Besides, it was after them. The cracks and stomps of the big thing’s scramble were surely loud enough to raise the dead or bring them running. It was finding its footing, gathering its energy, focusing its attention, and listening to the Blight just like the boys had done.

Houjin’s feet stumbled and he slowed, looking over his shoulder and then forward again, quickly. One direction, then the other. Trying not to fall. A worthy goal, in Rector’s estimation, but behind them something enormously tall was mumbling to itself. It sniffed the air—they could hear it, like a windstorm up two great nostrils—and picked its direction.

It tumbled out of the wreckage of its fall, and gave chase along their retreat path.

“Shit!” Houjin gasped wetly. It was the first time Rector’d ever heard him curse, but this was a fantastic time to start getting the hang of it.

Improbably heavy footsteps clomped hard against the smooth-packed streets and uncluttered avenues, making a beeline right for Houjin and Rector, who had wholly quit fighting Houjin’s attempts to guide him—by force, if necessary—farther up the hill and away from the thing behind them.

In Rector’s head he was going over the possibilities. Perhaps some oversized rotter dropped in from the sky … maybe the giant captain? He was big, he was nearby, and the ship was right up there. Huey had made such a show of pointing it out, hadn’t he?

Anything but the inexplicable.

But he knew it was all wrong. The captain would’ve called out, certainly. He would’ve said their names and asked what they were doing; he wouldn’t have fallen from the sky only to scare them witless. The thing behind them rumbled a thick bellow that wasn’t quite a cry and wasn’t quite a call. Either way, it wasn’t human.

Definitely not the captain, even as Rector’s racing brain tried to maintain the hypothetical option.

“No way,” he wheezed. “No way.”

“Hush up!”

“Where are we going?”

“I said, be quiet!”

“Huey, for Chrissake, it already hears us!”

“Underground.” He coughed. “Back to the underground.”

Rector’s heart took a dip down to his stomach. There was no way they’d outrun the thing. They were at least three blocks from the nearest entrance he knew of … if, in fact, they were anywhere close to where he thought they were. This realization made him lunge all the harder to keep up with Huey, whose grip on Rector’s arm seemed terribly fragile.