Cora turned toward them and didn’t even look at Kaveh as she marched past him, still holding the pulse emitter level, now at the three Similars. She walked past Ampersand and Nikola, standing in between them, keeping her pulse emitter trained on the three Similars and Obelus. “Leave.”

The three looked at her, the leader of the group, now having regained his bearings, standing a bit straighter, as if trying to loom from twenty feet away. It was surprisingly effective. Cora didn’t budge.

“Leave. You have what you came for. Now leave. Take him. Don’t come back.” She was stone still, hardly any tremor in her arm holding the pulse emitter.

Kaveh heard a noise coming from inside the armored car, of scraping as hundreds of pounds of biosynthetic mass was dragged out of it. It was only then that he saw the body, a broken, mangled thing that must have at some point resembled the three monsters standing in front of them. Then, as it dragged itself over the sand like a ghost, it seemed to reassemble itself, the innards closing like latches, the myriad spines and rods folding back into place like the hammers of a piano defaulting back to their resting places. The skin that looked like a lion had gotten ahold of it closed over the giant opening, folding back in on itself like wrapping paper. Then, it seemed to wrap in on itself even more as the Similars drew it closer—the head drawing in, the arms and legs folding up against it, and a film seeping out of it, not the liquid metal of the travel plates but a translucent material that flowed out of the back and around it like skin, wrapping it up until it resembled a cocoon.

Kaveh was so transfixed with what was happening to the uninhabited body that he didn’t at first realize they were doing the same thing to Obelus’s smaller, inhabited body, only this body was resisting. His arms and legs jerked out a few times before he resigned himself as the translucent wrap covered him, at first in strips like a mummy, then wider until it was one translucent sack, a spider’s meal wrapped up to be sucked dry.

He noticed the lead Similar looking at Cora before it looked at Kaveh. It was hard to read any meaning into so alien an expression. If he had to label it as anything, he saw it as bemusement, maybe even curiosity. Humans were beneath contempt, perhaps, but it appeared that they had been bested by one. Their cocooned spoils disappeared from sight, and a few seconds later, the three Similars wrapped themselves in their own liquid metal transport system, and they, too, were gone.