The Stranger backed away from them both. His ears were filled with the even ticking sound of a clock. It felt to him that the seconds were speeding up, and that time was running out. A sense of giddy exhalation . . .

“I hate to break this touching family reunion,” he said. “But I think we have bigger—”

Two shots were fired at once. The Stranger stared at the others. He could see the bullets. See them emerge from the barrels of the guns. See them cut through the air like slow-moving larvae. See them shed the casing, like pupae emerging, like popping corn. The bullets spread wings. Two butterflies rose into the air. They circled each other, then fled out of the open door into the city beyond.

“—problems,” the Stranger said.

The Conjurer stared down at the giant mechanical fish. It whirred now, from some internal mechanism, and it glowed, light escaping through narrow slits under its scales. The ticking sound grew louder.

“What did you say again this was?” he said.

“I didn’t,” the Stranger said. “But I’ve seen it, once before.”

“The Dumuzi Device . . . ,” the Kid whispered. “Right?” He turned to the Stranger. “Those aerialists on the train, this is what they were looking for?”

“I think so, yes,” the Stranger said.

“Well, what is it?” the Conjurer said.

“I think,” the Stranger said. “I think it’s a chthonic bomb.”

They stared at the fish. Its movements became more rapid, and clinking and hissing sounds began to emerge from it over the ticking of the hidden clock.

“I think,” the Stranger said, meditatively. “I think it might go off.”

“A chthonic bomb?” the Conjurer said. “Great Harlequin, not again!”

“You’ve seen one before?”

“Long ago, and far away, and only the aftermath,” the Conjurer said, grimly. “And that was enough, once was enough. We have to get out of here.”

“Can’t it be disabled?” the Kid said.

“Disabled? It’s a fish.”

“We could, I don’t know, shoot it.”

“You couldn’t even shoot me, kid. And it’s not like you weren’t trying.”

The Kid kicked the fish.

“Ouch!”

A tongue of light had darted out of the fish’s body and wrapped itself around the Kid’s ankle.

“Hey, let go!”

The Stranger looked at the fish, which seemed to grow larger, or to twist the dimensions around itself so that the walls and ceiling of the room seemed to bend down and around it, and he saw that a miniature symbol storm had begun to form in the air overhead, and obelisks and pilcrows and crucifixes burst in tiny flashes of light.

“Step away from the fish, kid,” he said.

“I’m trying to!”