As more beams filled the air—the space between me and my target in particular, I saw my paths steadily closing. There were gaps I could have dropped an eighteen wheeler through broad-side out, but it was a huge unknown, made worse by the suspicion that this had been deployed as an anti-flyer method.

He’s a tinker, I thought. The principles are the same. The toolbox that evolves to answer problems, the need for resources. The only things that hold him back, like any tinker, are time and resources. He’s had two years of time, and Goddess had enlightened us about his resource-acquisition. Valefor, Mama Mathers. Others.

Like most tinkers, he has them make resources that help them acquire or refine their resources. And because one key factor in this network or engine of his are people… he gets the hypnotist to help him get more people.

I flew in a course that put me over the ‘side’ of the growing webwork of glowing teal beams and bars that seemed to stab off into the stratosphere. I had to get to that door before they slipped away. More beams appeared high above, beside, and below me. The cross-bars that connected them slammed out, connecting them all into the solid mass.

Wasn’t doable. There had to be twelve of those assholes down there, firing in batteries.

I didn’t have any routes to travel that weren’t to the sources of the beams—something I wasn’t sure would work, traveling in the opposite direction, far enough away that maybe the beams terminated or got far enough apart that there weren’t cross-beams, or fly for a gap.

The first and second options meant I wasn’t flying down, to get to the woman with the purple fire or the group that was building the door, and they had their own flaws—the fact I was flying into dense webwork and the sheer lack of guarantee, respectively.

I flew for one of the gaps I could have rolled an eighteen wheeler through. Wretch out.

Teal webwork flared around me as I approached. It shrank around me, breaking from the larger structure. A lasso, securing itself around the Wretch with enough force that the Wretch broke.

I slipped the noose in the same way that someone could escape a pursuer by shedding the jacket the pursuer had grabbed. Being smaller, freer, not caring about that which had broke.

But there were more gaps. I was forced to judge distances and timing. The Wretch took time to reappear, but it wasn’t too long. So long as I timed it so I was moving through a gap as it came back up…