Tick lay on the ground up ahead, bruised and bloody, staring up into the twister that spun right above him, railings and pipes and poles and sheets of metal flying through the air in a circle. He looked to be in the exact center of the steel storm, the buildings and walls around him ripped to shreds as they provided fuel for the impossible tornado. Nearby, several crumpled metaspides twitched and sparked; one of them had most of its body torn off and another had partially melted, two limbs and a chunk of its torso reduced to a pile of silvery goop.

“What the heck?” Paul said, just as Sofia caught up with him, almost knocking him forward.

“We’ve gotta grab him!” she said.

“I know, but how?” He turned toward her. “You got some body armor I don’t know about?”

“Look!” she said, pointing at Tick.

Their friend was crawling toward them.

~

Tick didn’t understand how this could be happening. Above him, solid metal objects ripped in half, dissolved, and reformed. Everything around him had gone nuts, breaking apart and spinning in the air above him, only to melt together into new shapes. The clank of stuff crashing into each other mixed with the roaring wind, sounding like  freight trains were playing bumper cars.

And he’d had enough.

He crawled toward Paul and Sofia, thankful that the raging twister was several feet above him. Worried it might drop at any moment, or that one of the hundreds of pieces of debris would fly at him and skewer him, he scrambled on his hands and knees as fast as possible. When he reached what seemed to be the edge of the twister, he pushed himself to his feet and sprinted across the bridge to his friends.

“What’s going on?” Paul asked, staring over Tick’s shoulder at the chaos.

Tick turned to see it from this angle. The twisting body of debris contracted into a thin column, spinning faster the tighter it got. The destruction sounded like a loud swarm of bees, the small bits forming a tall, black cloud. Seconds later, the mass fell toward the ground, where it landed in a lump, a twisted structure of metal, a hideous pile with several crooked steel beams sticking out. Then everything grew quiet.

“How did that just happen?” Sofia said in a dead voice.

“Yeah,” Tick agreed. “Could this place get any freakier?” He immediately regretted the question, superstition telling him the answer was yes—just because he’d asked.

“I found the place,” Sofia said, turning from the pile of metal junk. “A perfect anagram. It’s called—”