The Stranger sank to the floor. He could no longer hear and there was blood coming out of his ears and his nose. He trained his guns on the open doorway, and waited. The Colossus took one more step, and then it was by the shore. The train gathered power and the engineer cursed one last time and checked his gauges and manipulated his controls and then the train hit the switch and was rerouted from the loop onto the bridge. The Colossus screamed its laugher again and the very rocks of the islands cracked and sinkholes opened everywhere and the caretaker’s burned hut disappeared into the ground. The mad ichorous thing that was Carl burst through the door then and the Stranger shot it, emptying both his revolvers into the creature.

It was not there, the Dumuzi Device. The Colossi had been fed false information, their ancient enemy had played them once again for fools. In the eternal war that was the Titanomachy, a score for the pupae umbrarum.

The Colossus yanked the now useless lifeline from its servant-appendage’s form. The creature that was Carl dropped to the floor, black-ink blood staining the walls and the floor as it died. The ghosts in the boiler screamed, soundlessly, and then the train was over the stalk of the bridge. Slow it climbed and then faster as it reached the topmost part and began the descent towards land. By then the Colossus had boarded the island and begun to tear it apart. It cared nothing for the fleeing fireflies on their little toy train. It merely wished to express its displeasure. The train fled— Well, let it flee. The Stranger leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes, for just a moment. The memory of that terrible face was etched forever in his mind. Then he forced his eyes open, and his limbs to move, and he climbed down to the stoker’s landing, to help the Kid with the boiler. The engineer, for the first time, smiled with grim satisfaction, and his fingers moved dexterously over the instrument panel. Then the train hit land and raced on, away from the mountains, and the snowfall, away from the Chagrin, and into open space again, and the wide expanse of the Thickening.

On the shore, Loretta was still alive. She felt the destruction all around her, and the Colossus’s anger, and its image was forever in her mind now, crowding out all others, everything that was her. There was a thing in her hand, a vial of some sort. But even the word for vial now escaped her. Without curiosity or thought, but only instinct, she uncorked it and put it to her mouth.