Here: some human teeth. And there: a shriveled tongue, lonesome – its mouth and head nowhere to be seen. Looking around, the floor is littered with human detritus: fingers and toes and rib bones. Mounds and pools of other, less distinguishable viscera.

“Out of the frying pan,” Uri whispers, sitting shoulder-to-shoulder with his sister, their backs to the wall, “and into something much worse.”

“The Scum have been here.” Ellie's eyes widen in the dim room, her pupils huge. “Might still be.”

In this kind of scenario there exist involuntary reactions common to every human being:

Fear originates in the brain and proceeds into the nerves, the muscles, the bones. But a brain never really knows anything for absolute certain. Best it can do is guess what is real and what is not. Guess at the danger and guess at the best way to survive.

Ava guesses they've come through the cottage window into what was once a small bedroom. There is one door and it is boarded shut from this side. The walls are gouged, trenches torn in the drywall when someone long ago made off with all the copper wiring. A filthy mattress coughs out its foam guts on the floor against the far wall. There are stray bits and parts of human bodies scattered like dice and the only light to see them by comes in through the window and it is suddenly blocked by one of their pursuers. Bach crouches beneath the window sill, the shotgun angled up, waiting to ambush the first killer who might try to creep inside. Ava unsnaps the strap on her holster, hand trembling on the butt of the revolver.

“It's open,” someone whisper-shouts outside, and then a scratching sound as they lift the window.

Now it's not simply that her hand is shaking.

It's that the tremors traverse her entire body.

But Bach looks like he could fall asleep any second. His breathing is normal. He's not sweating. He has the shotgun propped almost lackadaisically, like he might yawn while disintegrating the first intruder who climbs through that window. It opens halfway but then stops. Bach waits. They all wait. Then, one of the gang members outside laughs. And another. And the window slams shut.

“What the?” Uma whispers, and Bach holds his finger to his lips and cocks his ear. And then suddenly he whirls one-hundred eighty degrees and brings the shotgun to bear on the mattress across the room. But it's not a mattress. It's some kind of monster – it must have been hiding among the stuffing. The mattress mess rumbles and Ava can see a creature shaped mostly like a man rising up from it but something is off—

“Scum!” Ellie shrieks and stands and tries in her mindless panic to open the window and dive back out there with the killers but they're holding it shut and the leader is there facing her and he does a mocking impression of her terror and then he throws his head back and laughs.

“Stay behind me!” Bach shouts and he steps toward the creature.

The shotgun lights up the room like high noon. Every little piece of carnage casts a tiny shadow. Every mote of dust flashes bright as a meteor. Ava sees the fiend's face etched in the strobe of the shotgun. This may have once been a man, but at some point his jaws had split open and a pair of enormous mandibles burst through the skin, wickedly jagged and oddly mechanical. His eyes: black and reflective from corner-to-corner but for the faintest hint of light-emitting diodes flashing behind them. A pair of spindly, rusted metallic insectoid appendages fester out from each side of his torso. He's more machine than man, the modifications mutating him into some sort of monstrous bug.

The shotgun blast sends him staggering backward until he crashes against the far wall. The whole place rattles. The blast has not killed him, but it has revealed a rust-colored carapace beneath the human skin. He emits a piercing, electronic shriek and the party instinctively cover their ears. Then he sinks down into the mattress – or into a pit concealed beneath it!

“Antlion!” Bach shouts. “Antlion!” He whirls back around to face his comrades and dives to the floor. “Down, now!”

They obey, everyone hitting the deck at once, just in time for the fiend's top-half to reemerge from his pit. He rears back and then the skin of his human face sags and sucks in and is swallowed grotesquely into a dark and churning opening between the mandibles – his new mouth. And with the skin gone his new skull is clearly made of metal and it is angular and features segmented antennae which protrude from his forehead, dripping translucent goo. He is coming apart like an old scarecrow and where the flesh sloughs off his true self is revealed in increments to be less human and more electronic insect. In a way his transformation is mystifying and the party is entranced and then suddenly the creature projectile-vomits its former face back out across the room along with a torrent of viscous, milky liquid:

The pale slime misses high, splattering against the window they just came in through, the ooze dimming further what meager light filters inside.

The instant the paralytic acid attack has passed, Bach reacts. He army crawls forward with astonishing speed, slithering right up to the creature in its pit. It lunges and seizes him by the back of his poncho with all four of its arms, the struggle causing its human skin to split like soft, rotten gourds, wires worming their way out, fingers cracking off and becoming mechanical claws—all the while still aiming to drag its prey down into the killing pit—but Bach is too strong.

He rises to his knees and now he has the upper-hand in the grapple, snatching the antlion by its suddenly insectoid arms and pinning them to its sides. He pulls it up out of the pit and slams it onto the floor, kneels on its torso and in the next moment Ava hears the grinding groan she imagines is some sort of motor inside Bach, and the sparks begin to spit from between his lips. Electricity crackles and the hairs on Ava's arms stand on end but in the moment before Bach can electrocute the antlion a second Scum creeps over the rim of the pit and into the combat.

This fiend is different. His mutation is less advanced. He still looks mostly like an ordinary man but his expression is distant as though something far away possesses his attention. He stares straight forward at nothing in particular before suddenly jerking his head like he's demon-possessed, spewing a stream of the same viscous liquid as the first, covering both Bach and the antlion with whom he's wrestling in the goo.

Immediately the sparks cease spitting from Bach's lips. He slumps limply to the floor, face-down in the dust and the sticky gore which has sloughed off his opponent. But the antlions are immune to the acid's paralyzing effect, and in the next instant they grab him in tandem and drag him toward the edge of the pit. They will devour him down there.

They will devour us all.

Unless Ava can stop it:

It happens as soon as she simply thinks of the AbilityID – a number which seems tattooed on her brain now, perhaps the way a memory feels.

Her hand goes to the revolver and in a single smooth and automatic motion she slides it from the holster, brings it to bear upon the more humanoid Scum, and squeezes off a shot. The bullet strikes him in the gut and there is no carapace beneath his skin to protect him. He grunts, clasping both hands upon the wound and falling to his knees. Dark blood seeps out between his fingers. Uri races forward suddenly and performs a spinning kick, his heel crushing against the Scum's jaw.

The villain thuds to the floor, unconscious, and just like that—just by observing Uri executing the kick—Ava has learned another attack. There are terms like Action Points and Base Melee Damage seeded in her mind now and while she doesn't fully comprehend their meanings what she does understand is that if she wanted to she could, right now, perform a spinning kick like some sort of trained martial artist. For a split-second she feels empowered—downright invincible—but then she realizes a roundhouse won't rescue Bach from being dragged into that pit. She's going to need something with even more kick.

“AbilityID0007322,” she whispers, the digits buzzing in her ears, the gun humming with inexplicable energy:

It's like muscle memory. She grips the pistol in both hands, peers down the sight, big inhale, and the trigger almost squeezes itself.

>>>Target's Armor Rating exceeds attacker's maximum Attack Rating.

The words are telegraphed into a part of her brain she wasn't aware of until just then. The bullet strikes the fiend in the chest but ricochets off into the ceiling. Drywall dust sprinkles down from above and the mechanical antlion wrenches Bach the last few feet and over the edge – into the darkness below. Uri rushes to the pit's rim and Ava scrambles over on hands-and-knees.

Bach is slowly regaining some control of his body and down there in the trap he fights for his life. He keeps the antlion's mandibles pried apart by wedging the shotgun in between them – he's all out of shells, anyway. The pit is as deep as several Bachs would be tall – too deep for Uri or Ava to climb in and help. She takes the pistol in both hands—

“Watch out!” Uma screams, and Ava looks up just in time to see the gut-shot Scum tackle Uri, slamming him to the floor.

AbilityID0007322, Ava envisions the digits but nothing happens. Uri and the humanoid continue to wrestle for position but the fiend is a grown man and Uri is overpowered.

“AbilityID0007322,” she recites aloud – but still, nothing happens. It's like something's missing. Still, Ava knows what to do. She can perform this ability all on her own, without any outside help. She takes the gun in both hands, peers down the sights, inhales deeply, and squeezes the trigger.

Click.

The fiend tosses back his head and howls. A razor-sharp mandible erupts from his jaw. His mutation seems to be accelerated by the violence and Ellie shrieks hysterically. Uma sprints forward and pounds on the fiend's back but he is unfazed. Ava rushes in and:

It's as if she is a marionette for some invisible hand. Suddenly her footwork is not of her own doing and it is graceful and she leaps and it feels like floating and she spins and it is dizzying and her foot cracks sickly against the villain's jaw. She lands, feeling so strong and satisfied. She whirls about at once to witness the damage she's done – and sees instead that his jaw has simply split open on the other side and a second mandible suddenly springs out from beneath the skin. The specialized slicing appendages scissor together, sinister and self fascinated, like a killer playing with a new knife.

And then the pit explodes with lightning. Hunks of metal and globs of flesh are ejected like puss from a pimple. The decapitated head of the first antlion thuds and rolls across the floor, trailing wires which still spark and then suddenly do so no longer. And then Bach also comes leaping from the pit, crackling with electricity. In a world of awesome monsters, he seems to Ava to be the king of them all.

The second fiend abandons Uri on the floor in order to engage the greater threat. He charges at Bach with his arms extended and his fingers twisted into claws but Bach catches him by both wrists and then the electrical charge is so intense Ava has to look away.

The Scum jerks and twitches. The rags he's wearing incinerate. Bach roars and finally the light-show ends when the Scum collapses, a charred husk. He has been mostly cremated except for the thickest parts of his torso and skull and the mechanical components which had been contained within him. Ava sees one such part, cylinder-shaped and with a pump and bladder attached:

“William Cobb,” she repeats absentmindedly.

“What's that?” Uri wonders.

“I think his name was William Cobb.”

“What? Who cares what his name was?”

Bach stumbles forward and falls on the floor. He is utterly exhausted.

The window is still covered in the viscous venom but it is running down the wall, thinning, and soon the killers who have been waiting outside will be able to see in again.

“We've got to hide,” Ellie says.

“There's nowhere,” Bach mutters, barely audible.

“The pit?” Ava asks.

“I'm not going into the pit of some Scum.” Ellie shakes her head emphatically. “I'd take my chances with the body-snatchers outside. I'd take my chances with them selling us back to Human Resources.”

“Join hands,” Uri advises, “with Bach, too – get him by the hands.”

And they link together, one-by-one, until a circle is formed.

“What are you going to do?” Ellie pleads.

“Hold perfectly still,” Uma insists, “and be perfectly quiet. We must concentrate.”

She bows her head and her brother follows suit. They chant or hum, perfectly synchronized, too fast and quiet for the others to decipher, and then Uri snatches a handful of dust from the floor and blows a plume of it into the air above them and as it settles down on Ava's hands and arms for a moment there is a shimmer like a desert mirage and then she becomes the same ashen hue as the dust.

And they're gone, hidden in plain sight, the five of them having become dust and bits and pieces of humans. It's a flawless illusion. Ava doesn't move a muscle, doesn't even dare to breathe. Outside she hears the muffled voices of their pursuers. They've decided it's been long enough, they want to have a look. The window scratches and slides open a crack. Laughter, quiet and nervous.

“Looks like the antlions got 'em alright,” says one of the killers, “ain't nothin' left but some fingers and toes.”

“Oh shit,” says another, “is that a tongue?”