Yuta, Ichigo, Dzrtk, and I stumbled as we came out through the other side of the portal, our bodies having reverted to our default forms. My three spirits were nimble enough to land on their feet without any trouble. Thankfully, EUe grabbed my medical coat from behind and thrummed his wings, stopping me from falling flat on my face.

Unfortunately, there wasn't any time for me to orient myself.

"Genneth, look out!"

Yuta grabbed me and pulled me across the Tower's hall.

It wasn't hard to see why.

Vyx AVUs were barreling toward us. The clashing-blade sound of their churning, metal swarm-auras rattled my bones.

On the plus side, though, all the buffs I'd cast on us in the Prison Archive were still in effect.

Pro tip: never waste a good buff.

We made a mad dash up the corridor's incline. The AVUs behind us rocketed out of our escape portal, phasing clean through the Tower's core.

Up ahead, Ichigo ground to a stop and yelled. "Shit!"

We skidded to a halt.

Faceted mounds of silvery geometry were budding from the corridors' walls, both up ahead and behind us. Their metallic fragments swirled as they broke free from the walls.

More AVUs.

Ichigo looked back at me. "Dr. Howle!"

I clenched my fists and activated battle mode, turning myself half-pangol, altering Yuta's sword, and making Ichigo red with four-armed, white-fanged oni.

"Perfect!" he yelled.

Dzrtk narrowed zyr flower at me in bemusement.

I immediately went to work casting buffs.

"<Sanctuary>! <Bless>!"

A slowly revolving, luminous tetrahedron appeared around me, protecting me from damage so long as I didn't dole out any, myself.

Hunkering down, I started intoning the words of the <War God's Blessing>.

Above and below, as I chanted, Yuta, Ichigo, Dzrtk, and EUe let loose on the budding AVUs. Ichigo cracked their crystalline bodies with his katanas' hard edge; Yuta crushed them with the ink waves his sword launched their way; Dzrtk sliced out vacuum in quiver-hot arcs; EUe pelted them with lightning and flame.

But for every AVU we dashed to bits, more kept coming.

Ichigo yelled. "We can't keep this up forever!"

EUe turned to his Vyx companion. "V, can you—"

"—On it!"

The module whistled past the attacking AVUs and shot off like a missile, aiming for the wall. But instead of the expected crash and crunch, V merged with the Tower corridor's inner wall. Moments later, a whole section of that wall lit up and telescoped inward, forming a tunnel.

"This way!" V's voice resounded all around us.

EUe flew in the tunnel first. I ran after him, with Ichigo, Yuta, and Dzrtk following close behind. Yuta dealt a parting blow as he dashed into the tunnel, launching several arcs of razor-edged ink at the AVUs.

As we ran, I hyperphantasized walls behind us, one after another. Walls of steel, walls of scales, walls of stone; walls of fire; lightning; bone. Walls of procrastination and despair. Successive crashes shook the Tower as the AVUs rammed through the walls one by one.

Well, at least I was slowing them down!

Eventually, the tunnel opened onto a massive shaft, at the center of which was a giant, upward-streaming beam of light. It was as thick as a waterfall, and roared like a crashing wave. We ran along the walkway that ringed around the shaft. Looking down, I could see how far up we'd come.

Was this the Tower's core?

Suddenly, V emerged from one of the inner walls up ahead and yelled.

"Into the Light!"

He bolted toward the central light stream. V's body particles the instant he touched the beam. The particles were whisked up and away.

The sounds of the AVUs punching through the walls crescendoed behind us.

EUe flitted into the stream without a second thought and dissolved just like V had. I looked Yuta and Ichigo in the eyes and Dzrtk in the flower, and then the four of us leapt into it together.

There was no pain, just a slight tickling as my world effervesced into a cascade of dancing pixels.

WHOOSH!

The next thing I knew, the particles had vanished, and I was standing in a lighthouse at the top of the world. The room was a broad, cylinder-shaped window sandwiched between a floor and ceiling. The shaft of light crashed into the underside of the glassy, semitransparent mineral the floor was made from.

From where we were, the Network's labyrinth meandering far below resembled the folds and reticulations of a great brain, pulsing with a neuronic light.

"Is this—"

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"—The top of the Tower," EUe said, with a nod. "The Control Center. My aerie."

"What about the guardians?" Yuta asked.

V floated up to the ceiling in the middle of the room. "They can try all they want, they won't be able to get in here."

"Are you sure?" EUe asked.

V glanced down at us. "More than sure."

Then the little module spun around and sank into the middle of the ceiling, merging with its substance.

The 360° windows came alive with glyphs, twitching fractals, and light, abstractly symbolized. In moments, the symbols resolved into lines of text that, to my amazement, I could understand.

"What happens now?" Dzrtk asked.

"You do what you came here to do," V said. His greatly magnified voice projected from the Control Center's walls.

"Can you destroy the Lodestars?" I asked.

"No," he replied. "But…"

Light coalesced into a minimalistic control panel—like a neon sign—on a nearby sector of the window. A large, aggressively orange button appeared in the middle of the panel.

"…you can reset the charge-up sequence," V said. "That will give you several more hours before the Lodestars are ready to fire. Hopefully by then, you'll have mitigated the risks."

I ran up to the wall. "This button?"

"That's the one."

I pressed my palm in the middle of the concentric orange circles surrounding the button. The circles glowed bright, then vanished one by one, outward from the center. The rest of the panel followed suit.

Suddenly, the labyrinth's flickering lights went out. The stream of light at the Tower's heart likewise petered out, its great whirr slowing to a stop as it thinned into nothing.

"Is… is that it?" I asked.

"Yes," V replied. "What else did you expect?"

"Something more dramatic?" Ichigo suggested.

"Never mind that!" EUe said. "We still have much to do." He looked up at the ceiling. "V, bring up parameter controls for the D'zd Archive."

"Up-bringing!"

Charts and diagrams popped into being across a large span of the aerie's windows. The sphere of an entire world—the d'zd's planet?—appeared soon thereafter, slowly revolving in silent glory. Slender, dusty, cinnamon clouds slithered across the world's hazy orange skies.

Sheathing zyr swords, Dzrtk stared, awed by the globe. Ze reached out to touch it, only for zyr hand to phase through.

EUe walked up to the control panel. "You said their climate was freezing over?"

I walked up alongside him. "Yes. Ammonia sinks when it freezes, so the cooling of their planet has triggered a runaway cooling event."

"V?"

"Displaying climate controls," the Vyx replied.

The screen was flooded by a long, incredibly detailed list of parameters and specifications.

Dzrtk walked up behind us. "Which one is it?"

I furrowed my brow as I tried skimming through the list.

EUe pointed at a parameter that was flashing bright, bloody red. "There!"

I tapped it with my claw. "What now?"

"You adjust it," EUe said.

But what was the right setting?

No, I told myself. I needed to approach this like Greg would.

I looked up at the ceiling. "V? Is there a default setting you can restore this parameter to?"

"…Yes, I can," the Vyx module replied.

Yes!

"Do it!"

The inflamed parameter calmed down as the numbers rollicked upward like an odometer in freefall.

"Is that it?" Dzrtk asked.

"The D'zd Archive's parameters were designed to accommodate its inhabitants in perpetuity," V explained. "With everything reset, their environment should return to normal."

I leaned against the window, bracing myself with both my arms, shaking my head in awe.

"Can it really be this easy?" I muttered.

"Make no mistake, Genneth," EUe said, with a perky twitter, "it just looks simple. Up here in the stratosphere, everything does."

"Are you done?" Ichigo asked.

"No," EUe said. "Before I send you and Genneth back to his wyrm-body, I need to prepare to be reintegrated into the Network." He looked up. "How long will it take, V?"

"A few minutes," the Vyx replied. "I'm already on it."

"Then, with luck, the revolution begins," EUe said, "well… resumes." He clacked his beak and wiggled his tail feathers. "hUen-dE's reign has reached its final countdown!"

So much was happening; I could hardly believe it. Then I remembered there was one more detail I'd yet to deal with.

"EUe," I said, "there's something I need to give you."

He turned to face me. "What is it?"

Not knowing how else to do this, I gently grabbed EUe's hand and closed my eyes. I focused on the information I wanted to share with him and then willed a copy of it to pass from me to him.

"What are you—" He started to protest, but then stopped and gasped. "—Holy shit…"

I opened my eyes. "I take it you got the message?"

EUe stepped back and stared at his hands, holding his wings erect behind him. "This…" He looked me in the eyes. "Genneth, this is incredible! With this… drain my nectar, I think we can translate wyrmsong!" He hovered off the floor in excitement. Bright hopes diamonded in his eyes. "The Vyxit won't need to take my word for it, they'll be able to hear the wyrms' stories for themselves!"

"Genneth," Yuta said, "you said you wanted to send a message to the other wyrms."

"Yes, that's right." I looked up to the ceiling. "V, can you—?"

"—Done," V said.

A gold diamond appeared on the window beside me.

"Press your hand on it, Dr. Howle, and then speak your truth," V explained. "The whole world is listening."

"Son of a witch," I muttered.

I hadn't thought about it like that. Since the Vyxit fleet was all over my world, literally everyone would hear me.

I turned to my companions. "What should I say?"

"For starters, tell them not to attack the rebels if and when we start to break away from the rest of the fleet," EUe said.

"How will they distinguish between your allies and hUen-dE's loyalists?" Yuta asked.

"The same way we did, long ago." Raising his hand, EUe used his finger to draw an artful line along the window, swooping and looping, like a butterfly in flight. The screen lit up where he touched it. "This," he said, tapping his claw on it, "tell them to look for this symbol."

I recognized it from the Vyxit Senate. It was the symbol for one of the federations of clans.

"It's the sigil of Brightweather Hold. That's the capital ship we were going to fly away on. If I can get any allies, I'll tell them to fly its sigil. That's how the wyrms will know which Vyxit want to make peace." He raised half of his brow and turned to face me. "You can convey the sigil to the wyrms, can't you?"

Nodding, I closed my eyes again. This time, I ran a mental simulation of what it would sound like to sing the image as wyrmsong, and then made the sound aloud. Ichigo gave me a bug-eyed stare. I didn't blame him, the sight of the utterly inhuman noise coming out of my very much human (though pangolin-scale-edged) face was definitely jarring.

But I was used to that by now.

Yuta put his hand on my shoulder.

"You can do it, Genneth. Just be yourself."

"Thanks," I said. "I'll try."

Swallowing hard—trying not to think stage-frightful thoughts—I stood up tall, and then pressed my hand on the gold diamond symbol on the control panel.

And then I said what I had to say.

"If you can hear this, please, listen. My name is Genneth Howle. I used to be human—a neuropsychiatrist from Elpeck, in Trenton—but I'm now a wyrm. The strangers who have come to our world's skies are called the Vyxit. I know that it might not look like it, but not all of them want to fight. Look for this symbol," I then spoke aloud the bit of wyrmsong that communicated it; "The Vyx ships that have it won't attack you so long as you don't attack them. They might even help up! And if &alon and the silver-eyed wyrms try to hurt them, you have to stop them. Please, it's our only h—"

—Then, all at once, the windows' neon lights shut off.

EUe looked up to the ceiling. "V?"

"Run, EUe!" the Vyx module screamed. "Run! She's—"

"—That's enough of that."

A voice spoke. A woman's voice, prideful and calculating. Rage bubbled just below the surface.

I recognized it from the message left for EUe in the Philharmonium.

EUe gasped."No…" He dashed to the middle of the room. "Stay back, everyone! Stay back!"

There was a flash of light. When my eyes cleared, I could see the stranger that had joined us: a twEfE—female, by the looks of her white, rubyless, green-patched throat. She was impeccably armored. The dark, flexible, fibrous material was studded in slender, pearly white plating on her chest and limbs, save for the obsidian breastplate. The plates gleamed in the light, their edges almost supernally sharp. The breastplate, however, was as black as night.

"hUen-dE…" EUe muttered.

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