He laughed again, but his face didn’t change expression, which was way creepy. I squinted, trying to get a better view. “Oh, jeez,” I muttered in disgust. Clearly they had gotten this guy from Frank-n-steins R Us. First off, he was enormous — maybe seven feet tall. And huge, broad and heavy. One arm was like an I beam: way too long, out of proportion with the rest of his body. I could barely make out metal spikes that seemed embedded in his flesh. Gross. He gave an impression of being chunked together from different alien species, and somehow it seemed even worse than Ari’s awful wings, sewn into his back.

“Not saving you from this storm, mutant,” he said. “Saving you for your later fate, we are.”

His voice was weirdly inflected and metallic, like an automated answering machine.

“Oh, good. Yoda captured us,” Fang whispered.

Something hauled the net up with us in it, and we dangled a foot off the ground. Fang was hyped, also trying hard to get out. Angel still looked shocky and frozen, confused and scared. Total was struggling to right himself, and Akila couldn’t get on her feet, but she was growling.

“I am Gozen,” said the bigger thing. “I do not want you to freeze to death. I want to watch you die later.”

“You need to get yourself a new hobby,” I snarled.

“It’s always something,” Total muttered, still trying to get upright.

“Killing things is not a hobby,” Gozen said, sounding as though he would have smiled if he could. “It is my life. It is what I was created to do. I am able to kill things in many, many different ways.”

Gross, I thought. Someone had programmed him to feel pleasure about killing. I could hear it in his voice.

“We’re able to kill things in many different ways too,” I said, putting as much steel into my voice as I could, in case he was programmed to pick up on stuff like that. “We like breaking things, for instance.” I shifted my glance to one of the robot soldiers, deciding that if we all suddenly swung toward it, we could move the net enough for me to try to kick its head off.

“That is something we share,” said Gozen. His clawlike hand shot out before I could blink, and he grabbed Angel’s arm through the net. “Like this.”

We all heard the horrible, unmistakable sound of Angel’s bone snapping, accompanied by her barely suppressed shriek of pain. My heart leaped into my throat, and I chopped down on Gozen’s hand as best I could. My hand bounced off his grip, and the rebound almost dislocated my shoulder. Way to go, Max. Chop down on solid metal.