Something clicked in the other chamber, and she jumped, taking a moment to place the sound as another violent jerk, the sound of one of his limbs hitting the floor. She tried to shake it off, looking at these wolf spider tunnels, dozens of them. Loss of electromagnetic power was the one thing that could take down a Similar, which was why they were vulnerable to certain frequencies of electromagnetic pulse. Last year, during their battle with Obelus, he had given her a device that would speed the restart of his energy cores after an EMP had taken him out, a device that resembled a pill bug the size of a guinea pig.

If he was using this for storage, that thing had to be in here somewhere.

She approached one of the honeycomb tunnels, roughly the size of a child’s cubby. That skin-like material seemed smoothed over in layers, covering something, but there was no way to find out what without ripping it off. Hand shaking, feeling like Willie Scott reaching her hand into a mystery hole to pull a bug-infested lever, she slipped a finger under one of those wispy thin layers of material, and hit upon . . . something. She pulled it out. It was a . . . tool. What comparison was there? It was more or less shaped like a cylinder with a jack on the end. She had no idea what it was, but it wasn’t the pill bug, so she put it back.

By now, the earthquake had stopped. She tried a few more spider holes before, to her shock, she found what she was looking for. It was as she turned around, examining the pill bug carefully to make sure she had the right tool, that she realized she wasn’t alone in this subchamber.

She saw the eyes before she saw anything else, reflecting the dim reddish light of the drone she was holding in her hand. Then the owner of the eyes stepped forward into the light of her drone, and she could see it in full. An amygdaline body, far smaller than Ampersand’s, slightly shorter than Cora was. Eyes smaller and darker in proportion to the head than Ampersand’s, further inlaid, and a crest on the back of its head that was less pronounced, but on full alert.

For an instant, she thought this might be Enola, lying in wait for Ampersand to become vulnerable so he could enact whatever terrible thing he had planned that made Ampersand so terrified. But no, this wasn’t Enola. This was more familiar. It looked like Čefo’s body. It was Čefo’s body.

But this was not Čefo.