I tossed the little communicator on the workbench. "Taylor stole it. Just walked around with it. He'd been talking to Harrigan's guys for a while."

We all looked at the device. It was cheap, of course, Harrigan's signature. Gray plastic. A button, a speaker.

"It works on bluetooth, a frequency with some weirdness to it. Just slides right across the Slice, from here to Earth. I…I have a thing I need to say here."

They watched me. Cassie, Beautiful Mandy, Armand, Art Deco, Husband and, I assume, the Green Radio.

"My fault." I said. "I let it happen. Gary's in the healing tank, we didn't lose him. Schmendrick's gone. I wasn't expecting a straight-up attack like this. They took her and it feels like my fault."

I don't know if they agreed. Probably. The facts where right there.

"After the first two visits I didn't take the Humans seriously. They didn't present themselves terrribly well on either occasion: the idiots and their camp on the Chorus. The robot piñata. They were jokes."

The Fools said nothing. What was there to say?

"If you guys want…I don't know. If you want me to just stay out of things I understand. I'll help where I can. I screwed up and I'm sorry."

They looked at one another. "What?" said Cassie.

"You can't…you can't just quit," said Armand. "The hell is wrong with you?"

"Everyone here is so much smarter than me–"

"You kept us from killing Taylor," Mandy said.

Nods all around.

I frowned. I realized I was close to tears in front of my friends. "What's that got do do with anything?"

"Everything," Mandy said.

Cassie: "If I may, Owen. There are procedures. I'm not sure the rest of us would have followed them."

"You and your procedures. I didn't see you on that hill, threatening to rip Taylor's guts out or dip his living brain in acid or karate-chop his groin–"

"Doesn't count. I grabbed the twins and ran."

I shook my head. "Didn't even occur to me at the time. See?"

Armand hugged Cassie from behind. "Me neither," he told her.

They had the feeling of a good match, a strong pair. I felt it, through the connection in our souls. They loved one another, they supported and helped one another.

I looked at Mandy, who was watching Cassie and Armand. She met my eyes and flushed, round and red. Strawberry Mandy.

"Well…everyone did their best. I appreciate it. I'll do better. Friday gave it to me with both barrels: I hadn't been taking the Humans seriously. And now Schmendrick…"

We were silent.

"Harrigan's going to call us," I said. "We'll find out what's happening. It's going to be bad either way: if they killed her, of course, that's the obvious one. But Grayson Pitt, that loser commander from the Chorus? He told me some things."

"Science experiments," Cassie's voice was dead.

"That's one," I said. "It gets worse in ways Pitt didn't know about. Souls simply don't exist on Earth. Los Cazadores don't have intelligence without them. Schmendrick is going to seem like an animal. I don't think she'll be able to talk or think her way out of anything."

Icy fury, calm and deliberate, flowed from my friends. Their souls and mine were cold. All business.

"The frequency they use, the bluetooth for these?" I held up one of Harrigan's communicators. "We can track it. They're in an abandoned military base in Nevada. We can't get there yet, still working on it."

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"What?" Mandy said incredulously. "How did you…"

"We're able to send people, but they'll be at a serious disadvantage. As soon as a Fool goes to Earth, their soul just winks out. No Magic, no Steward of this or that. Just a regular baseline Human."

I flipped the chalkboard. It was covered in maps, equations, diagrams and simple charts. "We can do it. We can send things there. I think they suspect we can do that, and it's why they didn't nuke us."

"They can nuke us?" Armand said, eyes wide.

"Definitely, any old time. But they don't; two reasons. One: they want to abandon Earth to live here. They'd never nuke their escape paradise afterlife thing. Friday, the new guy? He says this world is turning into their entire goal. They want to come here and be gods, I think, and abandon all the rest of Humanity to die by the billions back home."

Wide eyes all around.

"Two: They're afraid we'd just turn their warhead off before it really even got here, which is what I set up last night, by the way: no explosive weaponry without my say-so." I waved my left arm; it had a series of Runes that hadn't been there yesterday. "Then we'd be able to use their own captured nuke against them, which they don't want very much."

"Clarification request: Nuke."

"Sorry, Art. It's a Human weapon that can kill thousands of people, remove a city and fill the area with poison for years afterwards."

Husband Schmendrick spoke. He was literally hopping mad; his claws clattered on the floor. "I am angry that she was taken. I am angry. I don't blame anyone. Nobody here took her. I am grateful that you are trying hard. All of us. I love you. I love you."

I picked him up, cuddled him, his bony, sinewy little chickeny body with its heavy tail. He jammed his head under my chin. "Can't quit," he said.

"Thank you, Husband. I love you."

He started crying, howling directly into my ear. I took it, though Husband could really make noise when he wanted to.

Cassie, seeing that Husband wasn't going to stop anytime soon, simply spoke over him, loudly: "You did this last night. You isolated their frequency, found their location on Earth. What else did you get up to, you and your Radio?"

"Trying to figure out their motivations, really. The question I keep running into: why here? Why bother us, when there are so many other options in this Slice? This world is big, after all, right Mandy?"

She nodded. "It shouldn't exist the way it does, frankly. Gravity shouldn't even be … and atmospheric pressure and who knows what else…It's much bigger than the Earth. I tried to explore, tried to find the end of it once. There's no end."

"How big are we talking," Armand asked. He looked nervous. "Bigger than Earth. Bigger than…like, Jupiter?

Mandy nodded. "When I first became this, I found out I can travel in water. Like a spirit, I suppose. And I think I can approach the speed of light when I do it, when I skip having a body."

Art rotated slightly in place. From him it was an exclamation of shock and amazement. "Inquiry: how far did you travel?"

Mandy swallowed. "I went about a month, just going straight West at nearly the speed of light. Eventually I came back. I found islands, and I found a mainland but I couldn't go there." She swallowed again. "Big," she concluded.

Indrawn breaths. Big.

Big.

"That leads me to think they can't go elsewhere," I said. "The Radio found three four-dimensional devices here here, left behind by civilizations that transcended. All incursions from Earth fit into a tiny bottleneck of about twenty-five miles. It all happens here, whether we like it or not."

"What if WE left," Cassie said. "Bargained for Schmendrick and just left, leaving this part of the world to the Earth richies?"

"We could," I said. "I'm not going to. But anyone who wants to go, that's understandable. Harrigan asked me to destroy the Earth. To end Humans. They trashed their world, they were killing one another. Like animals. A race of screwups."

I was speaking to Humans. They didn't seem offended.

"But maybe not all of them. Maybe not even most of them. The Radio says there's a pattern with certain races of people. They tend to be decent. But there are members of those races that are pure, distilled dumb, and they take power for themselves. Hurting the others of their kind until the whole race of beings just dies."

"Is that where Humanity's going?" Mandy asked. "On Earth."

"Sounds like it. Harrigan also asked me to do the other thing. I propose the other thing. It's not going to be easy. It's going to be impossible, actually. But that's just how I feel right now, when I haven't had any sleep."

Husband had stopped crying. I was petting him, and he spoke into my armpit. "You're going to get her."

"I'm going to get all of them," I said. "If anyone wants to help, I'd be grateful, but if not I understand."

They were in. All of them.

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