“Where are they?” Caldera said.

“Ice mage is in the back garden.” I kept my voice very low. The golem was really damn close, and that laser could easily pierce the floor. “Lost the force mage. Golem’s still waiting.”

“What if we make a break for—?”

“Bad idea,” I said. I’d been looking at the futures in which we did exactly that. “The street doesn’t have enough cover—with you hurt, they’d chase us down and pick us off. Only reason they haven’t done it already is they aren’t sure where we are.”

Caldera paused for a second, and I could sense her flicking through plans. “All right,” she said. “We’re going to have to stall them. I’ll—”

The futures shifted. I took one glance at them and my heart sank. I caught Caldera’s arm and pulled her towards the bedroom.

One of the few silver linings to these sorts of situations is that you learn pretty quick whether someone trusts you. Even wounded, there was no way I could have moved Caldera if she didn’t want to be moved, but after one startled glance she let me drag her inside.

There was a weird low-pitched noise, like a deep cough.

I twisted around. Through the doorway and out in the hall, where there had been carpet, now there was a big circular hole in the floor. Through it, I could see the mist-filled living room. As I watched, there was another cough and most of what was left of the hallway disintegrated into dust.

From below, I felt the vibrations as the golem moved and turned. The cough came a third time, then a fourth. There was nothing left of the hallway: if we stepped out of the bedroom we’d fall straight into the room below.

“Well,” I said quietly. “I guess now we know what that fourth weapon does.”

“What the fuck is that?” Caldera whispered.

There was another cough, followed by another. It wasn’t going directly towards us . . . yet. “Disintegration cannon. Wonder why it didn’t use it earlier. Maybe it’s got too slow a charge-up time. Or it could be one of those spells that needs the target to be stationary to—”

“Did you hit your head?” Caldera hissed. “Focus!”

“We all have our ways of dealing with stressful situations,” I said absently. Most of my attention was on plotting out futures. “It’s going to shoot the floor out from underneath us. Probably collapse the house.”

More coughs sounded. The golem was destroying the small guest room in which we’d found Leo, one section of floor at a time. We’d gotten lucky that it had decided to start there. Not too lucky, though. Our room was next.

Caldera hesitated one second, then lowered her head. “Fuck it.” Her voice was harsh. “We fight.”

“No.”

“We don’t have—”

I didn’t raise my voice. I often get calmer in really dangerous situations. “If you go down there, you’ll die.”

“You don’t—”

“I do know that, and that’s without the ice mage interfering. He wouldn’t have ordered the golem to force a confrontation like this unless he knew he’d win.”