Ampersand’s swaying became almost violent, and she could practically feel the electromagnetic supports that lent his body that antigravity elegance give way, and he nearly collapsed under his own weight. He half caught himself, and Cora caught the other half by bearing his weight on her shoulders. It was as though the millions upon billions of subroutines that kept his body up and running were all being rerouted into fighting the collapse, but in doing so had abandoned their posts that were keeping him operational. He would almost regain his footing one second and lose it the next, and he would have fallen to the ground if she hadn’t used all her strength to keep him upright. Twice this happened, but the third time, she wasn’t strong enough to keep him standing, and they both fell to the coarse salt earth, dozens of tiny salt-crystal walls crunching beneath him.

Cora dodged before he collapsed on top of her. “Ampersand?”

Nothing. Those wild, unfocused eyes didn’t even seem to be registering Enola as a threat anymore.

“I . . .” She shook her head, one hand on the carapace of his back, the other under his slender neck. He’d started seizing in that way she’d seen him do several times. “I don’t know what to do.”

She looked up at Enola, who wasn’t looking at the twitching mess on the salt but instead to the sky. “OUR BELOVED HAS BEEN CARELESS.”

“What do you mean?”

“HIS TRANSPORT CREATED A DISTURBANCE IN THE ATMOSPHERE, ONE THAT WAS EASILY OBSERVED BY THOSE WHO KNEW WHAT TO LOOK FOR. HE WAS FOLLOWED.”

“Followed?” she breathed. She didn’t get a chance to ask, Followed by who? before she saw who.

Obelus’s Similars, all three of them, stood not thirty feet away, their iridescent, silvery skin practically glowing in the light of the sun that had just cracked the horizon. One of them stood in front of the other two like a formation of geese, cold blue eyes glinting in the sunlight.

“Come on,” she whispered, mindlessly shaking Ampersand as if he were human, like it would do anything. “You need to get up.”

Enola turned to face the three, regarding them quizzically in the same manner he might do if it had been three raccoons that magically appeared in the salt. Enola shared that lighter-than-air affect that all of them moved with, but there was also an erraticism she didn’t see in any of the other ones in the cobra-like way that he moved his entire upper body.

One of the three Similars, the new leader, she presumed, began speaking to Enola in Pequod-phonemic, who responded in turn, and a conversation began. The three Similars were now circling them like a pack of hyenas, and though Enola was careful to keep his body between the Similars and the two on the ground, he never betrayed any sign of fear or aggression.