This is what I have discerned from looking upon their cave drawings and reading their crass hieroglyphics found at their temples: I think the gobbos are slaves. We think them as animals, as monsters, but I believe they are a race of people – subterranean hominids long separated from the genetic line that created us, or created the Neanderthals. I further suspect they found their way into the dark to survive some cataclysm of the above world. The Deluge? An Ice Age? Some… volcanic pyroclasm? Their myths are unclear. They came down here thinking they were alone, but they were not. Entities waited here at the bottom of the labyrinth: Those Who Eat. Chthonic gods, entrenched at the center of the maze like worms in a dog’s heart. And I believe those gods enslaved the gob-folk, whether out of fear or appeasement, or out of love or even some other heretic magic, I cannot say. I believe if we can break the goblins free of those gods, they can be tamed. Even made to live among us as people. Wouldn’t that be grand?

– from the Journals of John Atticus Oakes, Cartographer of the Great Below

“Skelly’s gone,” Mookie says. His voice is more a croaking bleat than the booming growl he’s used to. He drops her Bowie knife on the ground. “I found this. Nobody’s seen her. Which means they took her. Which means I lost her.”

Burnsy paces in front of Mookie just outside his house. Around, the dead of Daisypusher hover. Some clean up goblin bodies. Some weep. Some console.

“Was she someone to you?”

“No. Yeah. I dunno. A friend of my daughter’s, I guess.” Just one more way I failed you, Nora.

“She seemed all right,” Burnsy says. A tepid sentence, but spoken with the weight one criminal affords another. She’s a stand-up guy. Like you could trust her.

Could he? Mookie doesn’t know. Was she planning to stab him in the back when he wasn’t looking? At this point, it doesn’t matter.

The cleaver hangs at his side. Wet with clotting gobbo blood. And matted with hair.

“I gotta go after her,” Mookie says.

“Do you?”

“This is on me. Maybe if I figure out where they’re going, I can catch up–”

“Where are they going? They could go south. Could go north. Could find a shaft down into the Tangle. Will she be a breeder? A sacrifice? A test for their weapons? Food? A free fuck? You don’t know what they’re gonna do with her, which means you don’t know where they’re taking her. The Underworld’s a big place, in case you hadn’t heard.”

“Yeah, I heard.” Then, quieter, “I still have to try.”

Just then – a raspy throat-clear at the door. It’s the woman in the pink robe.

“Burnsy,” she says, holding out the scalloped box.