It’s instant.

  Quick as a change in the wind, and somehow, without any pupils or perceivable sight, it looks to Mouse. There’s no time for even her eyes to grow wide. The tunnel lights up with a surge of energy pulses from the gem around her neck. It begins to grow hot, the rune very visible now and thrumming with undulating silver.

  The waxy face beneath the visor ripples where a mouth might have been, and then it speaks: “Submit for purification.”

  Rivin, urgent now, cries, “Get the fuck away from it!”

  This time, they listen. The children scatter.

  Rivin darts forward now, blade drawn and thundering a vicious attack as it reaches out. He cleaves downward with a clean strike that’s effortlessly blocked by a gauntlet. The collision rattles through his arms and down his spine.

  The knight turns, or seems to — its mid-section does at least, while its legs are still pointed straight. With its other arm it flings him brutally down the tunnel mouth. Wind burns at his face before he lands hard against the wall and then again against the ground.

  The creature lunges towards Mouse, closing the distance in one blink.

  Ricket cries out but steps forward to shield her just as Chip darts towards them and ejects a bullet that only hits the wall. The thing clutches the snout of his rifle and strikes him hard across the face, sending him sprawling backwards. Ricket joins in, wild in his lashes — barbed-wire bat blunting against chest plate.

  Slink scrambles to jab a thin knife into the creature’s clavicle; unlike the armour, it pierces right through. The thing’s head twitches downward and then back into place. “You can—cannot—not have us.” It sounds almost human.

  Slink jabs down again, and this time a pale fluid spurts out before being sucked back into the slit. It shunts him with the butt of the gun, and the teen falls backwards into the narrow space, grunting and spitting blood.

  Rivin is already on his feet again, darting towards them, backpack abandoned. He cleaves a second swing at the nape of its neck, nicking flesh that parts like butter. Its head lolls forward, but its arms simply change. Gauntlets morphing into living tissue made sickle. Made a blade.

  Rivin looks on in horror before:

  “MOUSE, RUN!”

  She does as she’s told and bolts straight into a tangled-up shadow and hollow maze.

  A sharp pain splinters Rivin’s abdomen as the beast nails a blow, gouging a deep cut across his front. The teen gasps and doubles back, clutching at his chest. Ricket launches from the ground and grabs onto the knight’s arm, sinking tiny teeth into the diamond-hard visor.

  Slink tries his dagger again as it attempts to wrench the child free from itself, briefly delayed as one arm reforms fingers to grasp at kicking legs. He lands one blow, but the second is quickly parried before it crunches a pale elbow into his face — the bridge of his nose bursting beneath the blow. A second strike sends him scuttling into earth while Ricket is wrenched off and flung.

  Chip has repurposed a metal pipe eroded and barely clinging to the wall, but it’s no use—the thing flattens him into the side of the tunnel while dodging Rivin’s next swing. It forms and reforms around rapid blows and desperate splices of blade, its flesh interchangeable at will. Rivin swings low, severing it at the ankles — the creature falls to its knees. Streams of ethereal veins tether the wound and reattach. Just as quickly, it builds back up again.

  On all fours now, it begins sprinting into the darkness after a distant and pulsing light. After Mouse.

  Rivin is quick on its tail, stepping over the others and not looking back. The tunnels are a labyrinth — dark and limitless. He follows the sound and the roar and the thunder. The shimmer of light. Tries to remember the map that’s fallen loose from his belt. There’s the crash of something falling up ahead and a scream. Then, like a lit lantern in the dark, light.

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  The sound leads him into a clearing of decrepit, half-eaten buildings lodged into cavern walls like molars. Sandstone cottages that may have once wrung a tall mountain are now reduced to crumbling ghosts slowly flattening under pressure. Several have toppled onto their side, crashed and folded into stacks of debris, while others have collapsed into a ruinous stairwell of platforms and dangling beams.

  Most everything has been devoured by glowmoss and algae — every surface cushioned by a foliage that pulsed vibrantly with sound and softly with quiet. Right now, everything is beaming. Brightly lit. Rivin squints, shields his eyes, searches the landscape, and spies blood. Red blood. Human.

  “Rivin!”

  The sound draws his gaze upwards, where Mouse is already scaling platforms higher, screeching as the knight nicks her ankle with its arm — the limb now a thick spear more so than an appendage. The back of her coat is torn open, with a wound strapped across her ribs. Her backpack is abandoned and spread over the ground. Pierced several times already.

  “Submit.” It demands, voice tinny and high-pitched. Apathetic as it shreds the debris beneath her.

  Suddenly, the platform collapses, and the girl is forced to vault herself higher, narrowly pulling herself atop a splintered beam that bulges from a pressed window pane.

  Stone and refuse rain down on the creature, but it does not stop.

  “Mouse!” Rivin cries out, rushing towards them, already scaling the first bench of collapsed roof. He doesn’t see the others scrambling into the clearing after him, all in equal states of bruising and panic, but he does hear Ricket call out.

  Desperate, he screams:

  “The fucking necklace!”

  It’s still glowing around her neck. The skin beneath seems to be burning and red — blistering.

  Mouse grips a high wall now, adrenaline too high to lend her sense. Her neck feels hot. Her head is thumping. The Knight is right there. It’s right there. It’s right there.

  She grasps the gem and wrenches forward, tearing twine as it’s freed. Even from this distance, Rivin can see the letter beaming from the centre.

  She leans forward, throws her weight into her arm and tosses as hard as she can. The necklace sails over air, and visor eyes follow, watching the descent. Something scuffs and chips away. Mouse feels the wood bend underfoot, strained by her propulsion.

  The wall she’d clung to fizzles away like pages in ash.

  She slips.

  Just as the Knight breaches the pillars beneath her with jagged arms. The building collapses, and then she falls.

  Five voices cry out, but her scream is cut short.

  Rolls of dust flood the air, and Rivin is forced to shield his eyes from the brunt of it, coughing through thick swirls. From the plume of wreckage the Knight drops with a heavy THUNK to the ground.

  Rivin can’t see it yet, and only when the dust clears does he understand. It’s only a few feet away. Time hasn’t caught up. He can taste the blood in the air even before the horror strikes him cold. His eyes blow wide. His heart stops.

  The knight unravels from a kneeled stance, coming to stand stock-straight. Dirt and ruin roll free from it. Red. Red splattered up its front. Over its face. It’s holding something. It’s wielding something —

  A child. Mouse. Skewered upon its spear, her stomach rested against the crease of an elbow. She’s gurgling. A sound he’s heard before. So many times. Not from her lips. Never from her lips. He can’t bear it. Can’t breathe—

  Fire burns behind Rivin’s eyes, summoning tears that do little to blur the terrible sight. Her body is arched and limp, her head hung low. Her mouth is open, stuck in the scream that was strangled by blood. Somewhere in the dark, Chip screams for her.

  From her front pocket, the gum wrapper cat slips free to float to the earth. Rivin watches it drift and fall. ‘My fault,’ he thinks. My fault.

  He can’t hear anything above the gurgling.

  Thud. Thud. Thud.

  The creature turns its head. Rivin does too. Something glimmers in the periphery. The necklace humming in the dirt.

  It speaks. Its voice is different again. Garbled. “We remember—” It then looks past Rivin. Past the others. Straight to Chip. It points at the quivering boy, tilts its head and tries again, “You — guilty.”

  It lunges. So too does Rivin.

  “Submit—”

  His fingers close around the stone. It’s boiling to hold. He tightens his fist. The Knight stops short. Slowly, its head rotates, its free arm still held mid-strike where Chip cowers just inches from the bladed forearm.

  Faceless, it observes him.

  Mouse is still impaled on its limb, silent now, but as Rivin rises, the appendage returns. It slots free of her torso, jetting blood across the floor as the girl’s limp body crumples to the dirt.

  Chip is on his knees besides her in seconds, weeping as he presses his palms into the wound. “Nonono, Mouse! No! Open your eyes!”

  The thing ignores its prior target. Instead, it raises its arm and gestures to Rivin. It says, like it had when it first awoke:

  “Submit for purification.”

  The rune scalds in Rivin’s palm.

  He inhales slowly and shuddering, and with one last glance at the family he’d led to death, the boy turns and sprints.