unless he was masquerading as part of the skyline they would be headed deeper into foreign territory. Something that would make escape more difficult, so the current pseudo-jail was the best place to stage an escape.

  “You’re not bothered with following my lead?” Isaac looked from Lia to Savage, suddenly aware that he’d just been planning things out, not asking if either of the supers who had far more experience than him had ideas or interests. In fact, he wasn’t sure why he was so confident himself, save for perhaps Bulwark ought to be. His personas couldn’t give him any new abilities or knowledge, but could definitely give him unearned confidence.

  “Bubs is usually the one who makes plans,” Savage said with a yawn, tail twitching irritably against the carpet. “And we all know how to fight.”

  “I am usually at a desk at JFH,” Lia volunteered. “Field work is different.”

  “Face it, you’re stuck with leadership,” Sarah drawled, pointing her kiseru at him in amusement as she swiveled sideways to drop her legs in his lap and recline against the side of the couch. “So what’s the plan, man?”

  “They probably can’t understand what we’re saying, even if they’re listening in,” Isaac said, running his fingers over the beginning of stubble on his chin before dropping his hand to rest on Sarah’s knee. “But I recorded the teleportation theme song, so hopefully we can use that. I figure, Sarah can disguise us all as ikiski — Savage, she can just make your cybernetics look like crystaltech. Then we just slip into the city, poke around a little bit, and take the teleporter to as close to the south pole as we can.”

  “After breakfast, though,” Sarah said, half-hopefully.

  “I don’t feel at all bad about taking advantage of their hospitality if they’re going to feed us,” Isaac agreed. “Getting arrested kind of removes any goodwill I had.”

  “You think we can escape so easily?” Lia asked, her skepticism obvious even despite moonie faces not working quite the same as human ones.

  “Between the four of us? Easily,” Isaac said. “Though most of my plans rest on Sarah,” he said, patting Sarah’s legs where they lay on his lap. She merely smiled and inclined her head, smoke drifting about her face. “I can augment her powers a bit, enough to get us out of here and keep us hidden.”

  “What exactly are your powers, anyway?” Savage asked pointedly. “I know it’s rude to ask but everything we’ve seen is really vague. It does far too much, to the point where I’d think you were making it up as you went along.” Isaac wasn’t certain of Savage was accusing him of sandbagging or being some kind of extradimensional visitor in disguise, but it was fair that from the outside his power had a hugely disparate set of effects.

  “Well…” Isaac grimaced. In general he didn’t want to make it public, but under the circumstances it was fair enough that his fellow travelers would want to know what he was capable of. “It’s a bit tricky. I can control resistance to change. Normally that’s just physical inertia, like when I was Ravdia. But I’ve started branching out into the metaphysical, too.”

  “That explains much,” Lia said, watching him with an unnerving intensity. “That it managed to affect me directly, despite my protections. And that it lingers without an active power. I wonder if — no. Hm.” She fell silent, runes on her scalp flashing now and then in a quick staccato, as if demonstrating her thinking process.

  “Like I said, it’s a bit tricky,” Isaac told her, not additionally mentioning that his changes were permanent. That was another layer that he didn’t feel like getting into. “So, making us easier for Sarah to turn into smoke, to escape. Harder for our disguises to waver, or for random interactions to change them. Not perfect, not even that potent, since I’m pretty sure Savage is stronger than me even with the most I can invest. But tricky, and that counts for a lot.”

  “I doubt they have designed anything to account for that kind of power, let alone in combination with the rest of us,” Savage said. “But as you say, it is not direct force projection. We are agreed that we’re not going to fight any of these ikiski directly?”

  “Not unless there’s something extreme,” Isaac agreed. “I hate super-fights.”

  “No argument here,” Sarah agreed. “Some of these people remind me of Dad. Or even Blacktime’s folks. Those are not the types you mess with. They aren’t superheroes, some of them aren’t even really supervillains. They’re just killers.”

  The conversation wound its way onward for a few more minutes before a musical tone came from the door and a section of it opened. A tiny raptor, perhaps half Savage’s size, scurried through. On its barding it bore saddlebags with steaming boxes and icy bags, bundled up for transport. A second one followed, the two of them scurrying over to the table at one side of the room. They chirped at each other, using their foreclaws to unhook their cargo and deposit it on the table, before scurrying back out with hardly a look at the four of them.

  “Dino delivery,” Sarah observed, the neutral – and illusionary – expression on her face at odds with the gleeful tone of her voice. “Let’s eat!”

  As small a thing as it was, the food demonstrated to Isaac that he wasn’t going to last if they had to go into the wilderness for any length of time. He hadn’t realized how ravenous he was, and had to actively restrain himself from tearing into the packaging as the smell of unfamiliar spices and roasted meat filled the air. Spreading the food out on the table, there were a number of different cubed meats threaded on some kind of – to judge from the pictographic instructions on the box - edible cord. Each one had a different kind of sauce or spice mixture.

  The bowls were easier. They were some kind of half-frozen drink, sweet and fruity shaved ice, because of course reptiles didn’t use the same kind of cups that humans did. The entire spread was a neat bit of culture that made Isaac wish he could actually be there as a tourist rather than a refugee and renegade.

  It was essentially all meat, with the only vegetables present being the edible rope – at least, he thought that was a vegetable – and the occasional crisp-crunchy something that seemed more for texture than anything else. The only spice mixture he didn’t like was an odd sour-bitter char that he was happy enough to leave to Savage.

  The delivery dinosaurs had brought more than enough, with a couple meals worth left over after they were finished. Isaac and Sarah packed those into one of the remaining boxes, which Savage secured to his armor with a bit of tactical webbing. Swallowing the last of the half-melted fruit ice, Isaac looked at the other three, pushing aside the nervousness that threatened to ruin the enjoyment of his breakfast.

  “Ready to break out?”

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