Yvonne looked at her with pity. “Oh, girl, that thing isn’t dead. It’s probably put itself back together already.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Zhao said. “It just fell off a three-story building!”

“It’s…it’s partly machine. It can…reassemble itself.”

“So you’re not taking us someplace safe,” Rachel had said. “You’re just—”

“—Getting you the hell away from the Long Legs.”

At that moment, they heard an anguished howl from Cowboy. “What is it?” Pav had said.

Looking around, Rachel could see no obvious threat…but, surrounded as they were by buildings, she couldn’t actually see very far.

“Up,” Zhao said, pointing.

The Long Legs—its upper torso still incompletely assembled—had apparently just leaped to the top of a building not fifty meters behind them.

“Run!” Yvonne said.

They entered a panting, side-aching world of twists, sudden veers down what appeared to be dead-end alleys that turned out to have narrow passages, sprints across open plazas, and near-dunkings in pools of colored goo.

It took only minutes before Zhao said, “We can’t keep running like this. We have to kill that thing.”

“With our bare hands?” Pav said.

“No,” Zhao said. “We need a weapon. A gun.”

Rachel didn’t believe a gun would be useful against the Long Legs.

“No!” Yvonne said. She stopped; they all did, even the dog. Yvonne looked frantic, confused. “I meant, no, we don’t use bare hands or guns. That thing is…it’s an electrical field that holds it together, puts it back together. Overload it and we kill it.” Yvonne closed her eyes, like a contestant on a game show trying, trying to remember some simple fact. “There are…God, the word…duplicators?”

“Plates?” Rachel said.

“Yes! That duplicating process requires huge amounts of power, so the plates are like…nodes. We need to find a plate.” When the others stared at her, waiting for more, she said. “To electrocute the son of a bitch.”

“And the on switch,” Zhao said. “Don’t forget the on switch.”

Yvonne led them quickly through one last cluster of squat, ugly structures. Cowboy kept racing ahead, and Rachel felt compelled to call him back.

“Why don’t you let him run?” Pav said. “He’s a Revenant. He may know more than we do.” Rachel was ashamed that she hadn’t thought of that. She kept treating Cowboy like, well, an ordinary dog, even though she suspected that, in his canine fashion, he could be channeling the Architects.

“City limits,” Zhao said. He was right; they were out of the mass of buildings and alleys now…hard up against the looming, curving wall of the habitat.

The smooth quasi-concrete ground surface gave way to raw, packed-down earth. There were even patches of greenery and some trees…everything looking old.

This wasn’t a walkway. Every few meters lay a cluster of pipes or other impediments.

“Which way?” Rachel said.

Yvonne had stopped and, eyes closed, arms outstretched, was turning in a slow circle.

“Great,” Pav said, “now she’s an antenna…”

This struck Rachel as both funny and true.

Yvonne stopped her turn with her arm pointed toward the south end of the habitat. “Somewhere along there,” she said.

“Question,” Rachel said, finding it difficult to talk with the endless exertion. “How do we get the Long Legs on the plate?”

“Bait,” Zhao said. “One of us has to be on the plate, I think. To make the Long Legs attack.”

“Zhao, I volunteer you,” Pav said. He was working his way under, then over, the pipes.

“I’ll do it,” Rachel said. It wasn’t nobility or the desire to sacrifice herself. One of them needed to be bait. She was smaller and quicker than the others. And it would spare her the agony of watching—

Then the Long Legs emerged from an alley—it was now between them and the plate.

Cowboy ran toward the Long Legs, barking furiously. Rachel was amused to note that the Long Legs treated the dog as a threat…backing away and moving to one side.

But they were still unable to reach the plate.

“Sorry, Rach, I don’t think we’re going to be able to use you as bait,” Pav said.

“Yvonne,” Zhao said. “What are you doing?”

The Revenant astronaut had her hands up against the nearest wall, running them slowly, as if searching for a minute crack in the surface.

“Time is our enemy, Yvonne,” Zhao said, his voice growing more agitated.

“I’m looking for the controls, all right?” she said. “The voices are telling me, controls are everywhere…just got to—” She smiled. “Got ’em.”

Rachel couldn’t see anything different. “It’s just a wall.”

Yvonne used her right index finger to draw a big rectangle on the wall…it was like dragging an image on a Slate screen.

But then half a dozen different colored boxes appeared inside the larger box Yvonne had sketched. Each one was marked with symbols.

Rachel could see the Long Legs approaching now, as if moving in for the kill. What would it feel like, she wondered? Would she be ripped into pieces? Or would her death be even creepier…being absorbed somehow? Sucked dry?

Closer and closer…

“Got it!” Yvonne shouted.

“What?”

“Just…everybody hold on! Seriously, I mean.”

Rachel looked at Pav. She could hear the scraping, skittering sound of the Long Legs approaching. What? “Grab the pipe,” Pav said. They all did.

With her arm hooked around an alien tube, Yvonne brushed her hand across the panel.

Rachel immediately felt her vision distorting, whether due to her eyeball changing shape, or the habitat itself, she couldn’t say.

It was as if a gravity wave passed through them, simultaneously stretching the buildings, walls, and ground around them, squashing them…and dragging them toward the Long Legs and the plate.

But Rachel and the others held fast.

The Long Legs was slammed into the wall behind it, not hard enough to damage it…just to pin it.

“Here goes,” Yvonne said. With difficulty, as if she were being pulled toward the plate herself, she touched the panel that activated the duplicator.

The Long Legs twitched, then froze as a massive electric jolt surged through it. Then it began to smoke and melt, matter dripping down the creature’s sides as it began to shrink. Rachel wanted to look away but couldn’t. She wanted this thing gone; if this was how it had to happen, too bad.

In less than a minute, the Long Legs was gone. Yvonne shut off the power.

“How did you do that?” Zhao said.

Yvonne seemed surprised. “I guess I accessed the gravity controls.”

“The what?” Pav said.

“The whole NEO is, ah, filled with clumps of super-dense matter. There’s a…a system of magnets that moves them around, which is why we have Earth-like gravity even though we should be bouncing like balloons.” She blinked, confused. “I can’t believe I know all that, somehow. It makes my head hurt and my stomach ache.”

Zhao turned to Pav and Rachel. “The cat’s-eyes, you called them. They can be controlled.”

“Great,” Pav said. He had knelt to hold on to Cowboy. The dog seemed eager to sniff the remains of the Long Legs, and Pav was holding him back.

Zhao was taking a moment to be an engineer again. “Gravity. Nanotech plasm. 3-D printing. Morpho-genetic mapping and retrieval. I’d love to see the main computer and power station for these things.”

“Soon,” Yvonne said, tapping her temple. She looked tired, but satisfied somehow. “We’re on our way to some answers, I think.”

Rachel was still distracted by the awful, gagging smell of the electrocuted Long Legs. It was like burned plastic times ten.

As for the Long Legs itself…there was sizzling black matter spattered all over the plate.

“Is it dead?” she said.

“For the moment,” Yvonne said. “You can never really kill these things.” Incredibly, as Rachel looked on, several puddles of former Long Legs goo began to shape themselves into squares, as if forming up for battle. “Oh my God, Yvonne, look.”