Cosmosis

Trapper

I was getting tired of otters trying to kill me.

Not ‘otters’ , I reminded myself, Vorak .

This new one was certainly making itself memorable though.

Because, as far as I could tell, it wasn’t really trying. This new Vorak caught sight of me in the window. It leaned forward curiously, but didn’t otherwise move when it saw me.

It said something loudly, but the words were muffled by the glass between us. Even if I’d known more than a word or two of otter, or I guess it was Vorak, it wouldn’t have mattered. I wasn’t interested in anything it had to say.

My first instinct had almost told me that Stalker had somehow survived getting pinned to a log and thrown down a mountain river.

But this Vorak was not Stalker.

Stalker had been a bit stockier, with grey and brown fur. It hadn’t worn much beneath the cuttlefish-armor, either. In the few moments I’d had a good look at the ‘ Enumius ’ alien, it had only worn a heavy-duty bodysuit with a sparse equipment harness wrapped around its shoulders and chest.

This new one had solid dark brown fur. It wore the same kind of a harness and outfit, but it also sported simple armor. Bracers on its forearms, a simple chest plate, and a helmet.

The other big difference, I couldn’t sense it.

It was not one of the empowered aliens. Not Enumius .

Tasser joined me at the window. They took one look at the Vorak and went to retrieve their bolt-rifle. I thought Tasser might shoot straight through the glass, but they popped the latch on the side of the window, and it swung outward. It let in a wave of frigid air, but Tasser hefted the rifle and took aim.

The Vorak shouted something.

Tasser gave pause.

The Vorak shouted again, letting out a longer stream of sentences, but I couldn’t recognize any words.

It might not be speaking Casti, I realized. Humans had certainly invented a few hundred languages all on our own. Surely aliens too had their litany of languages.

Whatever the Vorak said, it kept Tasser from pulling the trigger.

It held up a claw and a small black disc formed out of nothing.

What?

I redoubled my focus on the Vorak. It was well within range if I adjusted the area toward it, yet I couldn’t…

As the disc widened in its hand and the object fully solidified, I felt the fading traces. But as soon as the Vorak was finished creating it, I could sense nothing from it.

It tossed the disc down into the yard where the creation landed on the snow without sinking in. Four legs unfolded from itself, and the disc stood up jerkily. The disc crab-walked away from the Vorak toward the building adjacent to ours. Its movement drew my eye to a similar disc, currently motionless stuck against another smaller building with large shutter doors.

There was another stuck to the gate behind the Vorak. Another on the wall. They were everywhere! The one relief I found was that our specific building didn’t seem to have any of the black discs stuck to it. But something had injured Nemuleki, and I had a sinking feeling I was looking at what.

Once the newest disc crawled far enough away from the building, it exploded in a massive fireball.

I jumped back from the window in shock, but even as I did, I knew I needed to adjust my expectations. That particular explosion wasn’t that bad, despite how large and loud the blast had looked. Sure enough, when I poked my head up again, the new Vorak was gone.

A little flash for misdirection, and it had ducked out of sight.

Trouble was, I didn’t think for a second the rest of the discs it had deployed would explode for spectacle. Nemuleki’s current condition was more than enough proof.

So, this enemy could create bombs? Stalker had been lethal, but this one already seemed beyond my ability to affect. This ‘ Enumius ’ alien was quickly seeming like it would be more Nai’s speed. The Farnata’s teal-fire creation was still a bigger threat in my mind than the myriad of bombs attached to the buildings. But the gap in fear factor had closed considerably, compared to Stalker.

Why couldn’t I sense it?

I tapped Tasser’s shoulder and nodded toward where the Vorak had been.

“Enumius?” I asked.

Tasser nodded in confirmation. They gave the snowy yard one more glance for the enemy before shutting the window and pulling back.

Crap . It felt like the floor was coming out from under me. Just when I’d started getting a handle on the tiniest fraction of what was going on with me, something new went and changed the rules on me. If it could create things, why wasn’t I picking it up on radar?

Frustrated, I followed Tasser back toward where Nai was putting bandages on Nemuleki. The Casti was at least conscious, so whatever bomb it had come across had not managed to be lethal. I doubted that was by design. Stalker had been playing for keeps; there was no reason to think this new one was pulling its punches.

, I thought to myself. Daniel wasn’t here to pick up on the verbalized thought, but it helped more than just thinking the same thing to myself.

It’s not that the rules changed on me… It couldn’t be that. I was just learning about more rules that had always been here.

I needed to stay descriptive , not prescriptive. I had sensed it, just for the briefest moment when it demonstrated the firebomb. Nai, I could sense perpetually— wait, that’s not true; I couldn’t sense Nai when it was unconscious! There was a precedent for not detecting empowered aliens.

Hypothesize then, I told myself. Why could I detect some empowered aliens, but not others? Why could I sense Nai while it was awake, but not otherwise?

The most likely explanation was that I couldn’t sense any Enumius alien while it was asleep. I didn’t have that much exposure to go on, but it seemed intuitive enough. So…

It felt like a viable theory. It fit the evidence I had.

I warned myself,

It felt a bit like talking to myself, only it didn’t make any self-conscious feeling well up in me. Like thinking out loud, except not out loud at all.

Ugh , this was going to get complicated. Daniel needed to hurry up and get back here.

Tasser withdrew with me back to the break room. It was time for the aliens to talk strategy and for me to listen uselessly and try to follow. Much as it wasn’t to my taste, I couldn’t do anything about it. Doing anything other than following their lead would probably kill me.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t do my best to try and figure out what else was going on.

One thing was abundantly clear. We were being hunted.

At first it had seemed feasible that Stalker had been our only pursuer. Nai had collapsed a massive tunnel behind us. Stalker must have gotten here by air, or it had come over the mountain on foot. Either way, it limited the number of enemies confronting us. Stalker had been alone, and here was the new Vorak, seemingly alone.

It seemed possible that the new Vorak had backup nearby, waiting to ambush us… except I got the impression that we’d already dealt with some of the backup: Stalker. I doubted this new Vorak’s presence was unrelated to Stalker’s. What were the odds two independent Vorak started to hunt us? Where there were two hunters, there could just as easily be three. Four. Eight? Sixteen? How many otters could be after us?

It couldn’t be that many, surely. Otherwise, why would Stalker have been alone?

I’d named Stalker obviously for the tactic it used. If Tasser hadn’t been carrying a very large gun, and if Daniel and I hadn’t gotten very lucky taking a stab at our alien abilities, Stalker would have been a lethal predator.

I got that same feeling that we were being hunted. Not in the same style as Stalker, though. It had been aggressive and confrontational. This new one was practically passive. It was content to let us approach, it wanted us to come to it.

And if Nemuleki’s condition was anything to go by, we’d probably step on a landmine trying.

I thought.

It was trying to keep us here. Tasser and Nai were so far unconcerned with retreating—anywhere we could go was arguably worse. Our options either demanded we confront Trapper, or backtrack into the snowy woods and probably freeze to death.

Of course it wasn’t acting aggressive like Stalker had been. It didn’t need to. Trapper knew our options.

“Thassik,” I said. Map.

Tasser humored me after a beat, but they moved to retrieve the map of the region we had.

“No, no. Alala.” I said, “Thassik,…” I held up my fingers in front of my eye like a mock lens trying to evoke my first exchange with Tasser. Small map. A map of these buildings and there rooms.

If I had a map, and understood where things were, I might be able to help us detect Trapper if it created any more, well, traps . If I even knew a bit about where it was, then maybe Nai could defeat it quickly like Stalker.

“Vosaro la,” Tasser said, showing me empty palms. ‘la ’ meant ‘no’ or ‘not’. ‘Have’ not?

Whatever the precise translation, it didn’t seem like it was possible to get a more detailed layout right now.

I spent the rest of the time imagining a new image to keep in my head with the journal and regional map I’d already made. If I couldn’t look at a map, I’d have to settle for making my own.

The mining facility had four large buildings arranged in a sideways ‘V’, and I might have seen a shed or something on the way in. We were on the second floor of the southwest building which seemed to be the smallest. It seemed like an office space with some temporary living arrangements. There had been bunks on the first floor…

I went through what I’d seen of the building so far and marked down the floorplan on the new map in my head.

When the aliens were done settling on a plan, we all got our feet ready to move again. Tasser and Nai made sure to grab everything they’d come in with. I took their cue and made sure to do the same. It seemed they didn’t anticipate staying in this room.

I didn’t think I’d be able to rest anywhere, knowing Trapper might be trying to put its crawling mines outside the door.

I was surprised Nemuleki was coming. We were all roughed up, but Nai and Nemuleki were both worse than Tasser and me. Just looking at us, you’d figure that the two of them were the ones to fight Stalker last night.

Tasser took the lead, exchanging their bolt-rifle for Nemuleki’s pistol. Tasser led us toward the stairs, and we quickly found our first problem.

The stairwell had a tripwire running across the top of it.

What on earth?

As soon as I realized I thought the words, I expected Daniel to make a joke. Instead there was only the uncomfortable reminder that he was gone. Hopefully that was temporary. I need that to be temporary.

The tripwire caught everyone’s attention, which very much defeated the point. If this trap was so easy to see, there was probably another one better hidden nearby. But if that were the case, why bother featuring the trip wire at all?

Trapper had already demonstrated two different flavors of bomb. It had more tricks it seemed.

Since Nemuleki didn’t react to the tripwire, I had to assume it had been some other kind of trap that they’d been injured by. How many different things could this otter create?

It stopped us dead in our tracks. Tasser talking quickly and Nai struggling to muster up energy for more than one-word answers. They debated for a minute, then another. I could only pass the time scanning our surroundings.

I didn’t detect even a hint of Trapper. But if I wanted my mental radar to reach any of the other buildings, I needed to use it in beam form. Confining it to a beam already sacrificed volume for range. The odds that I would even catch a whiff of Trapper the moment it created something were close to zero.

But that begged the question how Trapper had made this tripwire so close to us. I knew I couldn’t detect anything while I was asleep, but I’d been up a while now. Could Trapper really have set this up before I’d woken up?

I hadn’t gotten a look at these stairs during proper daylight before now, but I was pretty sure the tripwire hadn’t been there earlier.

If I could only detect when Trapper made its creations, there was only one explanation. The tripwire had been created elsewhere, then carried here and set up manually.

Trapper didn’t even need to have set the trap personally, the walking discs might not be traps themselves. They could be trap deployers.

Tasser said something and we reversed direction down the hall. We still didn’t return to the break room, instead going toward an exterior door. We filed out into the snow, Tasser keeping their eyes fixed on the other building’s windows in case Trapper poked its head out and offered Tasser a free shot.

Our path confused me at first. This was the second floor; at first glance there wasn’t a way out here. But a sturdy catwalk connected the balcony with the next building.

It seemed to me if Trapper was going to attack, it would do so when we were vulnerable. And being two floors off the ground in a swirling blizzard felt pretty vulnerable.

No Vorak made any appearances.

It was bitter cold for the brief while we were outside and that didn’t change upon entering the southwest building. Unlike where we’d spent the night in, Nemuleki had turned on the power for only the first building it seemed.

Carpet. Cupboards. The first building had been positively domestic. The next was much more ‘mineshaft’.

We entered onto the second level of a massive steel scaffolding. The structure actually went beneath the ground floor into the mountain. This was an entrance to the mine proper. The whole building was dark. Only a few beams of light found their way through the windows. It was going to be nearly impossible to watch out for whatever Trapper had laid out.

Tasser was leading the pack with me close behind. Nai was unwilling to walk with me behind it.

It was fittingly similar to how I’d felt fending off Stalker. Tasser and I had been jumping at shadows, worried about every angle. Only instead of moving as quickly as possible, now every step was painstaking and deliberate. Pressure plates or laser activated traps would be a lot harder to see than tripwires, and since Trapper’s discs could make more than one kind of bomb…

Tasser saw something moving in the dark and fired a single shot at the scaffolding pillar. The skittering disc they’d seen cracked open spewing far more liquid than should have been contained in something that size. It must have leaked a gallon of fluid onto the grated metal floor. After a few seconds, every drop of the liquid swelled up and hardened into stiff foam, engulfing that corner of the structure.

Add one more kind of trap. I tried to look on the bright side: at least Tasser had seen this one.

But the longer I had to think about the danger we were in, the more frightened I became.

Stalker had not truly been able to use its Enumius power to the fullest extent. Whatever was in my head had countered its ability to hide and camouflage. The matchup had been extremely favorable to Tasser and I. We’d had a gun, and a way to stop it from ambushing us so easily.

Stalker had still almost killed both of us.

My abilities were not so well suited against Trapper.

The variety of danger it could put us in was what had me on the edge of panic. It was recklessly showing us more and more creations. Getting caught in any of the traps it had shown so far would either kill me, or if I was lucky, just imprison me in a rock-foam coffin.

My instinct was that it would show us more.

“Shut up…” I muttered under my breath. “Stay positive.”

Tasser led us around to the part of the scaffolding now covered in hardened foam. Where one trap had already gone off, there probably wouldn’t be any others. It was a safe spot to scout our advance.

The aliens didn’t share too much with me, but probably by necessity. Even if the pace of circumstances demanded they not fill me in, it still only worsened the imminent feeling that I might be about to step on a landmine. I did manage to glean that we were going down though.

That made sense. The tripwire on the stairs had blocked our descent before. Being on the ground level would give us the most room to maneuver. As long as we were on buildings’ upper floors, it was easier to pen us in.

Once we were on the ground, we would… I wasn’t sure. Hopefully there was a gameplan beyond just ‘avoid the traps’.

Tasser pointed out the ground level door on the level below us and started moving toward the staircase that would take us there. It was just as much ladder as staircase, it was angled just enough to not be perfectly vertical, eighty, seventy-five degrees at least. The steps weren’t as tall as earth staircases, but it was easily twice as steep. Each step overlapped the one above it by a large margin.

Tasser didn’t like it either. As we drew close enough to peer down, they held out an arm, signaling us back from the steps.

Instead, Tasser walked over to the edge of the scaffolding and hoisted themselves over the railing. It was a long drop down; this scaffolding went underground into the mountain. Nai followed suit. Even Nemuleki did so.

“Oh you have to be joking.”

Nemuleki had caught a bomb a few minutes ago, and they were about to shimmy down a metal support pillar instead of taking the stairs.

The alien’s perseverance was only part of my dismay.

The rest was because I was right behind them. It made sense. If Trapper was setting all the usual paths with explosives, foam, and God knows what else, then we should start taking some unusual paths.

I’d heard about people jumping from burning buildings before, to their deaths. People said it was because while both options seemed lethal, in the moment, the fall could become less terrifying than choking on smoke and being slow roasted alive.

I couldn’t help but understand the feeling, because the fall I was about to risk was in no way appealing. The gravity might have been a little lighter, but it wasn’t that much lighter. A three-story fall could still turn me into a pancake.

The extra dose of fear made my heart race a little faster as I stepped over the railing. My knuckles clenched white on my handhold. This was certainly terrifying. I’d been plenty scared already, what with an alien otter trying to bomb us. I would have been mad if I hadn’t already been so scared.

Tasser went down first. Once again, the Castis’ round bodies belied their strength. Tasser and Nemuleki both descended with firm grips on the edges of the vertical H-shaped supports. Tasser even slid part of the way, bracing their feet against the beam. The two Casti extricated themselves onto the ground level. Nai followed, more shakily than even Nemuleki. It seemed like the Farnata alien might pass out again at any moment.

Tasser leaned out from the ground level ready to try and catch Nai if it fell.

It didn’t.

But I did.

I got my fingers on the sides of the beam and eased my weight off the edge of the scaffolding. At first it went well. The metal was frigid, but it wasn’t numbing my fingers just yet. I had to alternate which hand held my weight, shuffling them down the length of the beam. I had to stretch to reach out for the ground level railing.

I should have gotten a foot down first.

When I put my weight into my grip, the railing buckled with a groan. It didn’t come undone from its supports, but the sudden lurch was enough for me to lose my composure.

My foot slipped off where it was planted on the side of the beam. For a moment I was weightless. Maybe if Tasser had been in position to catch me, I might have been able to avoid falling. But we’d all been looking at Nai, seconds away from collapse.

I fell below the ground level and my arm shot out blindly. I somehow got my hand onto the railing of the next level down, but I was already falling with momentum.

This railing let out another shriek as it deformed. Instead of bending a few inches out of place, it practically folded over on itself as I dragged it down. I thought for sure my grip would fail, or that the skin would shear off my palms.

Instead, managing to keep my grip deflected my fall to the second sub level below ground. I crashed into the ground and the wind knocked out of me.

It took a few moments to reassure myself I hadn’t fallen the whole way down.

I gingerly flexed my right arm, testing how much grabbing the railing had torqued it. It only felt tense for now, but that had to be the adrenaline. Catching a person’s worth of weight on one arm while falling?

How had I not pulled my shoulder clear of the socket?

I didn’t have any time to rest though because the next moment, a hiss let out a few inches from where I knelt.

The black disc had been invisible in the low light before it had started spewing thick red clouds of smoke.

Just on reflex, I sucked in a breath before the gas came closer, and I kicked it away from me. The trap disc tumbled down the scaffolding shaft, leaving a plume behind it. I couldn’t tell how far it fell, but the gas it let out continued to fill the shaft.

Tasser and Nemuleki let out shouts somewhere above me. I saw the stairs leading back up to the ground level on the far end of the scaffolding, but I forced myself to turn away from them.

I’d just found one of Trapper’s discs.

There might not have been any trap on the stairs. I knew that. But the gas trap was still smoking up the shaft from below. If there was a trap on the stairs, the gas meant I didn’t have time to be safe about it.

I needed to find another way back up.

This stupid scaffolding couldn’t be the only vertical access. Mines usually had elevators, didn’t they? Who wanted to haul ore up a staircase?

But that was back on earth. I had no guarantees the creators of this structure had the same accommodating spirit.

I had to trust that at least some alien out there favored working smarter over harder.

Like the levels above me, there was an exit to this section of the scaffolding. It was even in the same place as the exit on the ground level. I could still sense Nai, even two levels beneath them.

If I tried to follow the same path Tasser and the others were on, just two levels down, then surely, I could regroup with them.

As it stood, they were my only chance to survive.

The tunnel had no lighting, which was horror movie levels of bad idea. But the alternative was climbing up two stories in a mineshaft quickly filling with gas that I could generously assume was radioactive. Or toxic. Or… name an adjective.

I wished I still had the heavy stick. Poking it in front of me might have revealed any of Trapper’s discs before I stepped on them.

Creeping down the tunnel as swiftly as I dared, I tried to stay ahead of the gas behind me. Every single step, I expected to set foot on a button that would give an awful click. I’d be standing there frozen trying to think of how I might be able to dive off the bomb in the instant before it exploded.

Except… I chided myself. If I stepped on a high explosive bomb, I’d be dead before I recognized it.

Oh boy. Was I really imagining what Daniel would say to me if he were awake right now?

Yes, I was.

I needed whatever help was available to get a handle on this situation. I was not about to look my own eccentricities in the eye. Not when any moment I might come across—

—Trapper dropped down right in front of me with its back to me. I froze, and for a second, it didn’t.

It held up a hand and I felt its presence blaze to life again in my mind. It startled me how fascinating it was to feel the alien simply melt into existence on my mental radar, while being able to see it with my eyes the whole time.

It formed a new disc in its hand and tossed it down the tunnel in the direction I was heading. It’s presence began to fade for a moment before resurging again to form a new disc.

Trapper turned and threw the new disc directly at me. It hadn’t even seen me here. The throw had not been meant to hit me.

I caught the disc on habit, sharply aware it was likely a bomb.

The sound made Trapper lock its eyes onto me, like it was only just now realizing I was here. Its hand darted toward its chest… only to land on nothing.

It doesn’t have a gun, I realized. Just like Stalker. It had reached for one, but it wasn’t carrying one.

I moved first by a split second. I threw the disc back at Trapper, hoping that it would either explode and kill it, or that it wouldn’t explode if its creator might be caught in the blast.

Trapper caught the disc in turn and tried to dart for the ladder chute it had dropped down from. It started to jump up the ladder, but I tried to punch it.

It was wriggly. It flexed its body away from my blow. The thick fur around it belied how slim this Vorak was compared to Stalker. The blow didn’t feel like it connected solidly, but Trapper was still knocked partially off balance. My attack didn’t stop it from escaping up the chute it appeared from. One look up the ladder and I didn’t try to follow.

It had left the black disc fastened to the wall of the chute behind it.

I dove away from the ladder, shut my eyes, and covered my ears. A heartbeat later it exploded.

It was not the flashy firebomb it had shown off before. This was a heavy blast that shook the ground around me. I felt the rumbling shock in my stomach.

In the ladder chute like that, it hadn’t been very destructive to anything but the ladder. The chute itself was chewed up and the twisted remains of the rungs lay at the bottom. I wouldn’t be able to go up that way. I did grab one of the metal rungs though. It was a bit short to really swing, but as far as weapons went, it was a passable cudgel.

I needed to move. Trapper knew where I was. If it had any time at all, it could pin me in an inescapable position.

But now I felt like I wasn’t about to step on a landmine. Because I’d seen where Trapper had thrown the first disc. It was still there, skittering about. I could barely make it out in the dark, but it was the only thing moving in the tunnel.

What surprised me was that it didn’t simply plant itself on the floor. It went back and forth peeling sections of itself apart and twisting the pieces into small parts. Tiny wheels, pulleys, even a filament line stretched across the bottom of the tunnel.

The guess about the discs being deployers was spot on.

I’d been in distress, more or less chronically, since landing on this planet. But every time I got to look at something like this, I got a little excited. My and Daniel’s efforts to make a flashbang had paid off more than we could have ever hoped when the idea first came to us in desperation. Seeing something as intricate as Trapper’s discs assembling a tripwire out of itself? It felt like one more hint that I might be able to take advantage of.

Seeing it laid out also let me be confident enough to simply walk near and take a careful step over it. No motion sensor. No pressure plate here.

Moving past the tripwire, I came across another scaffolding, not unlike the first one. There was a second shaft delving into the mountain.

The stairs on this scaffolding, however, were a pile of melted slag.

Great.

Was this Trapper? It had been nearby recently, but I couldn’t think of a reason it would destroy the stairs instead of rigging them like it had everything else. The pile was still warm though. Maybe the Vorak had destroyed the stairs in an attempt to keep me down here.

As if I would take that lying down.

I would have to climb up.

I’d never had a fear of heights. I didn’t plan to acquire one now. I just needed to not look down while I climbed up the support beam.

I gave my arms an experimental flex. Stalker had stabbed me close to my left shoulder, and I’d practically dislocated my right shoulder breaking my fall earlier. This was not the condition you wanted to be in for climbing.

But beggars can’t be choosers.

I started climbing. Going up was marginally easier than going down. I didn’t need to carefully let my weight down like before. The opposite really. I just needed to keep my weight in tension with the beam.

“Hand over hand,” I muttered. “Just keep climbing.”

Wearing a backpack, especially one stuffed this full, was making this more difficult than it needed to be. It wasn’t even the weight. The gravity was turning ordinarily challenging climbs and making them downright doable. But the backpack labeled ‘Titus’ stuck out awkwardly. If anything fell and clipped it, the force would probably send me tumbling down too.

I heard a door open somewhere above me, accompanied by multiple sets of footsteps.

“Tasser?” I yelled.

“Cayleb!” They yelled back.

Excellent .

I forced myself to not rush. It wouldn’t do to reach the ground level only to fall again. Hand over hand, foot over foot, I hauled myself up the H-shaped support.

I could hear the aliens in a fight above me. Angry snarls and shouts were punctuated by the cracking of the pistol. I couldn’t see who fired it.

I got up to the ground level, making sure to put my weight on the flooring section of the scaffolding and not the railing. It was an awkward transition, but I got solid footing under me again. No longer in danger of falling under a mountain.

Still in danger though.

I rushed into the next room. I had to jump over Nai, who was on the ground in the doorway.

Trapper was currently wrestling Tasser for the pistol. Nemuleki was nowhere in sight.

I retrieved the metal ladder rung from my pocket and threw it. It bounced off Trapper’s shoulder armor, but it did get the Vorak to turn.

With my other hand, I closed my fingers around a cluster of microscopic stars and spun them into atoms in my hand. The moment Trapper turned toward me; I tossed a small shimmering yellow ball in front of its eyes.

Trapper wasn’t the only one who knew how to create an explosive.

It might have been mild in comparison, but my flashbang went off right where it was supposed to. I didn’t quite get my arm up in time to shield my own eyes though. Even through closed eyelids, I was seeing spots from the blinding light.

But Trapper was worse off. It had caught the full brunt of the flash. It darted away from Tasser only to bash its way into a metal storage cabinet. It’s claws scrambled against the concrete floor and the metal fixtures, and I lost sight of it. I heard a door slam open, and Trapper was gone.

I’d hoped Tasser would shoot the Vorak, given the chance. But with Trapper retreating, I could see my flashbang had caught them too. Casti had huge eyes, and huge pupils to match. But for the first time, I saw Tasser’s eyes constrict down to dots.

“Tasser,” I said.

Alarmed, they twitched their gun toward me, and I froze. “Cayleb.”

“Yeah. Su,” I said.

It relaxed partway. “Nai...Nai?”

“Uhhh… this way.” I said. Tasser couldn’t see me a few feet in front of him.

“Nai?” they asked.

Unsure of what else to do, I put a hand on Tasser’s shoulder and tried to steer them toward the doorway where Nai had collapsed.

The Casti gave a jump, but otherwise let me direct it toward Nai.

“Nemuleki?” I asked.

Tasser clicked their tongue and spat out a phrase too quickly for me to understand. For now, Tasser was preoccupied with Nai.

I checked the door Trapper had escaped from. It seemed to be the one Tasser and Nai had entered through. It led outdoors and there were tracks leading to and away.

Checking outdoors let me notice a few more discs Trapper had deployed, each one of them crawling somewhere to set up another deathtrap.

After seeing more of its MO, I felt like I was beginning to get a glimpse of Trapper’s priorities. There were patterns to what it was doing, just like there had been to Stalker.

Trapper was going for coverage, not convolutedness. In a way, the same variety that made its creations so unpredictable and aggravating also made them safer to confront. If every disc had just been a high explosive mine, I’d be dead. But instead, there were a variety of effects to keep us guessing.

Maybe there were limits to how many traps of a certain type it could make. But it felt more likely that Trapper wasn’t as eager to confront us. It had run away from me. Me .

I couldn’t be that big of a threat to it.

It had even run at the first opportunity when I’d found it fighting Tasser. Maybe it hadn’t intended to run across the Casti in the first place. Could it have fled from me only to accidentally put itself in Tasser’s path?

Considering how eager it had been to flee the second time, that seemed plausible.

How long had Trapper actually been here? It was not impossible for it to have arrived at this facility earlier than us. But if that were the case, shouldn’t it have set traps at all the entrances? But since fleeing back into the wild was a death sentence, it might have focused its efforts on preventing us from leaving. It didn’t care about the trails leading away from the mine. It only cared about the gate and the road.

The deciding factor was, ultimately, the variety in its traps. There were traps that would kill us, sure, but there were just as many that would hamper, immobilize, or otherwise deny us movement. It wanted to slow us down, kill us if possible. But more than that, its tactics screamed delay to me.

It was stalling, playing for time. Stalker had engaged immediately because it couldn’t significantly delay us without directly confronting us. It couldn’t afford to wait for the backup from Trapper.

Trapper had us in the opposite scenario. If Trapper had more Vorak friends somewhere nearby, then every moment we spent here was time for the hunters to close in on us.

This was bad. The only way time might help me was Daniel. This was the longest he’d been gone so far.

<…Caleb.>

I sat bolt upright. Speak of the devil, Finally!

I thought, practically shouting in my own mind.

he replied.

I bet.

I said.

This was a weird sensation. I probably needed to get used to feeling simultaneous terror and relief.