The awesomeness of what was happening would have been a whole lot more enjoyable for Jonan if Ani had been there to partake in it right alongside him. But this wasn't about joy; it was about spark. Warriors got weary; that was just a fact of life. And that's what having allies was for: so that others could pick up the pieces where you left off once your stamina started to flag.

A month ago, Jonan would have treated this opportunity as a chance to go for a joy ride. But now? Now he knew it for what it was: a solemn duty.

The assignments were simple and straight to the point. In case of emergency, Geoffrey would be sung over into Mrs. Elbock's body; Bever, to Nathan's; Morgan would be given charge of Lopé the Ludicrous, while Heggy would jump into Dr. Nowston's driver's seat.

Karl's body went to Jonan, and for one simple reason: Jonan didn't want to burden any of the other wyrms with the depths of his grief. Besides, Karl had his own pain to deal with.

Karl looked over to Dr. Rathpalla. "Dr. Rathpalla…"

The psychiatrist was a stack of coils shivering in the corner of the room. "Go," he said, with a flick of his head. "It's… it's better this way."

Out of sight, the fox let out a howl that sent shivers down the wyrms' spines. Waves of sound and light carried collapse and devastation in ripples across Karl's vision.

He looked up just in time to see all three of the fox's third eyes launch torrential energy blasts at a squadron of flower-ships that had been descending toward the city.

"If I have to guess," Jonan said, "they probably deployed the ships to investigate whatever the fuck's been happening inside the Imperial Palace—it's what I would do."

Unfortunately, the pilots had just paid for their curiosity with their lives.

The beams obliterated the ships effortlessly. They'd never stood a chance. The aircrafts themselves got blown to smithereens before their shields had even finished collapsing. The barriers' crackling remnants hung briefly, like an echo, before disappearing.

"Fuck it!" Dr. Nowston shouted. "There's no time!"

Karl tensed his body like a spring as he wove a plexus around himself. The power started to flow at the same time that he let the tension burst free.

And he soared, and the other wyrms followed, assembling into formation.

Mrs. Elbock, Dr. Nowston, Nathan and Bethany, Maryon and Mr. Twist, Little Lopé and Sir Kurt, and many others.

All of a sudden, a familiar voice broke through the Night: my voice.

"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."

"Is that Genneth?" Mrs. Elbock said, in disbelief.

Karl didn't know what to think.

My speech continued: "I know that it might not look like it, but not all of them want to fight. Look for this symbol."

An image of the symbol filled Karl's mind.

"The Vyx ships that have it won't attack you so long as you don't attack them. They might even help us! And if &alon and the silver-eyed wyrms try to hurt them, you have to stop them. Please, it's our only h—"

But then the message was cut off.

"What do we do?" Dr. Nowston asked.

"Right now, we've got bigger problems than these 'Vyxit'," Heggy said. "Look." From where she rode atop Dr. Nowston's back, she pointed at the fox.

"What's it doing?" Merritt asked.

"More craziness," Jonan observed, riding Karl.

From the looks of things, the creature had been attacking structures at random. Its blasts had left the city crisscrossed with deep ravines. Buildings at the crevasses' edges had toppled over.

A massive fungal stalk snapped in two as the skyscraper it had grown through fell to the ground and crashed onto the ravine beside it.

Nathan pointed a claw at one of the giant sky-ships high in the atmosphere. "Look, up there!"

Karl raised his head to look.

"What the hell is that?" Bever said.

Karl trained eyes onto the cluster of spots emerging from one of the big ships. The spots glistened brightly in his third pair of eyes.

"They're sending reinforcements!" Geoffrey yelled.

The reinforcements came from the ship closest to the city. Their engines' blue jets were shooting them through the sky so quickly that Karl could already make out the shapes of their hulls. Light built at their noses and then streamed out in screaming red death rays, aimed directly at the fox, which was soaring along a boulevard.

The beams hit, but for all their bluster, they were as good as useless. The death rays just stopped where they hit the fox's body, as if its flesh was eating them up. The cerements of darkness on the fox's flanks and underbelly spread with every moment it spent in contact with the beams.

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Beating its wings, the creature soared, then raised its three heads and roared, firing a gargantuan laser beam from its chest. The beam was as wide as a mansion, and shone enough to banish the Night itself, briefly lighting Elpeck in shadow and white. The beam's streaming brilliance swallowed up the approaching reinforcements and the blast waves they made as they detonated, continuing onward, up and up until it hit the underside of the mothership that had deployed them.

The ship atomized, sending out a rippling shockwave as it exploded. Its light challenged the moon.

"Karl, look!" Jonan yelled. "The stains on the fox!"

It took one of his riders' prompts to knock Karl out of his awe. Lower in the sky, Karl watched the fox swoop to the ground and land. The beast ran on all fours with rollicking speed, plowing through ruins and abandoned vehicles without a care.

But most of all, Karl noticed what Jonan had: the darkness on the beast's chest and flanks had receded, as if spent.

No, not "as if"; that's exactly what it was.

"Whatever this thing is," Jonan said, "even it can't indefinitely maintain the kind of high energy output needed to produce a beam like that. Quick, Karl, tell the others!"

"No," Karl said, "you can tell them."

"Wait… I can?"

Jonan let out a yelp as Karl nodded, but then grabbed Karl's horns and yelled, and Karl sang his words into the night.

"Heggy, the fox has powered down! Now's our chance!"

"Heggy," Dr. Nowston yelled, "he's right!"

"Should we get one of those nukes, now?" Bever asked.

Jonan nodded vigorously. "Very much so!" He patted Karl's back. "Let's get going!"

"Roger," Dr. Nowston replied. "Merritt and I will get wyrm bystanders to join in."

"Understood!" Karl said.

Dr. Nowston broke formation, flying around a skyscraper and down a boulevard while Karl descended toward the ground. Karl flattened out his flight path as he raced toward where the wyrms had stashed the nukes.

"Let's go go go!" Jonan yelled.

Barely a heartbeat later, Mrs. Elbock roared in shock, She immediately sang whatever it was she was experiencing for all to hear.

"Oh no…" Karl muttered.

The fox's rampage was bringing Elpeck's wyrms out of the woodwork. Snouts and tails wriggled as the wyrms came into view, eyes blazing with prismatic fire.

"The wyrms are infected…" Geoffrey said.

"Move move move!" Jonan yelled. "Karl, tell them!"

And Karl did. He trumpeted Jonan's words: "Don't let them touch you! Don't let them fucking touch you!"

Looking around in a panic, Karl found and grabbed a stray steel beam as he shot out a ruined husk of a building and then slammed it onto the head of an infected wyrm that had come zooming toward him.

"Oh fucking shit!" Mr. Charles Twist shrieked. "Fuck it! Fuck it all!"

"What is it?" Lopé cried. "What?"

"Look, there!" Nathan said.

A shiver ran down Karl's spine as he did. As he passed over a boulevard, Karl spied one of the wyrms that &alon had treed, and not just any wyrm tree, but one of the infected ones.

The tree's branches flailed like jellyfish tentacles. The abomination raised up pavement by the sheet-full as it rocked from side to side. Prismatic fire danced on the fluid pooled around its trunk.

"Angel's mercy…" Bever whispered.

The corrupted wyrm tree used its branches as arms and the heads at their ends as blunt, fingerless hands to push up off the ruined sidewalk and pry itself free. Its many long roots broke free with audible snaps.

The monster toppled to its side, roots writhing behind it, like too many tails. It skittered forward, using its heads and necks as limbs, chasing after the fox, which had just bashed through the base of a fungal tower.

Karl blasted out of there with a pataphysical burst at his back.

"C'mon," he yelled, turning back to Nathan and Lopé. "The nukes are this way!"

"You shouldn't have done that…" Jonan grumbled.

Then Karl looked back, and saw why.

The Palace's shadows were emerging from the fox's body.

"DEMONS! DEMONS!!"

The Emperor shrieked as he wriggled free. Others followed, writhing like spastic maggots, their blade-limbs wreathed in particolored fire.

They launched out in every direction, leaving afterimages trailing in their wakes. The apparitions attacked their surroundings, seeming at random. They carved through buildings, ruined vehicles, and dripping wyrm-trees, making no distinction between friend and foe.

"Beast and Queen," Jonan said, "this city has really gone down the tubes!"

Looking ahead, Karl broke away from the corridor of buildings.

"Yes, yes," Nathan said, "this is the place!"

They'd reached the edge of the spread of bowls and pits the nukes had carved into the city. It was just a matter of zooming across the open space until he and the others reached the blast pit where the remaining nukes were stored.

Yes!

The bombs were still there, and the magic that kept them from detonating was still intact, glowing like wireframe eggs in Karl's wyrmsight. Diving down, he ensnared several with his magic and zoomed back up. Nathan and Lopé did the same.

Geoffrey stared at the weapons in awe. "I suppose we've got a fox to fry."

Karl doubled back toward the monsters. Racing through the city quickly brought him to cross paths with the winged fox. He banked around in a wide curve, veering between ruined buildings as he made his approach.

"Hot damn!" Jonan said.

The freakish corrupted wyrm tree lay beside the fox. Its many necks were outstretched. Flesh and fluid peeled off the wyrm tree's body and flew into the fox's, dissolving into it. Prismatic fire flared on the wyrm's body as it broke apart.

Once more, the paths of darkness along the fox's flanks and chest crept forward, expanding their coverage.

"Shoot the nuke at it, Karl!" Jonan said. "This is as good of an opportunity to strike as you're ever gonna get! Reverse the polarity of your magic, or whatever. Launch the bomb at it like a rod from a fucking railgun! Rods from god, baby! Then let 'er blow!"

Despite not knowing what a railgun was, Karl did as he was told.

It definitely sounded like it would be impressive.

It took just a thought for Karl to invert the orientation of the weave's forces, turning the spell that towed it along after him into an accelerator that launched the bomb at the fox with explosive impulse. He turned and rocked up and away in the spare seconds before the impact, speeding his thoughts as he flew away, slowing the passage of time so he could watch and wait for just the right moment to reverse the energy fields keeping the bomb's barometer from triggering the detonation sequence, not that he was entirely sure what that even meant.

"This is for Ani, you fucking bastards!" Jonan yelled.

Karl triggered the reversal right as the nuke struck the fox and the wyrm tree.

And then everything went wrong.

The strength of the pulse Karl had sent to trigger the detonation spiked ludicrously. The lines of force shimmering around the wyrm tree, the fox, and the nuclear bomb brushed up against each other, interacting to devastating effect, triggering an explosion that happened almost too quickly for even wyrm thought to process it. One moment, there was the bomb and the wyrm and the spirits dissolving into the fox; the next, an ever-expanding sphere of the purest white.

Feathered wings flickered into a wide pose, materializing motes of many-colored flames as the blast spread. As Karl plummeted to the ground, he split his mind in two, one half putting all of its effort into surrounding himself with as many layers of the most powerful forcefields he could muster, the other, singling out Geoffrey, Bever, and Morgans' spirits.

Karl was far from the only wyrm about to be swallowed up by the blast.

In his mind, he yelled for Jonan, but then the wave swept over him before he'd even hit the ground, and the next thing he knew, he was back in the world where light and shadow had traded places.

Meanwhile, the next thing Jonan knew, instead of riding dragonback (well, wyrmback) like in one of those old fantasy movies, he was the wyrm being ridden.

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