FROM THE TOP terrace, Prehler radiated a slow burn.

“Turn It. The Hell. On.”

I stuffed the remote back into a pocket and shook my head.

“Ouch, I think I’d rather not. Now that you’ve revealed your murderous plan, I think it’ll be better for all involved if I keep this machine tucked in.”

Prehler simmered, then took one measured step down the stairs toward me. The awkward silence was punctuated by another boom from the vault door. We both ignored it, and he took another step down.

Let him. He had his big speech. Now it was my turn.

“You’re right that we’ve both been chewed up, and you took it hard,” I said. “But your response was to stick it to others before they could stick it to you. A lot of people wouldn’t blame you. It’s the predictable emotion of any dumb, human Neanderthal. SO predictable that you couldn’t fathom that I might go another direction.”

I watched him carefully.

“I took the path less traveled.”

Prehler’s eyes narrowed, and he took another step.

“Sure, I’ve been an ass for a long time,” I continued. “But unlike you, I looked at who I really wanted to be. You’ve been bullied, beaten, and disemboweled, and the only thing you learned was to be exactly the same or worse. You did let them turn you into the very thing you hate. After all those lives, you’re every bit the crybaby you were two hundred years ago. So much experience, and you never evolved a millimeter.”

Prehler took one more tantalizingly slow step.

“Well, I’m not letting that happen to me.”

Another step.

One more and I knew he’d tackle me. I also knew that I couldn’t take him man for man. If he got his meaty arms around me, I’d be as dead as that Amber he left in that alley. Prehler knew that too.

“No, Mr. Kinder,” he spoke. “You took the same path as too many other Incarn sheep who curled up and died before you. When you looked at your ape face in the mirror and pondered, ‘Am I human or alien?’ you asked the wrong question.”

His eyes were bloodshot and steaming.

“You were never either one. You were never anything more than what your Golden parents wanted you to be.”

Step

“Cannon fodder.”

He jumped me.

Just as I planned.

See, speaking of evolving, Prehler didn’t know that I’d been holding out on him. When he launched himself with both arms outstretched, he never considered what would happen if I grabbed one and swapped panes.

Imagine the power of geometry. Humans used it to build several thousand years’ worth of civilization, from the pyramids to the aqueducts. On a smaller scale, there’s an old physics trick when your car is stuck in the mud and you can’t pull it out. It involves tying a taut rope, a very taut rope, between the car and an immovable object. If you tried to pull on the rope straight back in a tug of war, you wouldn’t have the strength and your car would stay stuck. But such a tug would only involve one dimension. If you were to say, pull on the taunt rope perpendicularly, you’d be applying a second dimension. That creates a trick of trigonometric leverage, an application of force via the sine and cosine powers of a right triangle that multiplies your strength. The car is pulled free with a fraction of the effort. Try it yourself in any parking lot. It’s a brilliant application of 2nd-dimensional perpendicular force.

So when I swapped panes while gripping Prehler’s arm, it applied the power of the 4th- Dimensional perpendicular.

SNAP

I rolled to the side as Prehler fell past me to the floor, his scream ringing in my ears. He landed on his knees, clutching his forearm in sputtering rage.

I didn’t give him a chance to get back on his feet, as before his bloodshot eyes even focused through his agony, I jumped him…and took both of us on a pane-swapping ride.

Don’t worry, I had already put out tiny feelers to make sure the control room was still over bedrock and I could make the jump without crashing into a basement. The control room vanished as our world surrendered to lightless murk. Prehler roared in guttural hate as I pushed him though uncountable panes in a single screaming leap. He tried to wrap an arm around my head, but his pain interfered, and I pushed us both too far, too fast. Before we had even taken a breath, we were buried so deep that I could barely feel my own hands. Then putting all my strength into a single heave, I hurled Prehler to land a dozen yards away before we both came to a halt in whatever shapeless void this was.

I finally breathed.

Prehler got to his feet, eyes wide with thwarted anger. Shaking and gripping his arm, he stood up with a look that would kill.

Now I got nervous. Maybe this whole idea was stupid. But it had worked on Mr. Stinky. It would work again…wouldn’t it? I cringed as Prehler raised a fist to knock my head off.

No, I wasn’t strong enough to beat him.

But the 4th monster that grabbed him from behind sure was.

I stepped back, watching Prehler suddenly in the fight for his life against an extra-dimensional boogeyman. Their limbs entangling in a furiously escalating death match, Prehler screamed in fury. Tentacles constricted around his head and neck, pulling him off-balance and into the dimensional gloom. He screamed all the louder.

Not a scream of fear, but of viscous bloodcurdling hate. I stepped back farther. Prehler fought like a wild animal, ripping and tearing against the monster, throwing furious punches even as he slipped deeper and deeper into dimensional limbo. He drew blood, and for a moment I feared he would actually escape—

He didn’t. In a rage of violence, they both vanished into the dark ether, still locked in bloodthirsty combat.

Gone.

I wondered, briefly, if I was rooting for the right one.

But it worked. Prehler thought there couldn’t be any monsters this deep in the mountain, but I knew better. I’d seen one when jumping around the vault.

This one looked different. Oh well.

I got the hell out of there, jumping back to the home pane so fast that blood came out of my ears. Materializing alone in the control room, I gave a snarky salute.

“Godspeed, Prehler.”

BOOM

Oh yeah, Dukane’s men were still trying to break in; and from the sound of it, they weren’t too concerned about saving the door. I’d have to hurry and do the real job. Climbing up to the top terrace of Master Control, I scanned the video arcade’s worth of LED buttons spread out before me. I had studied the schematics but seeing it in person was overwhelming.

How many blinking lights does one machine really need?!

BOOM

That was louder.

Hurry UP.

I would have, except at that precise moment—a ripple of 4th-Dimensional energy washed over the entire lower terrace. Everything blurred as it shifted into 2D for a moment, then snapped back into place, vanishing as if it had never been there.

What the hell was THAT?!

I didn’t know, so I went back to the controls.

One of these systems, activated in the proper sequence, would use my spliced components to fry Dukane’s machine from the inside out. All I had to do was decipher this starship’s bridge of a control panel. I leaned over a monitor and found a menu labeled “Power.” So far, so good—

BOOOOOM

Every monitor fritzed with a second of static. Dust fluttered from cracks in the ceiling, and at the edge of my hearing I heard metal clanking on bare stone.

Uh oh.

I had a sneaking suspicion that I had just run out of time. Jumping to ground floor, I exited the room to sneak a peek down the hall at the allegedly impenetrable vault door. When I turned the corner, I saw—

There was no vault door. Just a billowing cloud of dust and a hundred red laser pointers slicing through the jabbed debris. A hundred pairs of stomping feet were right behind them.

Oh snap. A few of those catsuit mercenaries I could handle, but not an army’s worth. Nor could I handle the several Purples running up behind them. I was out of my weight class. I turned and ran. But not back to the control room, that was a dead end. Rather I ran back into the guts of the machine itself. Blowing up a vault door was one thing, but I bet Dukane would be less inclined to throw explosives around his pet baby.

Running past the first rung of LED rings I ducked inside a side tunnel, and considered my position, being trapped inside Dukane’s machine having no obvious way out. Dropping a pane or two might get me past the human commandos, but I’d never sneak past the Stygian Incarns I had seen approaching.

That left me with only one potential escape, and I despised it. Bedrock was nice for pane swapping as it kept my feet on solid ground, the alternative being falling through the human floor. I knew from studying the maps that this whole cavern was carved out of bedrock, meaning there wasn’t any human floor to drop through.

Except for one little spot. Confirmed by the schematic in Mission Control, there was one point I could drop through. But…

Bullets rang around me.

“But” nothing. Either I made the move, or I got perforated.

I ran, pushing my legs to stay around corners and behind obstacles so no pursuer could get a clean shot. I didn’t have far to run, just to that junction of power cables coming up out of the floor—from the generators down below.

Several stories below.

More bullets punctuated my inevitability of options. When I reached the cables, I swapped panes.

And fell through the floor.

And fell and fell.

When Marie said, “Throw yourself off a roof,” I’m sure she didn’t mean it literally. Nevertheless, here I was in midair and total darkness, falling.

I couldn’t see how high I was and was sure I didn’t want to know. All I knew was that either I performed my very first large-scale blueshift compression right now…or I’d be smashed to pieces in utter seconds.

Instinct. Instinct.

I’m going to die.

My vision went blue—

—and all of a sudden, the floor hit me. I slammed hard rock with a thud, scrapping skin off my knuckles. I landed in a tangle of limbs staring up at the heights of the mountain, at least three hundred feet above me.

With the compression I had fallen…twenty feet, tops.

Funny what dynamic intellectual achievements you can reach when you’re under pressure.

Nevertheless, that hurt. Pain spiked through my back, my legs, and…everywhere. I groaned as I got up, but I had done it. Great thing about dropping through floors, your adversaries can’t know exactly where you went. I hadn’t been in anyone’s line of sight when I dropped, but the Stygians would be aware of that trick even if the humans were not. I couldn’t stay here.

Where exactly was “here?”

A small, tiny cavern, apparently only here as a junction for massive power cables snaking around. Easily three feet in diameter, cables coiled around corners and through tunnels, eventually stretching upward to the Great Machine, several stories up. Several human-sized tunnels exited the cavern, funneling themselves into the darkness lit by those ever-present red maintenance lights. I guess I had to pick one before my pursuers got smart. But—

Another huge 4th blur rippled the air right in front of me. For a split second I thought I could see the adjacent pane to this one, then it vanished again. Just like what happened in Mission Control a minute ago.

Is that a by-product of the 4th Tunnel or what? I didn’t know what that ripple was about, but it had vanished as quickly as it appeared.

Of far more concern was the blueshift compression suddenly tainting the cave from high above, dropping a Stygian in a black commando suit right in my face.

They don’t miss much, do they? He didn’t even stumble on his landing. Show off.

I blasted him with the knockout inhaler. Sure he was a braggart, but I fought dirty.

I also had luck. His blueshift had given me a split-second warning. But that luck evaporated as several more blueshift compressions colored the area, and Stygians dropped in all around me. Three…four…five…hitting the ground in those damnable bent knee superhero poses.

Snap.

That was enough of that. I picked a tunnel and ran.

The tunnels down here barely deserved the name. They were unfinished and cramped, bathed in a soup of horror movie emergency lights obviously meant for short straw maintenance workers. They divided and subdivided, leaving me endless choices on which way to run and how far. Nothing else was down here except more power cables, stapled right into the bare rock. Occasionally I could feel the rhythm of massive generators beyond the wall, but I ignored everything to run as fast as my numb legs could handle.

Where to go? I’d have to get back to the surface if I was to finish this, but did these tunnels even go anywhere? Each turn led to another intersection and picking the wrong one might get me lost down here forever. Fighting new pains in my neck, I ran through several intersections at random. Finally, the tunnel started widening, the red lights illuminating an exit from the labyrinth. Somewhere else.

Somewhere huge.

A gargantuan cavern. About one hundred feet side to side with a thirty-foot ceiling, it was so large that the red light barely illuminated the far end. Anywhere was better than where I had been, so I ran inside and got a good distance away from my inevitable pursuers.

That’s when I noticed some strange construction.

Along the walls, buried in the rock itself, unusual shapes alternated between the lights. They looked almost like…vaults in the wall. I could see over a dozen along both sides of the cavern. Farther along, I saw huge excavation equipment, and more holes dug out of the bedrock. Holes the exact same size and shape of a big metallic cube sitting on the rocky floor, outlined in red blinking lights.

Well, funny meeting you here.

Even if the monstrous freight elevator appearing out of the gloom on the very far end didn’t give it away, I knew where I was. This place would have to be down here somewhere. The ominous “Red X” in the elevator earlier wasn’t subtle, and necessity demanded a place like this be really close to the generators.

Taking great care not to make any noise, I explored Dukane’s Maximum Security Prison.

I recognized the prison cubes from the Tower immediately, but this place had an extra layer of security. The cubes, or cages, were embedded into the rock itself, neatly inserted into specially made slots in the cavern. Each one blinked with the telltale indicator of There’s something in here.

Over a dozen of them.

Dukane didn’t just catch the Tentacle Terror, he’d caught a veritable zoo of 4th monsters.

Walking past them, I figured this would be a really good time not to exchange the frying pan for the fire. I didn’t go near any of the windows as I really didn’t want to know if T.T. had a brother down here. Except—

POUND POUND

I already did know. The nearest vault obviously held the Tasmanian Devil, that whirlwind I saw last time. That must have been just a relay point, with this being the final destination.

POUND POUND

It still wanted out really bad.

But it wasn’t going anywhere. Dukane had a pretty good plan going on here. Human cages only exist in three dimensions, but the earth exists in four. So down here in the bedrock, any incarcerated creature would be caught by the non-excavated stone, unable to escape by jumping panes. Only a catastrophic power failure to the front door would give them any hope of escape.

In my gawking, I almost didn’t hear the voices from the tunnels behind me. My pursuers had worked their way in here just as I did, and I wouldn’t be alone much longer. Those buggers would chase me all over the mountain, and I just didn’t have the time. Dukane couldn’t know exactly how long Prehler and I had been inside his mountain, but a hundred dollars said he had men inside his machine right now, checking for sabotage. He’d find my adaptations in short order and that would be the end of that. I needed to get back to the control room, but I couldn’t take on the entire private army.

I was pursued downstairs, outnumbered upstairs, and fighting a ticking clock. The voices got closer—

But they weren’t here just yet…and scratching my neck, I realized it would be some minutes before they were.

Time for yet another dirty trick.

Speaking of catastrophic power failures…

The Stygians entered the cavern slowly, eyes at the ready. Their purple glows clashed against the red illumination.

Consummate professionals, they approached in pairs, supporting each other in their matching black jumpsuits. Each one also held a taser in one hand as they tiptoed in silence over the rocky floor, looking for their target.

Looking for me.

They wouldn’t find me just yet. My goal here was to get them deep into the cavern…too deep to run back to the tunnels. I doubted “running” was their plan anyway, as they were all projecting that damned “I’m not afraid of anything” uber confidence of knowing they were the strongest men in the room. They didn’t look afraid of a damn thing and kept moving forward, searching.

Yes, right about there would do.

Oh hell, I was really going to do this wasn’t I?

Yes, I guess I really was. I could feed the Bad Wolf one more time. These guys deserved it.

Those “guys” were now in the dead center of the cavern, surrounded by a dozen mammoth vaults on either side. The apparent leader held up his hand, freezing everyone in mid-step. He peered around as if he had heard something.

He had.

He had heard the nearest vault door start to shimmy.

Red lights flashed as a power surge ripped through the entire assembly, frying the internal circuits of every vault in the cavern. Sparks blasted across the darkness as every light went dead, leaving only cold quiet.

Deathly quiet. The eyes of the leader went wide—

The vault doors blasted open.

All of them.

A tsunami of screaming blurs engulfed the cavern, smothering the Purples. Two of them raised knee-jerk blueshift compressions in an attempt to contain the surge, but they were overwhelmed in a screeching ripple.

A spinning blur engulfed one Stygian.

A black tentacle whipped out to constrict another.

A crackling whirlwind tore into the rest. Blood flew liberally.

At least, that’s how I imagined it. I was hiding in a dark corner four panes deep. I didn’t want to know what was happening, nor see a damn thing. Let’s talk about something else.

Such as…how did I sabotage a multimillion-dollar containment system?

Well, the first rule of engineering: If it’s not broke, fix it until it is. Dukane had protected his vaults against pane-swapping 4th monsters, but not against goofball Rube Goldberg rewiring by a frustrated engineering genius. His own engineers were obviously competent, but they forgot the biggest lie in technical science is “No one would ever be that stupid.”

On the contrary, that’s when persnickety cynics like me say, “Hold my beer.”

I mean really, power cables and junction boxes just lying around? What if some disrespectful malcontent sabotaged them? People ought to be more careful. In another life, I would have been a good engineer. Anywho…

The Stygians didn’t last long. After a minute, I dared to sneak two panes closer to home and saw shifty blurs popping around the cavern in frantic 4th jumps. Their…uh… “work” completed, they trudged toward the elevators.

They’re waiting for you upstairs, fellas. Go knock yourselves out.

Except where they wanted to go, they didn’t need elevators. They ripped away several doors and crawled right up the elevator shaft. I waited long enough to hear the first scream, echoing down from so very far above. New alarms went off. Some recorded female voice spoke over hidden speakers:

“Black Alert! Black Alert! Isolation Procedure Commencing! Mountain Exits will seal off in thirty seconds! Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven…”

More screams punctuated the alarm.

Only then did I leave my hiding place. Moving across the rocky floor to the elevators, I happily found one that wasn’t smashed. I didn’t want to go up just yet. As screens next to the elevator bank flashed BLACK ALERT, I figured I was a lot safer down here. More warnings told me massive walls were sliding into place to block every exit out of the mountain. These 4th monsters could not be allowed to escape, and Dukane had very wisely built a final fail-safe that turned his mountain into a prison in the case of catastrophic containment failure. Smart move.

So…we were now all locked in here together. Dukane, his men, the monsters, and me. It would be a really good idea if I stayed off the top floors for a while.

Have fun, guys. I’m not leaving this spot for at least a half hour.

CRREEEAAACKK

Or not. Another sound echoed through the cavern and turning around…I saw had missed something. Not every cage had blown off its hinges. In fact, one of them hadn’t budged at all. Until now. The last vault shuddered with the creak of a haunted house as it was pushed open from the inside.

A blurry monster stepped out.

A 4th distortion hid most of it, some vague shimmer almost like a funhouse mirror, a ripple in space mostly visible only by the cavern it obscured. It had no detail, no texture. I couldn’t even see its aura or any facial features, just a large reflective form.

The creature exited its cage, stepping over some bloody bodies. It ignored them…instead taking great interest in me, staring me down.

Uh oh.

My heart raced. I was already backed against the elevators, so I couldn’t run. I was alone in here. The only thing left of my Stygian pursuers were smears on the floor. This…Mirror Monster had nothing to vent its anger on except me. I almost made a move to drop panes—

But…the creature didn’t move. It just stared.

Staring back, I could now make out a vaguely humanoid shape, and either two or three arms, depending on how I squinted. Wait a minute— This creature was a dead ringer for what I had met around the 150th pane! The one that pointed the way home!

Is it the same one?

Impossible, this one had been locked up. Meaning the other one…

Appeared in a dimensional ripple next to the first. I blinked and there it was. I recognized it immediately, as it had been only him and myself in a pane of absolutely nothing. I’ll never forget him.

I had just released his buddy.

The two very large, very shiny, very blurry 4th-dimensional monsters looked at each other, and then at me.

You’re welcome, I guess. I hate awkward silence.

Fortunately, so did the Mirror Monsters. After staring me up and down yet again, they stepped into an adjoining pane and vanished. I had the cavern all to myself.

Thank God. Can I just sit here for three days and get my adrenaline to level off? I’d appreciate it.

Of course not, because—

That strange blurry ripple from the control room and the tunnels appeared for the third time.

SCHOOOOMMM

Ever see an implosion centered on an explosion? All light compressed into a colorless hole about ten feet across, a spherical bubble of black air that crackling with 4th-Dimensional blurriness. A gust of wind nearly pulled me off my feet as a pressure gradient sucked all the air into the hole.

Oh hell.

I already guessed where this was heading, and covered my face when the black hole exploded, blasting outward and knocking me to the ground.

From a hole in space, Prehler jumped into the cavern.

He fumbled for his footing, kicking residual debris and gasping for air, obviously winded from dragging himself back from wherever I had thrown him. His jumpsuit had several tears, matched by bleeding gashes across his face and arms. He gagged for a second as he caught his breath—

—and saw me.

His eyes flamed in red rage.

Dammit, never send a 4th monster to do a man’s job. I hurled myself inside the nearest working elevator, tripping over my legs as I pounded the UP button. Prehler shouted but couldn’t close the distance before the elevator door slammed in his face. I shot away, watching the floor indicator tick up and up, breathing in dry heaves as if the gates of Hades had just opened up beneath me.

Judging from the bloodthirsty look on Prehler’s face…they obviously had.