Nora's spines shot up before she noticed she'd heard something behind the wall. When she did, she froze in place, except for her head slowly turning to bring her left ear to bear, searching for a clearer sign. It could be nothing. It could be some stray pet, or another of those weasel-things the people of this island keep to hunt the rock worms. But it sounded more like a rock worm, crawling through a tunnel already bored through the concrete wall.
	Then she heard it again. A scraping, maybe carapace on concrete, hip-high on the wall. Moving the same direction she'd been walking. It sounded a lot like a rock worm.
	She moved slowly forward again, quietly, tilting her boots with each step to muffle her footfalls. If she could line up her strike properly, she could cut the rock worm in half - if it was a rock worm - with the same swipe that opened up its tunnel. If she couldn't, she'd be facing jaws harder than steel in a stand-up fight.
	Then the sound suddenly dropped out; listening carefully, she picked out something softer, a faint hiss, a rustle of grass.
	This island was templated on a piece of city, and aside from the sky of roiling colors overhead, she was alone among rectangular towers of concrete and glass. Grass was decidedly out-of-place, and Nora was fairly sure it was a clue to the creature's location, but she wasn't sure what it meant. Was the inside of this building templated on something else? Did its template hold a grassy area inside?
	She leapt back without thought, her sturdy tail striking the asphalt when its counterbalance just wasn't enough. A rock worm the size of her arm dropped through where she had been, its jaws carving out a pattern from the soft asphalt in a single swipe.
	She cursed her reflex as she wound up, switching from the Dark Tongue to a more-creative stream of invective in Crafthall Trelloth as she swiped through the rock worm, dashing forward through the asphalt furrow carved by the wave of roiling color charging her claws. If she'd just lashed out instead of dodging, it wouldn't've had a chance at another strike.
	The rock worm failed to make good on that chance. That wave tore it into two pieces and some shreds in between. But a searing pain from her tail meant she wasn't safe yet.
	She whipped around to see another pair of rock worms, one with her blood spattering its jaws, trying to wriggle out of the roiling colors she'd left behind. She looked up… and saw the grass. Thirty hands above the asphalt, a grassy plain was glitching through the concrete wall, as if it were unsure what to template on. More rock worms were coming over the edge, out of the grass to fall jaws-first onto the asphalt, turning toward her.
	Some small part of her mind wondered if they had any idea what they'd found. The rest of her mind was split between drawing her pokesec from her second left trouser pocket, and turning to run. With one claw but without looking she opened it and poked the waypoint button — inwardly thanking its engineers that her pokesec even had a waypoint button — and then she brought it up to her face so she could repeat the last call she'd made. Her tail stung anew with every other step, but she could take care of it if she outlived the rock worms.
	"Hey, that was fast. Find something good?"
	Nora flicked the waypoint into the call while Tess was talking. "Artillery! Here!"
	"Aiming." Tess was by choice positively convivial on the job, but Nora knew she could trust Tess's training to kick in as needed. "Confirm no wait for clear?"
	"Confirm!" Nora risked a glance back; rock worms were still pouring over the edge, sniffing along her trail, hunting her at a leisurely pace. If not for artillery, they'd easily outlast her sprint.
	"Three, two, one," The last word was drowned out by the thunder of artillery fire, but Nora knew it was "mark".
	She dropped and rolled a few dozen hands, coming to a stop on her knees, and wound up with both arms as her pokesec clattered past. When the moment came her arms moved on their own, each ripping its own path of roiling colors across in front of her, somehow catching the pillar of brighter colors as it flashed out to city-block-wide and beyond. As she saw the vast wave parting for her tiny little waves, as the roaring hellstorm of nonexistence swept over and around her, she made a mental note to visit Alex's grave and apologize for giving him shit for claiming this worked.
	As the colors slowed and disappeared, the roar faltered into the rushing of air, and then faded, leaving behind a silence almost crystalline.
	"…I hope I never hear that again." Tess's voice cracked a little toward the end, but Nora exulted in the sound, for it meant she still lived.
	Nora was now kneeling at the front edge of a promontory of asphalt jutting out into the gulf of empty air toward where the rock worms had been. Little wisps of color were the only thing that remained of the wide crossed arcs that had saved her life. The artillery shell's blast was similar in kind to her charged claw-swipes, but not only more vast, it ran its course in under a second, scouring even air from a radius of over a thousand hands. "Alex was right… This changes everything…"
	"If you call down an artillery strike on your own position while I'm on duty again, I swear to fuck I will end your career."
	It seemed like humans always picked the strangest topics for their expletives. Speaking of, Nora checked her tail; it was sliced open, but not through. She'd be using the human toilets for a while, but with bandages and time her tail would be fine. She picked her pokesec back up, and fumbled with her right hand for her first aid kit. "Maybe I can put together a shield system for Walkers. Personal RAP plates. Who knows? But, um…"
	"…What is it?"
	Nora scanned what for now was the horizon; the road and buildings on the other side of the blast had developed a distinct lean, as the chunk she was kneeling on was drifting loose. A glance back revealed the promontory closed back up behind the small oval of asphalt that had been protected. She was already disconnected from the island by nearly a hundred hands in every direction. "I'm going to need pickup."