"Hender's right," Nell said.

They doused their lights immediately and gathered behind Kuzu, who was peering through the window at the dark metropolis.

Glowing swarms of bugs and iridescent eight-legged "rats" charged up the street, followed by giant spigers with fluorescing stripes rippling light on their frilled skulls. At several intersections in the distance, they could see spigers clashing and locked in mortal combat, causing grisly pileups like traffic accidents. Henders "trees" had already begun to sprout on the sidewalks, their palmlike branches dangling red and blue fruit over the streets.

"Look, Shueenair," Kuzu said.

"Oh," Hender sighed sadly.

"Like home," Kuzu said in his own language.

The first bloom of Henders clover was visibly spreading, encrusting the streets and buildings, intermingled with patches of glowing colors that Nell recognized as rainbowfire. Great glowing patches of rainbowfire had spread across the high ceiling of the cavern, as well.

Nastia noticed the glowing patches with alarm, remembering the phosphorescent splotches on the walls of an abandoned Soviet uranium mine she had explored a few years ago. It was the scariest place she had ever seen, until now. "Is that uranium?" She pointed at the roof of the cavern.

"No!" Nell said. "It's a fungus that grows here. It must like eating clover.... They were trying to get it to grow in here, but there was nothing for it to eat before."

"Nell," Hender interjected, clasping her shoulder. "Andy is ... gone!"

Nell was gutted by the news, finding it difficult to believe. "No! What was he doing here?"

"He didn't want us to go without him," Hender said. His fur flickered dark colors as he reached another trembling hand out to her.

Nell gasped as Hender squeezed her hand. "How?" She looked at Galia furiously.

"A ghost got him," Hender said.

Nell bowed her head, gritting her teeth from the blow of grief that punched her.

Abrams peered through the window on the other side of the apartment overlooking the river. To the right, a waterfall of blue light bounded, formed by water that had percolated through the bedrock from the slopes of Mount Kazar from a reservoir of bioluminescent algae that fed the subterranean cascade. Nastia looked with him through the window. "That waterfall looks like the waves back home in San Diego, when the algae are blooming," he said.

"There must be bioluminescent organisms in the water," Nastia said, marveling at the blue cataract.

"It looks like we're safe here for the time being," Bear said. "Let's sit down for a second and get our bearings."

They sat on the leather couches around the glass coffee table that reflected the waterfall in the window. The headless mule twitched behind the couch where Nastia, Bear, and Dima sat. Nell sat across from them, exhausted and grief-stricken, her eyes glazing over as she stared at the strange machine that continuously balanced on four legs like a foal behind the couch across from her. "That thing's a robot, right?"

"Yeah," Nastia said, putting a hand on her shoulder. "It gives me the creeps, too."

"OK." Nell nodded.

Abrams reached into a pack on the side of the mule and fished out a fresh Dragon Skin tunic, tossing it to Nell. "There ya go, Rambo. Put that on."

"Thanks." Nell pulled on the heavy jersey. "A ghost ripped my shirt off."

"You did damn good for a civilian," Abrams said.

"Yeah." Bear nodded. "And you saved our asses."

"Da." Dima smiled. "Thanks."

Abrams pushed several buttons that snapped open his body armor, and he stepped out of it. "OK, we just lost four men. And it looks like we just lost our only known escape route. What's our plan?"

Nastia pulled out the city map and unfolded it on the coffee table between them.

Hender sat on the couch and typed into his phone:

The 14th Darkness

26,439 years ago, a long night came again, and sels came together, peacefully this time, at last. Only five were left.

"Write now?" Kuzu chided Hender as he sat beside him.

"The Books are written to remember, when darkness comes," Hender reminded him, and he finished typing his final entry:

The 15th Darkness

Today, the 15th Darkness came.

Kuzu read it before Hender put the phone back into his belly pack.

Nell pointed at the southwest corner of Sector Six on the blueprint. "We're here, in the main cavern of the city."

"Yes. Where is Maxim Dragolovich?" Dima said.

"Do you want to rescue him," Nell asked. "Or kill him?"

"I want to capture him," Dima said. "And bring him back alive."

Nell laughed, weeping. "So this whole thing is partially your fault," she said. "Maxim said the government was persecuting him." She shook her head weakly. "Though I think he was probably insane already, too."

"I don't know anything about that," Dima said.

"He was mad," Galia said sadly. "But they drove him mad."

Nell pointed at the dormitory inside the hospital sector, which was located on the opposite corner of the map from where they were. "Maxim is trapped here on the second floor of this hospital," she said. "He was trying to turn on the electrical plant up here." She pointed to Sector Four. "His men were seconds away from pushing the button and feeding this place with perpetual power. Can you imagine what would have happened if they had succeeded?"

"What, Nell?" Kuzu asked.

"With light and steam and heat down here..."

"Yes?" Kuzu's deep voice vibrated the air. Purple sparks flashed in his blackened fur like lightning in a storm cloud.

The others regarded him apprehensively.

"The Henders ecosystem would explode, swiftly multiplying until it found a way to spread to the surface, Kuzu," Nell said. "And kill us all."

"Oh."

"As it is, they have already infested the sectors between Maxim and the power plant," Nell said, pointing. "They're the only thing now that is stopping him, thank God. He's trapped and surrounded."

Galia looked pale, staring inwardly, his shoulders falling. "He was a great man, a great hero. You have no idea."

"He may have been. I'm sure he was," Nell said. "But he might be the greatest villain in human history, Mr. Sokolof."

"They have more blood on their hands than all the villains of the world," Galia scoffed with a ragged grimace of irony.

"You still don't understand, do you?" Nell asked. "If any Henders species reaches the surface, not one flower or insect will survive longer than a few more decades on any continent on the face of the Earth. The entire world will look.... like this."

"I have bad news," Nastia said. "It is believed, by Russian authorities, that the railway line we just set charges in was completed, after all. It may still connect all the way to Metro-Two in Moscow, and from there may well reach points throughout Eastern Europe. I believe I am authorized to tell you this now, considering our situation. It is a secret that the Russian government did not want to reveal, even to this small group, unless it was absolutely necessary. But now that Sector Seven has been breached, you must know. Unless we detonate charges in the train tunnel immediately-"

"Shit!" Bear said.

"They're set to go off in less than seven hours now," Abrams said.

"Those incendiary grenades have probably burned out, man," Bear said. "Those things can move now! There's nothing stopping them!"

Abrams exchanged the heavy lithium battery pack of the XOS suit with a fresh one. "There's enough poison gas in that tunnel to choke a herd of wildebeests."

"Like what?" Nell asked. "What kind of gas?"

"I threw in a cocktail of everything from tear gas to chlorine to tabun gas."

"Great," Nell said. "Tabun works only on mammals, tear gas probably won't have any effect on Henders organisms, but-chlorine gas, you said? That's good. That should work. But it buys us only a little time before it is dispersed and no longer lethal."

"It's a tunnel. It'll take a while to disperse," Abrams said.

"You guys killed a spiger, too," Nell said. "That's good. That should occupy the predators for a while and keep them from moving on."

"Yes," Hender agreed.

"How can we get to the charges in the train tunnel to set them off sooner?" Dima hissed. "With all that poison gas in the tunnel now?"

"Maybe we can rig explosives to one of our flying bots," Abrams suggested. "And control it remotely from here?"

"Yes! We could use the tunnel we just came through," said Dima. "That spiger left the door open behind us." As he pointed, a sound like a battering ram shook the building, making them all jump out of their seats, coming from the bedroom.

"What is that?" Galia cried.

Abrams and Bear grabbed their guns and the others ran behind them. They opened the door behind the bed and heard a pounding and scraping sound squealing against the dented hatch on the other side.

"Fuck," Abrams said. "That spiger followed us!"

A shattering blast hit the door, bending the thick steel.

"No way it can get through," Bear said.

Kuzu laughed deeply. "Spiger's stuck!"

Dima looked at Nell. "OK, so there goes any chance of sending an ROV from here."

"Let's get out of here, and close this door, too," Nell said.

They retreated to the living room again, and Nell waved them back to the map on the table. "OK, let's look at this."

"There must be another way," Nastia agreed.

Kuzu sat next to Hender as the others gathered around the table. The large sel felt his energy surging as the symbiants that had migrated off the spiger into his fur now separated and multiplied at a rapid rate, colonizing his body. His skin could breathe again as they exfoliated it. He whispered to Hender in his own language. "Listen to me, Shueenair. Ferrell killed Andy and the other human. And he tried to kill me, too!"

Hender replied in Kuzu's tongue. "You did not kill Andy, did you, Kuzu?"

"No! I would not kill Andy."

"Are you lying?"

"You only ask that because they have lied to us so many times. They will try to kill us, too. This is their chance. But it is also ours! It need not be the last darkness. If you follow me now, the whole world will be ours."

Nastia suddenly screamed, startling everyone.

Behind the couch where she was sitting, the hooded head of a ghost octopus reared up on the mechanical mule where a real mule's head would have been. Dima used his dog whistle to back the mule away from the couch, but the muscles of the ghost had encased the robot's legs and fought its firing servos for control.

Kuzu seized the opportunity and sprang over the couch, landing on the far side of the mule. With four hands working at blinding speed, he pulled two handfuls of magnesium flares from under the ghost and then, from a compartment in the mule's side, grabbed an explosives pack like the one Ferrell had carried into the train tunnel.

The ghost on the robot's back turned its snail-head toward Kuzu and shot ropes at two of Kuzu's hands, immobilizing them. Without breaking his rhythm, Kuzu used two other hands to pick up a combat knife, unsheathe it, and slice the ghost's ropes. Then he put the knife in another pack and slung it over one shoulder, backing away. He snagged his bow and quiver where he had set them near the stairs and shouted, "Shueenair!"

"No!" Hender replied.

The others watched, confused, as Kuzu's fur flushed red.

"Then die!" Kuzu roared in English.

And the sel sprang down the stairway to the front door.