Other limbs, I could barely see, even a majority of others, were gripping a ceiling far out of sight in the darkness high above the room, so the rest of it could hang down.

It reached into itself, and it pulled out finished work.

I counted ten pieces of tinker technology, built to be larger than I was. Then I revised my number to fifteen, then to twenty. Discs, gauntlets, claws that glowed too bright to look at directly.

“Hurry!” I called out, with one word taking up my full capacity of air. The next two words were the same. “Devices incoming!”

I could make out the others past dust and images of a world past. Their route was close to the dais, beneath an outcropping of Cradle’s slabs. That outcropping served as their cover from the worst of it.

Filaments extended down. Not a hand, but a thousand prehensile strings that snatched at my clothing, the roots of my hair, my arms, even my nose momentarily, my tit, and the toe of my boot. One moment I was free, the next I was being wrenched skyward, filaments cutting into clothes and skin like razor blades, and in the third moment I tried to move and I realized the sheer limitation of movements available to me.

I shifted position, wriggling my shoulders until I was out of my jacket. I hoped to slip free, and I found the cords cutting into my sleeves too tight. It was a good thing the material of my costume top was made to be rugged. I hung from my forearms and one toe, my jacket bunched up around my elbows.

My midsection almost didn’t have the strength for me to twist, to bring my foot up, and to get it to where my elbow was. To push, scraping the sleeve against my arm inch by inch, as the ground disappeared beneath me, half-foot by half-foot.

I got one arm free, and I swung. I kicked off my boot, and swung again, dangling only by the one arm.

And inch by inch, my body weight now pulled my arm free of that sleeve.

Cords were reeling in, possibly ready to reach out again. I focused more on the moment than the future I could be dreading. I kicked out, swung, and wrapped both legs around the nearest arm, giving me the leverage to pull with almost my entire body. Getting my arm free. It got my costume top.

Which apparently wasn’t okay.

From one disc above me, a flare of orange, a burst of flame. Like Colt’s lighting arms, but it was fire, and it was sinuous, with three digits like a bird’s talon. When it hit the granules beneath me, it turned them to glass. Forming a shape like a letter ‘Y’, two talons slid in the ground around to point away from me, and the third stabbed up and in my direction, aimed right for my upper body.