Time begins to wobble and ripple all around us, when Gunda throws the switch. For a single moment, she and I and Orsonville, we hang suspended in history. Past and present and future inhabit the same place for a moment, held together by a wafer-thin membrane of possibility.

Above me, future Orsonville shifts through every possible version of itself: a blasted wasteland, a gleaming metallic utopia, a smoking crater filled with molten glass and cooling asphalt where the world used to be.

Below me, the past: Orsonville layed out before me in layers like the pages of a book. What it had been with all its bloody past and its strangeness. The small town that sprang out in the middle of the wilderness. The little village that the natives built, centered around a strange, inverted temple. An outcropping or rocks, set up by pious men all the way down to the great crater where silhouettes of inhuman things toiled under the world’s skin…

Gunda shimmers for a moment, every possible version of herself stretching out to infinity, from the moment of her birth to the strange twists of her possible future. To the left of me, I see eight-year-old me, still lost and scared in the woods. To the right…I’m laying on the ground, broken and bloodied. Or alive and well. Or old and scarred.

The clouds above us part. The sky becomes transluscent, quakes. Beyond the sky, Gunda’s lineage beats against the barrier that divides history. I see them stretching out forever in their hundreds of thousands. The children of the Wurvalak the First Wolf, all the way from prehistory. They beat their fists against the ground of battlefields, howl from the top of rocky crags at the sight of a hundred moons suspended in the sky. Roman Centurions explode into monstrocities, shedding their banded mail. In the trenches of Ypres, they cease their feast for a moment to gaze at fractured time. In Mongolia, they leap from their horses and run across the fields, heading for today. In their thousands, they begin to cross the threshold of history.

And then, it’s over. Just like that, the ripple subsides. Somewhere down below, Betty has thrown the switch and disabled the reactor that powers the time shaper. The invasion ends as abruptly as it began. Gunda cries out in disbelief. I beat my chest and laugh, too soon.

Up in the sky, something descends into present-day Orsonville, wreathed in flame. It makes the snow atop the Edgarhorn evaporate as it goes.

Unhinged from time, the Hindenburg falls into present-day Orsonville, careening through the heavens. The time-shaper groans, hisses, spits sparks; it’s working on fumes now. I move in and extend the fighting staff using the hook to rip at the cables still powering it. It dies, too late.

“Come to me, my brethren! Let slip the wolves of war!” Gunda howls. She jumps off the ledge and into the Hindenburg, crashing into the cabin. Inside, a pack of feral wolves whoop with joy at the sight of her. To them, only a moment has passed: they’ve shifted through a blazing inferno and delivered themselves to the present according to their design.

“Plan B, I guess.” I mutter to myself.

I jump off the ledge after her, trying my damnedest not to think of the sheer cliff face of the kilometer-long drop down into the jagged rocks of the Edgarhorn. The wind carries me behind Gunda, past the Hindenburg’s cabin. I reach out the fighting staff and hook myself up on a cabin railing at the last instant. The sudden jolt nearly dislocates my shoulder. The fire roars above me, consuming the blimp. We fall down in a controlled descent. Apparently someone is still struggling with the keep it airborne.

I hoist myself up, clenching my teeth. How many are in there? A dozen, two dozen? More than her original pack. They could tear me apart in an instant. I should be terrified.

Except I’m climbing up through one of the shattered plate-glass windows. I look at the pack of werewolves still in their tattered uniforms, blood still fresh on their claws from the siege of Berlin. They are killers, each of them veterans of fighting two far more experienced Helfwir.

I’m a dead woman.

Nothing left to be afraid of, I guess.

“Invasion’s over. Everybody off the zeppelin.” I say in my best tough-girl voice. Yeah, that should scare them.

“Helfwir!” Gunda snarls “Sie zu töten!”

The first three come at me head on. The darts are in my hand before I know it. I throw them blindly and somehow they find their mark. The werewolves ignore the pinpricks, until the poison hits them and blinds them. They stumble all over the deck chairs and booths. One of them jumps so I sidestep to avoid him.

Moving in to the next two, the fighting staff compacted in my hand, I smash the hammer against one’s ribs, turn around and slash at another’s tendons with the hook. The others keep their distance, try to gauge me. Extending the staff, I use the spear to keep them at a distance. The largest among them moves in so I stick him with the spear-tip, twist it inside him. He shudders and snarls in pain. The tip isn’t silver-plated, but it must hurt like hell. Collapsing the staff’s haft, I close the distance between us, jump on his shoulders and get another one right between the eyes with the hammer head. The werewolves lie scattered around me. Gunda spits something in German, runs for the cockpit. I unsheathe the bat.

“Rippen ihr auseinander!” The huge werewolf barks. “She’s only…a girl…”

“Come on then, if you’re wolf enough.” I say.

The hook serves well as a weapon, bringing the first two in to crack the bat against their ribcages and spines, leaving them sprawled on the floor. The werewolves move lightining-fast, a whirl of fur and talons and teeth. They rip at the spider-silk shirt with lucky shots, sink their teeth into my shoulder but I beat them back. The huge werewolf moves in. I catch him from the corner of my eye. He’s holding something in his hands, while one of his henchmen grabs me in a half nelson, picks me up off my feet. I struggle, but I might as well be kicking at a brick wall. The huge werewolf bounds closer, a spear in his hands. The tip’s made of iron, barbed and wicked. He thrusts at my chest, against the spider-silk shirt. It rips apart and I feel it piercing my sides.

The pain sets fire to my brain. The werewolf holds me pinned against it. The blood spurts out, hot against my skin. I bite my lip so I won’t pass out. The werewolf holding me releases his grip thinking I’m dying already, so I smash his kneecap with the bat, crack the spear shaft with the hammer. They let me drop on the floor.

“What?” the werewolf snarls, still holding the shaft in his hands, uselessly. I knock it out of his hands with a blow from the staff, then bring the bat down on the side of his head. He collapses on the floor so I hit him again and again and again. When I finally stop, his face is a mass of blue and black. He’s still alive, but he’s certainly out of it.

I head for the cockpit, jumping over the sprawled bodies of werewolves all over. The space inside is going to be cramped, so I sheathe the bat again, pull out a knife. The poison’s still glistening on the blade. Good.

One crack of the hammer later and I’m in the cockpit. Gunda is at the controls, with a man barely sixteen years old by her side, dressed in a tattered soldier’s uniform. She’s keeping the thing in the air, only barely. We’re approaching Orsonville.

The soldier moves in, shifting as he goes. The knife cuts his arm, his chest before I finally stick it in his thigh for good measure. He begins to cry and weep in German, his brain flooded with his worst nightmares. It happens so fast that Gunda doesn’t even have time to stop me as I bury the spear halfway into the controls and wreck them.

“Noooo!” she yells and swipes at me blindly, a backhand blow. I roll away, freeing the staff. She tries to bite me so I turn it around and place the hook at the back of her head. Her momentum carries her out through the plate glass window. The altimeter starts screaming. Just to make sure, I smash the controls some more and destroy the steering wheel.

In the cabin, the downed werewolves begin to stir, notice me.

“Next stop, ground zero!” I yell as I shut the door behind me. They smash into it, tearing through the metal. The Hindenburg makes a sharp decline. Perhaps Gunda had a chance of keeping it airborne. As it is, the thing is little more than a ten-ton dumbbell on fire. My work here is almost done.

I pull myself out of the window that Gunda smashed through. There’s a ladder embedded in the blimp, perhaps intended for repairs. Fire bursts out of the balloon a few meters to my right, singes my eyebrows. Gunda’s nowhere to be seen. I’m hoping she fell to her death but I know that’s not the case. The steps rattle under my feet but they will have to do. I’m nearly at the top when another explosion rocks the blimp and the fires begin to spread outward. I move as fast as my legs will take me, all the way to the top.

Below me, Orsonville is coming up fast. We’re heading for Henderson Lake. There’s six werewolves, all of them singed and mad as hell.

“Hey, wolf boys! Let’s dance.”

And that’s halfway to the end of the whole mess.