"Attack dogs too smart to attack." Lubin shook his head. "No. This is wrong."

"Maybe they just want to keep us pinned here," Clarke said hopefully. "Maybe—"

Something rang faintly in her skull, not so much heard as felt: an itch, shrill and irritating.

"Ah," Lubin said softly. "That's more like it."

The change was too subtle for sight and too fundamental. No motion sensor, no image-analysis subroutine would have been able to read the signs. But Lenie Clarke knew it instantly, on some primal level that predated Humanity itself. Something in the gut had never forgotten, in all these million years. On all sides, many creatures merged suddenly together into one, into a vast seething entity with myriad bodies and a single merciless focus. Lenie Clarke watched it leap towards her and remembered exactly what she was, what she always had been.

Prey.

"Flash!" Lubin barked. Almost too late, she remembered to shut her eyes. Four pops sounded in rapid succession. A constellation of dim red suns ignited briefly through her eyelids.

"Go!"

She looked. The composite organism had shattered, just like that. Solitary predators wheeled on all sides, blinded and confused. Briefly blind, she remembered. Briefly confused.

She had seconds to act and nothing to lose. She charged.

Three meters from the nearest beast she started shooting. She squeezed off five rounds; two hits in the creature's flank. It snapped and dropped. Two others stumbled into each other, a mere arm's length away: one shot each and she was spinning in search of new targets. Somewhere offside, needlefire slammed obliquely across the ground. She ignored it and kept shooting. Something dark and massive hurtled past, bleeding flame. She nailed it in the flank for good measure and suddenly she was transformed yet again, all that adrenalized midbrain circuitry flipping from flight to fight, whimpering paralysis burned away in a fury of bloodlust and adrenaline. She shot a leg. She shot a great heaving ribcage, black and sleek as a diveskin. She shot a monstrous, silently-snarling face, and realized it had been looking back.

A part of her she hadn't even known was keeping score served up a number: seven. That's the number you can take, before they come for you...

She broke and ran. Lubin was running too, poor blind Lubin, Lubin the human tank. He'd switched back to clusterfuck and cleared a fiery path down twelve o'clock. He charged down the driveway—

—I told him no obstructions oh boy will he be pissed if he trips on a sewer grating—

—like a sighted man. Dogs shook their heads in his wake and wheeled, intent on reacquisition.

They were closing on Clarke, too. Their paws drummed at her heels like heavy rain on a cloth roof.

She was back on the asphalt, a few meters off Lubin's stern. "Seven o'clock!" she cried, diving.