A sharp silver point popped out from between the rust troll’s eyes and then twisted, grinding whatever brain the troll had into shavings. The edge of a scalpel then burst through its open mouth, knocking out several of its triangular teeth. Then I heard a high-pitched whine and watched in disbelief as a tiny circular saw cut through the lower third of the troll’s body, splitting the gallbladder, which voided a gush of blue ooze. The troll went stiff for several seconds and then released its reservoirs of inky poison through all of its pores, forever wasted as it sopped into the dirt. The troll fell limp as a leaf.

Tub stood victorious, his hip sack open, gripping in both fists the most disturbing weapons I’d ever seen, hand-fitted tools forged of pitiless steel and callous chrome. He switched off the whirring handsaw and grinned.

“Dr. Papadopoulos,” Tub said, brandishing the dental devices with pride.

“You stole them?” I asked.

Tub shrugged. “Thought maybe it was my turn to cause a little pain.”

Together we hurried around the edge of the plateau until the screams of the abducted kids were directly above us. Now that the Machine was empty, it could be a matter of minutes before Gunmar made a meal of one of them. I stared up at the sheer face, wondering how we’d scale such an impossible wall.

Tub grabbed my shoulder.

“Good news, bad news time.”

“Good news,” I said. “And make it real good.”

“I found a way up.”

“That is good. Very good. How bad could the bad news be?”

Tub winced, turned aside, and pointed.

Two thick black cables trailed up the side of the plateau and over the top.

“God, no,” I said. “Anything but ropes.”

“We can do this, Jim.”

“We couldn’t do this in regular old gym! Much less a troll inferno!”

Tub stuffed Papadopoulos’s instruments into his pack and zipped it shut. His grin was as cocky as a globe-trotting swashbuckler’s.

“All those times I fell in gym class? I was faking it to piss off Coach.”

“Really?”

Tub’s grin straightened.

“No. But it sounded good, didn’t it? Let’s pretend that it’s true and climb these bastards.”

He clapped me on the neck and jogged over to the cables. By the time I got there he had two handfuls and was bracing his feet against the rock as if rappelling. I kicked aside a stack of human bones and grabbed the other one, scrambling up several feet before a familiar dread seized me. My blistering palms began to slide down the hot cable, and my spine began to twist, the final signal that I was a goner.