With my heart pulsing like a siren, I pawed at my corset where my ice picks should’ve been. I was defenseless without a weapon and useless as a ghost magnet since I couldn’t invite any more spirits inside. At least I had my chains, though I’d learned on Mayvel just how easily those could be yanked from my scalp.

We followed the trail of death down a hallway past several closed doors, the noise of the seemingly disinterested crowd of space travelers fading behind us. I mapped our progress in the periodic table map in my mind since we’d likely need to make a quick getaway, if we happened to survive. Poh scanned the names on the plaques beside the doors while I threw glances over my shoulder to see if anyone followed us. The floor dipped down steadily, leading us to the bowels of a haunted space station.

Around the next corner, we slid to a stop. I gasped. Blinked. Tried to plug my head into what I’d half expected, but never wanted to see.

Blood painted the entire length of the hallway, had even splashed onto the ceiling. Mangled piles I didn’t keep my gaze on too long lay slumped along the walls.

“Holy fuck,” Poh whispered.

Crispin deposited what he’d eaten on the floor, his hand braced on the wall and smearing the blood-covered paint white again.

A male’s shouts erupted from somewhere farther along the maze of hallways, scraping sharp needles up my back. The sound knocked Poh back a few steps, and she whipped her head around to connect her panicked gaze with mine.

“He’s dead,” Crispin said, his voice almost a whimper. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and straightened, his lightning eyes brimming tears. “Whoever you’re looking for is already dead. We need to go. We need to get—”

“No. We can’t. We walked into a trap, Crispin. I’m…I’m sorry.” I took a steadying breath that did nothing to calm my nerves and slogged through the muck toward the nearest door on the left. If we’d gone farther down the hallway, I was pretty sure we’d find more of the same. “Look for a weapon.”

At the touch of a button on the side panel, the door popped open. I glanced behind me to be sure Poh and Crispin followed. Poh snatched Crispin’s shoulder and skated him forward, ensuring safety in forced numbers.

Frosted glass cubicles and larger offices took up the wide space, spotless compared to the hallway except our bloodied footprints on the iron-colored floor behind us. The air was colder in here, pinching my lungs with every inhale. We fused ourselves together as we searched offices and desks for signs of life or something that could be used as a weapon. Crispin found a golf club, which he clung to in front of his body and murmured what sounded like a prayer into its metal.

As we moved, the lights on the high ceiling flickered. I stuck one of my chains in my mouth, but it hardly gave off a zip of energy. Hopefully it was sufficient to attract enough electromagnetic energy to shield me. With the violent deaths that had happened here, there were likely a large number of malicious ghosts who would find me if my chain wasn’t enough. For good measure, I poked another one inside too.

We headed right down a narrow path between cubicles and offices but stopped when the lights overhead shrank like dying stars until there was barely a spark.

We froze, huddled together. I sucked harder on my chains, my blood raging between my ears.

To our right down another narrow path that led toward the hallway, a dark, massive shape loomed outside a frosted glass door. Saelis. A scream welled in my chest and hung there, petrified.

Poh dragged me backward behind a cubicle wall and down to all fours, but not Crispin, who shrugged out of her grasp. He rocked back on his heels, his mouth hanging open, his hands jerking at his sides as he stared at an office chair. It rolled and rocked out of a cubicle in front of us into the aisle, seemingly by itself.

As the frosted glass door creaked open, the chair crashed to a stop against another cubicle wall.

Poh made a mad grab for Crispin, but he backed away. A stream of urine darkened his pants down one leg to splash the top of his shoe. He spun and lunged for the direction we’d just come, taking the golf club with him.

A terrible screech sounded from the direction of the open door, followed by heavy thuds that vibrated the floor under my hands and knees.

Poh hauled me backward past another cubicle and in and around its wall. We pressed our backs against it, her hand never leaving my shoulder to cast me with her invisibility, and waited.

The Saelis thundered into the center of the room where we’d just been, less than five feet away from us. I crushed my hands to my mouth and stilled everything but my deafening heartbeat. Out of the corner of my eye, Poh squeezed her eyes shut as a slight tremble shook through her frame.

The Saelis’s claws clicked across the floor as it moved deeper into the room. We could sneak behind his back and escape through the doorway where it had come from. Where there could possibly be more Saelis. Or we could stay here forever.

I flashed a look at Poh and jerked my thumb behind us. Poh slowly peeled herself away from the cubicle wall, her body coiled to move. Fast. She zipped her gaze around the wall then nodded at me, her hand on my shoulder.

My six senses ratcheted up to high alert. I slinked after her, each touch of my tiptoes as soft as I could make them. I bit down hard on my lip, keeping my head level so my chains wouldn’t clink. Poh led the way out of the cubicle, ducked into a low squat. I followed, glancing around for Crispin or the Saelis. I didn’t see either one.

Down the narrow path to the right, the door the Saelis had come through opened once more. Poh spun around with a wince and waved me back in the direction we’d just come.

Clicks sounded from the doorway. Answering clicks echoed from across the room. Two Saelises. Their footsteps pounded the floor, drawing closer to each other. And us.

Poh hauled me backward toward another cubicle. Inside of it, someone sat drooped in the seat, facing away from us. A female, with a gaping hole in her skull and blood plastering her curly long hair to the back of the seat. Her head shifted, and her chair began to slowly turn around as if she’d sensed my presence.

I leaped back, choking on my terror. Poh’s fingers slipped off my shoulder.

Click, click, click. The Saelises were almost upon us.

I couldn’t stay here with the dead woman because she might attack. The chains in my mouth didn’t appear to repel her. I couldn’t pass her through me. An entrance to another cubicle yawned open across the aisle to my left. Before the woman had turned her chair all the way around, I lunged toward the opposite cubicle.

Poh’s fingers weaved through the ends of my hair, but it was too late. We were separated. And I was no longer invisible to the Saelis.

The fronds of a potted red plant whisked together when I brushed past it. Had they heard it? Did they know they weren’t alone in here? I shoved a third chain into my mouth and sent up a prayer to Feozva.

Their footsteps stopped, but their riotous clicking didn’t. It filled the room, knocked at the back of my skull, and hundreds more answered back. Whether it had sounded from inside me or not, I had a sinking feeling we were the subjects of an alien conversation.

With my back braced against the frosted wall of the cubicle, a sudden chill quaked down my spine strong enough to shake the glass. I pushed myself away from it, my breath pluming out in front of me with a stuttered exhale. Goosebumps sprang up my arms. The hair on the back of my neck lifted, stirring my senses away from the Saelises’ clicking.

Something—something else was here.

I popped a fourth chain into my mouth and sealed them and the building scream inside with my flattened lips. The sweet metallic taste rolled across my tongue but didn’t awaken my parasites into an uproarious high. Maybe the metal wasn’t an alloy at all. I willed any traces of iron inside them to cast a safety net around me anyway.

The clicking stopped. The sudden quiet roared. Had the Saelis left?

Several footsteps thumped outside my cubicle. Not heavy like the Saelis. Lighter. Hurried. And paired with frightened voices.

“Hurry! We need to un-magnetize ourselves from the ring,” a woman said, her voice squeaking with panic.

“Then we’ll float directly into the magnestar,” a man said. “We’ll be dead!”

“But so will the Saelis,” the woman said. “Come on.”

More footsteps approached.

“Hurry! We need to un-magnetize ourselves from the ring,” the same woman said.

This wasn’t happening in real time. This was a residual haunting, ghosts reliving the same memory again and again. Which meant they hadn’t made it. They’d never stood a chance. Minus any weapons, neither did we.

“Absidy?” The faintest of whispers sounded from behind me.

I turned my head, listening for something other than my own slamming heartbeat and the residual ghosts’ memory repeating outside the cubicle. As silently as I could, I moved to peer around the wall. More footsteps rushed closer, the same panicked voices, but on my exhale, they drifted into the darkness. So my chains did have at least a little iron in them. I allowed myself one small victory for that.

Across the narrow path in the opposite cubicle, Poh crouched, her expression fierce. She cautiously stepped out and motioned me toward her. I went, and with her hand on my shoulder, we stood in the middle of the path and moved with stealth.

From somewhere on the space station, a slight whir began and rumbled the floor. Neither of us stopped to wonder at it.

At a box of squat, walled-in offices in the center of the room, we stopped and squinted in the dark at the plaques next to each door. One of them read Don Summertack. Inside the offices, the lights didn’t work, but we searched anyway and came up empty. This guy was likely already dead, and we were just spinning our wheels when we needed to get out of here. We’d have to find another way through the rings.

I was just about to whisper as much to Poh as we stood inside Don’s doorway, but the glass door opposite his office clicked and shuddered against its frame. We froze between the two offices, Poh’s hand tightening on my shoulder while our breaths plumed out in front of us.

The door opposite Don’s swung open on silent hinges, darkness crowding every corner inside. But only a split second before a large steel desk flew out. We lunged out of the way, but Poh was too late. The desk barreled into her and slammed her into Don’s office. His door banged shut behind her hard enough to rattle the glass.

Poh. Please don’t be dead.

I turned my head to look at the open door, the movement slowed by the violent tremors shaking through me.

Inside the dark doorway stood a man, his head split down the middle to his nose. His body was drenched in blood and entrails, and a silent scream propped his mouth open. His empty black eyes drilled holes into the space in front of him, searching for the ghost magnet behind her thin iron shield that he must’ve still sensed, but his gaze skated right by.

The whirring noise grew louder.

An iron ring paper weight that must’ve spilled to the floor from the desk floated up in front of my face. I blinked hard at it, willing this sudden break from reality to come back at a more convenient time. What was happening? The chains in my hair lifted, too, rejecting the space station’s gravity. A flutter erupted in my stomach, then unfurled outward as my feet left the ground. Someone had turned the gravity off. Or instead of un-magnetizing the station to the iron ring, they had doubled the charge.

A body flung itself through Don’s frosted glass door, white-blonde ponytail swinging over the shoulder of her duster. Poh. Still alive. Shards exploded outward and sliced through the unfazed ghost standing at her side.

Poh took a single step toward me, then stopped, jerked her feet as if to go farther, and flicked her gaze up to mine again, hovering slightly above her.

I snatched at empty air to stop my ascent. “Someone’s magnetizing the station.”

She lifted her pants bunched at the ankle and revealed blue metal legs structured like exposed bones. “Automatic magnetized legs. Should the need arise.”

I shook my head, rising higher into the darkness, at a complete loss. What the fuck was she? An android?

The whirring sound grew louder. My chains pulled toward the high ceiling and the ring above the space station, harder and faster the closer I drew. I slammed headfirst into the top of the room hard enough to crack my teeth together. The rest of my chains swept past my ears and thudded against the surface. The magnetization found the metal in my corset and crashed my back against the ceiling. Air emptied from my lungs. Pressed this close to the magnet, it yanked the chains from between my teeth and whipped them out of my mouth to plunk above my head.

As soon as they had snaked past my tongue, the ghost next to Poh whipped his black gaze up to mine. Instead of silence pouring out of his open mouth, he bellowed. Every frosted glass cubicle wall shattered. The doors that led to the bloody hallway splintered. A burst of cold washed through the room. Amid the broken shards were ghosts. Peering in from the bloodied hallway. Sitting in their cubicle chairs that had been painted red with blood. Hundreds of them. Their black gazes pinned to me high above them. Then they flung themselves at me in a lethal swarm.

My arms dangled free, so I wrenched my hands above my head to my chains and yanked. The magnet held them tight. A panicked growl worked through my clenched teeth, and I pulled with every bit of strength I had in my fist. But the magnet was too powerful. And the whirring increased.

My only iron, so close but gone. I couldn’t invite the ghosts inside. I couldn’t repel them either.

I stiffened my arms and legs and braced them against the ceiling as if to sink into it and hide. But it didn’t help.

The ghosts turned corporeal as soon as they neared me. They bit and tore at my flesh, their black eyes piercing to the back of my skull. Bloody fingertips wormed into my mouth and pried my jaw open, demanding entrance to all of them at once.

“Come in,” I begged.

Their faces twisted together in a whorl of black smoke and filtered inside my mouth, digging, clawing to the back of my throat and beyond. I gagged at the death inside me, then inhaled sharply, trying to draw them in.

But I couldn’t. They ripped out of my mouth, spun into a physical form, and screamed at my face.

I wouldn’t survive this. A glance down my body revealed dripping gashes. And the cylinder of consumectalons still down the front of my corset, open and leaking.

A wretched, unearthly howl scratched at my eardrums from somewhere below, a sound that shot deep trembles up my back and cratered a hole in my skull. An answering howl echoed back, impossibly close. It came from inside me. Out of my mouth. Green washed over my eyes and sharpened and dulled my vision at the same time into something completely foreign. Oh my Feozva, what was happening to me?

The nearest ghost lunged at my jaw and pried it open. Another grabbed my throat. The rest kicked and punched their way into my body. But I couldn’t let them.

Tobacco smoke touched the back of my tongue as a voice that wasn’t mine hissed between my lips. “Consume.”

I didn’t hesitate. I freed the cylinder, tipped the connected cap up, and while hanging stomach-down from the ceiling and my mouth wrenched open, some consumectalons made it onto my tongue. What didn’t make it inside rolled off my chin and trickled underneath the bandages on my arm to my scales.

A massive torrent of energy soared through my body until I thought I might burst. Higher. Higher still. The blood sheening my skin glowed. The faces of those fighting to get inside faded into the darkness for just a moment. Somewhere in the background, the whirring noise began to run down.

“Go in,” I ordered.

And they did, but not where I expected. They morphed into black smoke and surged toward the empty glass cylinder. On and on until smoke curled out the top and the glass cracked.

I gasped. Slammed the connected cap on top to trap them. Stuffed it down my corset.

Had I just commanded them where to go, sort of but not really? If I could do that, surely I could do the same with those already inside me. If I knew exactly where to send them.

The lights blinked on again, except those immediately around me, throwing spots around the large room. The magnetizing whirring stopped.

Below, Poh stared upward, her yellow eyes rimmed in white. “Absidy!”

My arms and legs dangled, followed by the rest of me. I plummeted, screaming. But it abruptly cut off when a pair of human hands whipped out of thin air and caught me. I huffed a breath, allowing myself one second to gather what little wits I had left, and gazed up at the owner of the arms.

A man, sixty-something, with a blood-smeared white button-up shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows lay doubled over a wide steel platform hanging from the ceiling.

“Absidy Jones,” he breathed, sweat rolling down both gray sideburns. His hazel eyes were wide, panicked. “You saved my life.”

“Pull me up,” I said, my voice cracking on a sob, “and I’ll explain all the ways you have that wrong.”

“Fair enough.” The tendons in his arms strained as he pulled my arms above the edge of the platform. Once I could brace my forearm on the flat surface and I could pull myself up, he released me. “Don Summertack. I saw your video you sent us. I had my Mind-I taken out, based on what you said, before the Saelis arrived. Others weren’t so lucky.”

Gripping the platform in case it vanished out from underneath me, I stared up at him as he stood. “Don, y-you have to let us pass through the rings. You have to.”

“They’re already open.” He shook his head, and made a helpless creak in his throat. “That’s why they came.”

I started to stand, but felt like I was sagging into the platform. “Already?”

“One of my employees tried to send us into the magnestar to try and stop them, but they caught her. I tried to help her fight them off, but only managed to flip the switch in the other direction.” Iron flashed from inside his mouth as bright as his tears. “I’m s—”

A loud crack sounded. Don’s eyes widened even farther, their whites blazing. A trickle of blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. Something popped, again and again, like shrill, punctuated teeth on a zipper.

“What—? Don?”

He slumped forward, into me. I shot to my feet, but under his weight I stumbled. Behind him, hidden in shadows, stood a Saelis. It gripped what looked like a bloodied spine.

Oh. Horror flooded my every cell. My stomach twisted in revulsion. A single step backward kicked my feet out from under both me and Don. We fell over the platform, but something jerked us to a stop.

I quit breathing, gripping tighter to Don’s wrists. He lay on his stomach on the platform, his arms dangling over the side. Up past his dead eyes, the bottom of his shirt had flipped up his back, and a huge grisly hole in his flesh grinned down at me. It grew wider, the rest of his intact skin ripping as if he’d been gutted almost all the way through to his belly button. Caught between whatever held him on the platform and my weight pulling at him, he would be torn in half. Easily.

I had seconds.

Swinging my legs underneath me for momentum, I slipped my grip higher up his forearms, first one then the other. His blood poured downward, slickening my palms, splattering my face. Vomit kicked at my teeth, but I forced it back down. I wrenched myself upward even more, my fingers curling over the folded fabric at his elbows. We were nearly head to head.

I released one hand to make a grab at the fabric near his armpit. Eight more inches, and I could grab the ledge of the platform. His shirt ripped. I reached up past his gaping wound and brushed my fingertips against his belt. Almost. There. I stretched up more, more, and finally snagged it.

The last of his flesh tore at eye level. The torso my body had been braced against ripped free. I swung wildly, my one hand gripping Don’s belt, while his insides from his lower half spilled loose. A shower of blood and organs coated me from head to toe. I tightened my mouth, dared not inhale, and grabbed his belt with both hands. My muscles shaking with the effort, I pulled myself up to the ledge beside his legs. With one last burst of strength, I hauled myself onto the platform and collapsed.

I wiped at my eyes and nose, then a combination of sobs and gags lurched from my mouth as I pressed my cheek into the cold metal. The Saelis had come to open the rings to Mayvel and Wix. What if I was already too late?

“Absidy.” Poh’s voice behind me, tight and filled with warning.

I snapped my eyes open.

Enormous, black-scaled feet tipped with curled claws stepped toward my head. A deep tremble rattled down my back. My body shrank away instinctively, but I froze when the Saelis stopped about a foot away. Terror swept the air from my lungs as I waited for my inevitable death.

I’d tried. Feozva knew I’d tried to stop them.

But the killing blow never landed. I risked a glanced upward, at its tufts of white hair, its long snout with razored teeth, its glowing green eyes aimed slightly to my right. I followed its gaze. My bandage must have fallen off, but underneath the thick layers of blood, gray scales reached up past my elbow. They were spreading.

With slow movements, I drew myself into a sitting position, searching the Saelis for a hint of violence.

“No. Don’t.” Footsteps swept up behind me.

Maybe I’d hit my head too hard. Maybe it was sheer stupidity. Or maybe it was deep shame about what my race had done to his. But I stood to face the Saelis head-on.

“I’m sorry.” The backs of my eyes burned at the truth in those words, yet I knew how meaningless an apology was in this case. It didn’t fix anything, didn’t make it right, didn’t come from someone who’d actually been involved in the Saelis slaughter. Nonetheless, I was sorry.

Poh dodged in front of me, her whole body rigid and her head bowed. “I was sent by Saelis to kill her, and I lied and said I did. I’m sorry, but just…just don’t hurt her. She’s important. Divined. I don’t know what she is, but I know that she has to be alive.”

Divined? No. I didn’t feel divined. Just other.

The Saelis raked his green gaze away from me to Poh. The air around us tensed, needling unease up my scalp. Seconds rolled past, each one punctuated by a hundred heartbeats.

But then, as if we no longer existed, the Saelis turned and stalked back into the shadows. A moment later, the sound of its clicking claws vanished through a darkened doorway. He let out a loud, terrifying screech. Somewhere from outside the walls, something hissed and crunched, coming fast, but I didn’t dare peel my eyes away from where the Saelis had gone.

Poh whirled around and handed me a lethal blade of broken glass. “We go. Now.” She pushed me along the platform the way she’d come, kicking the rest of Don off the edge.

“What just happened?” I asked. “He’s just going to let us go?”

“Not at all.”

“What do you mean?”

Another platform branched to the right up ahead. The hissing grew louder from all around us, coupled with thunderous footsteps.

The iron in Don’s mouth flashed inside my head. And I was covered in his and my blood and drenched in parasites.

Hybrids. Hybrids were coming, and fast.

The metal hummed under my feet, urging me faster. In front of us, the door to the platform opened. A wave poured out, its individual parts human-shaped with glowing green eyes. Growling, spitting, and mad with hunger.

Behind us, the door the Saelis had disappeared through crashed open. A fresh wave of hybrids surged through. Coming in from both sides and crushing my lungs together.

Poh shoved me onto the platform that led right. But she didn’t come with me. She held back.

I didn’t think. I ran for my life.

All the way across the length of the room was another door. Feet nipped at my heels. Hot breaths hit my arms. But parasites still bounced through me, more than maybe I should have, and carried my high even higher as my blood pumped through my veins. I charged through the door ahead and slammed it shut on a hybrid with spit strings hanging off his chin.

I had a half second to collect my bearings enough to realize I was above the main hallway with the rings hanging from the ceiling. I had another half second to lift my foot over a one-hundred-foot drop, or a clear platform like the one that crossed to the other side over the tops of the rings. I prayed for the latter.

I set my foot down. It landed on a solid surface, and just as the door burst open behind me, I poured on speed.

Below, glowing green eyes tracked my movements. Some swept along the hallway with me as I made it to the other side and turned right. Towering above them all were hundreds of Saelis. They plowed in the same direction as me, a race to reach the rest of humanity first.

But behind them, somehow, was Poh. She cleared a path right through the center of the hallway, both arms swinging shards of glass. Blood sprayed the walls in great arcs. The smell of it thickened the air and rolled my stomach into a deadly spin.

No sign of Crispin.

Iron pegs attached to the wall zipped by as I ran. Clear hanging wire secured the rings to the pegs. I glanced ahead and across the hallway to the broken doors below, then zipped my gaze to the ring hanging directly in front of them. Fingers, toes, and eyes crossed that this plan would work.

When I was ten feet away from the final iron peg, I finally spotted Crispin. He’d dragged an ice cream cart into the corner by the doors and huddled on top of the colorful umbrella with his golf club.

The hybrids chasing me down the platform surged faster. I did too. I would only have a second to unplug the peg, and I hoped it was as simple as that.

I skidded to a stop just past it. Turned. Stared down a redhead just feet away whose teeth were bared. And yanked.

It slid out easily, and the iron ring began to swing toward the exit doors. I whirled back around and ran.

Crispin’s jaw dropped as he leaped off the umbrella out of the way.

The iron ring slammed through, effectively opening the doors in a great explosion of metal, hybrids, and white wall dust.

I followed the same path I’d seen the bot take to the glass spiral staircase that led behind the information desk, then leaped off the final few steps to the floor below. “Poh!”

She was there in an instant. The two information desk employees’ eyes glowed green, their chins tucked to their chests, and a growl curling their mouths.

“Police are to the left!” Poh snapped their necks, first one and then the other, with the speed of a trained killer.

Their flesh bent grotesquely toward the direction she’d just come, the green faded from their eyes, and they slumped to the floor.

Before the dust settled, the three of us ran.