Wait.

  It wouldn’t work.

  But it might.

  It couldn’t.

  But it was better than just giving in to the cold numbness in my leg and the toxins I knew it was feeding into my blood, without even the Rain to slow it down anymore.

  “Logan! I need a zombie!”

  Hacking at the vines climbing his legs, he threw an incredulous look at me. “What?”

  “Just trust me!”

  “The only one I can reach is Serru! You don’t want me to do that!”

  “She won’t feel it!” For even a faint chance at salvaging something from this, I hoped desperately that she’d forgive us.

  I sshed at a vine that had showed up as reinforcement for the first one, working my way towards Logan, dodging what seemed to be all the remaining vines. My damaged leg kept trying to give way under me, and more than once I nearly fell; the green tendrils trying to wrap around my ankles slowed me to a crawl, and when I bent down to cut at them, they attacked my arms. The spreading numbness in all four midnight-blue limbs added to the urgency. She was right, I didn’t have long.

  Logan, brows drawn down in deep uncertainty, freed himself enough that he could y a hand on Serru’s chest. The vines around her had sckened when she stopped breathing; the leaves that had sealed themselves in pce were loosening, and a few had fallen away, showing the lines of tiny livid punctures following the central stem of each. The ground below each severed vine was much more red than the coppery rain water soaking everything.

  The hatchet slipped out of my grasp, my fingers nearly devoid of all sensation. I looked down at the yers of vines and leaves, sapping strength and poisoning me. How was I supposed to use magic like this?

  “What do you need her to do?” Logan asked.

  “Yes, where are you going with this?” the Moss Queen asked curiously. “Newcomers can’t be zombies.”

  “I...” I stopped, fighting back despair. The one idea that had even a thin thread of hope, I wasn’t going to be able to try because I couldn’t manipute my dispy.

  “Problem?” she added solicitously.

  “Whatever yours looks like,” Logan said, and he sounded short on breath. I was scared to look in his direction. “It’s all in your head. Just a shortcut. No mouse, use the keyboard.”

  I’d seen him swap forms repeatedly with no sign of an interface. Probably I’d seen him use his felid abilities without even realizing he was.

  Conscious of my own concentration beginning to fail, I visualized my blue-green dispy, everything I knew was on it. I’d used it repeatedly for weeks, I knew how it looked. I imagined as clearly as I could that I was turning the knob from the blue merperson symbol to the red ornithian one. I lost it, regained it, realized it wasn’t working, and tried harder to shut out everything else around me.

  Dragon form felt less good than it usually did.

  The Moss Queen sighed. “I really do not understand why the Quincunx persists in offending all women by giving you female forms.”

  “Pretty sure at least two women want to get that there dragon in bed,” Logan said, with a breathless ugh.

  “Yes, well, they don’t understand how offended they should be.”

  I had to shut them out, had to ignore them. Whether Logan intended it or not, if her attention was on him, less of it was on me. But I didn’t think he could keep it up for long.

  Doing magic this way was hard.

  It probably would have been even if I wasn’t struggling to stay focused. But I could do this. I’d had hell days, overtime and no sleep with only snatched junk food and caffeine to run on, and still had to keep my wits and offer the same level of care I had at the beginning. I could do this.

  Swap Health Status.

  Despite the stated cost, my mana bar continued to pulse white and red even when I activated that ability.

  And I knew I had, because I saw the Moss Queen and Logan and Serru all outlined in orange, but nothing else was.

  I staggered over to Serru and forced one of my numb hands to rest briefly on her forehead. There was no reaction at all, except that the orange outline around her turned blue. The orange halo remained around the other two.

  If I had to crawl to reach the Moss Queen, I would.

  For the moment, my feet were still holding me up, but I stumbled increasingly. Logan kept right on goading and insulting her, I thought, but I couldn’t make much sense of the words. It would take too much effort to try, and I needed everything I had to pick my way through the vines.

  The vines had other ideas.

  They brought me to a halt still out of reach.

  “What made you think I would let you get into arm’s length of me?” the Moss Queen asked disdainfully. “The st thing I want is something like you able to touch me.”

  I blinked at her, trying to parse the words.

  It didn’t say I had to touch the second target with any particur part of my body.

  My dragon tail had been a target, hanging low and in reach of the vines, and I’d used it several times to pull pnts off my legs. It felt numb.

  Not a single vine had made contact with my folded wings.

  I lurched unsteadily into a turn that put my side approximately towards her, took a deep breath, and put whatever I had left into snapping my wings out to their full enormous extent. If I’d tried for just one, it would probably have been the wrong one, so it was both.

  The Moss Queen cried out, but it fell silent in mid-sound.

  The vines colpsed, those nauseating flowers shrivelling. The ones coiled around my limbs began to peel away.

  Logan.

  Logan had to stay alive. Otherwise I’d failed.

  Panting, I visualized my dispy again, and coaxed it over to centaur. I almost used Purification Rain, but awareness of the catastrophic result kicked in, barely in time. I switched it to Healing Rain. I could do Purification selectively.

  It was a lot easier to reach Logan and Serru through the vines as they withered than it had been against resistance.

  Serru was tearing bare-handed at the dying vines around herself and Logan; she looked up at me, slightly pink water streaming down her face and dripping off her hair. “I don’t know what just happened but he’s still alive. Barely.”

  I nodded, dropped to one knee in the bloody water with all the awkwardness of the first time, and visualized the dial turning to Purification. I used it on him, on me, on Serru just in case but I was pretty sure she was in perfect health. As the rain and the Purification began to work, some of the sensation crept back into my hands. It was painful pins and needles, but that was better than nothing at all. I wiggled my fingers gratefully. My mind began to clear at the same time, the fogginess fading.

  With my mana bar still pulsing, I reverted to the old way of manually turning things. I could practice hands-free ter. Right now, I needed more intense Quickheal, ramped way up, on him and me both, and Diagnosis on him so I could figure out what else might help. No bone or connective damage, but we were both down on blood, enough to put us both in Stage Two hypovolemic shock, and there was tissue damage as well. A normal level of Softcure could help that along.

  Logan groaned. “We’re alive. Is that a good thing?”

  “Yes. And it’s really important that you stay alive. And stay jotun. Do not, under any circumstances, change.”

  “What?”

  “My dragon form’s Hail Mary. Swap Health Status. Just need to touch two people. Turns out it breaks the rules.”

  “You... swapped Serru’s zombie status for her all-clear status? And that worked?”

  Serru’s pink eyebrows rose, but she said nothing, just stretched to seize her hatchet so she could hack at the dying vegetation.

  “It worked. You have one zombie who will be very, very pissed off eventually. But not today. One crisis at a time.”

  Logan sat up and looked around. “Yeah. We’re in a dead town and that includes all your friends except one, and there might be spores out there carrying a mossling infection that will probably still happen even if she’s not actively behind it. I think we have enough to worry about. But if she’s a zombie, I can keep her out of trouble for a couple of years.”

  The rain wound down, and we recovered.

  And standing in the middle of it all was a single motionless figure, eyes empty, not even breathing, waiting for orders. It was, frankly, creepy as fuck, but also weirdly satisfying.

  Myu crept out of cover as the rain stopped, and came directly to me for cuddles, leaning against me and trembling.

  “We’ll get her and Heket back together,” Serru said, reaching out to stroke the little cat. “It just might take a few days. At least she knows and trusts us. I think she’ll calm down quickly.”

  There wasn’t much of anything we could do about the townful of dead mosslings. We wanted to do something for our friends, not just leaving them, but Logan and I were exhausted, and Serru settled for retrieving their respective personal bags, Aryennos’ azure satchel and Terenei’s teal-and-cream lightweight backpack, Heket’s heavier yellow backpack and Zanshe’s bright green single-strap bag, plus my portable house. Heket’s mecha was just twisted metal. I wasn’t sure whether it would repair itself in time or not, but it probably wouldn’t happen fast.

  “We might be able to get other things back ter,” Serru said. “Settlements usually have a lost-and-found. But this is everything important. How far out do you suppose those spores reached? Are Peace and Cheer safe?”

  “No idea,” Logan said. “Let’s go find out. Hey! Psycho bitch!”

  The green-and-brown zombie finally stirred and oriented on him.

  “She can carry everything,” he said. “Except the cat. Obviously.”

  Serru took Myu. In human form, so I could hold Serru’s hand, I took my house. We did, out of fatigue, let the zombified Queen carry the rest.

  Animals in pastures y in limp heaps on the still-damp ground.

  “That rain covered a massive area,” I said. “How did you make it so I could?”

  “Normally I would tell you not to talk about that, but apparently, no one is paying any fucking attention to whether anyone’s following the rules. It’ll reset eventually, no idea when, but until then, the system is going to keep acting like everything you do has the most minimal possible cost and you’re recovering immediately.”

  “Useful trick.”

  “I try not to use it. I don’t always respect rules but I’m not stupid enough to get in trouble. Although apparently there are fewer consequences than I was led to believe.”

  “Quit your grousing, Logan. You helped save the world. I’ll see what I can scrounge up for a quest reward.”

  All three of us stopped. Our zombie kept right on walking, never missing a stride.

  “Jack?” Logan said, as we looked around for the source of the voice.

  There was no reply.

  “That sounded like the wagoner who gave me a ride,” Serru said. “And told me you were alive in the caves.”

  “And the guy who gave me my portable house,” I said.

  “That was Jack,” Logan said. “He got here way before the Bitch Queen. He was a teacher before. Considered it his job to do the tutorial for all newcomers, and he did his best to look out for everyone. Helped everyone get settled doing what they wanted. He... he got pretty frustrated with me but he didn’t give up. A while back, he... actually, it’s never been clear exactly what happened. I got a message saying goodbye and that he’d been offered an opportunity he couldn’t pass up, and that was it. She got a lot worse after that. Speaking of whom, she’s ahead of us.”

  “What we’re seeing does not give me much hope for Peace and Cheer,” Serru said with a sigh, as we started walking again. “At least they’ll come back somewhere friendly. I’m not sure whether Terenei’s aunt hatched them or got them as adults, but if they were adults, the people there will make arrangements for them to get home. They’ve certainly had an adventure. I hope Irinora isn’t too angry with all of us.”

  “Will she let us near them to say hi?” I asked. “I’m going to miss them.”

  “Terenei can talk her into it.”

  Sure enough, one pasture held a whole rainbow of motionless ornithians, and two of them were of very familiar colours.

  “You can’t carry all this,” Logan said. “And I need to check in on my houseguests and try to find three missing felids that I doubt she brought to Drumsong Cascade. But we need to rest and eat and finish recovering first. I can’t mail packages from my hacked post office outlet but it can handle messages. I’ll drop a message in the warden group about what happened here, and fuck, phrasing that is going to be fun. They’ll arrange cleanup and make sure that someone is here to help people get oriented when the ones born here start respawning. You can use it to leave messages for your friends to get when they get back. Once you decide what you’re doing we can figure out the easiest way to get four packages into the postal system going the right way.”

  “What we’re doing?” I echoed.

  “You could skip going to the Axis. Probably. I mean, she’s at least temporarily not a threat and in two years I bet Purification potions are everywhere. The Axis has answers and something useful but also a pretty steep price. At this point...” He heaved a sigh. “Can’t believe I’m saying this. It would be good for the world if you went. I’m a lot less sure it would be good for you personally. And I can’t actually say anything other than that. Literally. I don’t know if you owe the world that, when you just stopped the worst threat ever. That’s... that one’s up to you, and I’m not going to tell you what you should do. You got the manual in bits and pieces and I bet you don’t have all of it, but you’ve got enough to have the general idea. If we turn left at the next corner, we’ll be going back towards the river and we can find a pce to set up the houses with water.”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  He shrugged.

  We found a stretch of keshore that was probably a public beach under normal conditions, golden sand and a pavilion and red berry bushes. There was enough space to set up both of the portable houses and run the hoses to the shore.

  Serru calmly accepted Logan’s invitation into his to use the hacked post office interface in the corner; he and I waited outside.

  “Ask me nicely and I might build you one for your house,” he said. “Maybe change your bag so it can hold your house without imploding reality. You can pay with potions or something. Ask really nicely and I might build you a hospital on a Shallows isnd.”

  “That would cost a lot of potions,” I said. “Does anyone here really need a hospital?”

  “Hospital-themed house with lots of guest rooms. Whatever. You might have to remind me about hospitals, I mostly saw them on TV and it was a long time ago, didn’t pay much attention and those memories are fuzzy. Might be fun to build. I’m out of ideas for my house and shelters get boring.”

  “If you aren’t hiding from her, maybe you could try building other things. Things people can see and appreciate.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. Don’t forget, I’m the Zombie King.”

  “You should probably pick a new title. Zombies are going out of fashion.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you just stood up to the worse threat by far.”

  He snorted. “Don’t try to make me a hero. I hate her. I hate what she does. You and I are not friends. But I don’t need another enemy.”

  “Wouldn’t be the first person I’ve worked with I could respect but didn’t personally like.”

  When Serru emerged, he sent his zombie inside, followed her, and pointedly closed the door and drew the curtains.

  I really didn’t care what he did at this point.

  More than anything, I wanted to be indoors with Myu safe, and then just hold Serru and shake for a while.