Aska knew the thing was following them, the insect. The knowledge of its pursuit would be enough to make her crawl, she couldn't walk though, her body had started to die by inches, baked in the desert sun. She didn't want Sykes to put her down, but couldn't understand why he kept carrying her. He acted like a mother in her cave-month, as if Aska were as precious as a cub in its first weeks. But it wasn't that. You could smell it on a hunska, when she'd had her young. You knew she would kill anything that came near her – it pulsed in her blood, bled from her skin. Sykes had a different kind of madness, a battle in his head, the sane warring with the insane. He wanted to run, to drop her and hope the insect would be satisfied. But he wouldn't, couldn't.

"The hell?" His words sounded dry now. She tried to look where he looked. Through dim eyes she saw something out among the dunes, riding above them like a stick in a stream. Buildings?

"Ruins," Sykes said. "Must've been bigger than the Woolworth Building. Much bigger."

Aska could see the ruins better as they descended the dune. Immense pieces of stone, shattered pillars thicker than the thickest tree, angled as if sinking. The house the gods must have lived in before they left.

                                                                                        ***

Issac found a strength he hadn't known was left to him. His last strength. He broke into a half run. The guns bounced on his hips. He didn't know why he was still carrying them.

There would be shade. Water maybe, deep in those foundations. Places to hide. Almost more important than the water . . . there would be places to hide. An image of the insect hurried across his mind, black legs thrashing, driving it up the foot of the previous dune as they reached the crest. The horror of it crawled over him, through him. Just the sight of thing made him hate it – some ancient enmity set in the core of his bones, needing no reasons. Worse than he hated the insect he hated the way it unmanned him, made him ready to drop everything decent and just run. Made him ready to drop the girl, to climb over his own mother to get to safety.

"Damnation!" He had to stop and crane his neck as they got closer still. The size of those pillars. He'd never felt so small. Not even the desert vastness had made him feel so insignificant.

He found a gap between two towering blocks of stone and clambered over the rubble wedged between them. Shade! Hot breathless shade, but better than the sun's fist. The rubble made for tough going, its sharp edges undulled by desert winds, more like glass than stone. It would be easier without the girl. The words drifted into his mind as if spoken by someone else. Issac shook his head and pushed the hair from his eyes. Dry hair – he had stopped sweating. Not a good sign.

Something tripped him on the down slope and he almost pitched head first onto jagged stone. He limped on, bleeding from his ankle. The six shooters banged against his hips as he walked. His legs felt sore from it. If his fingers had any cleverness left in them he'd take the damn belt off and leave it. A left turn, a narrow gap where he bent double to follow a sandy tunnel, Lilly's nails biting at his back . . . another long passage between huge blocks with the sky a thin blue line above them. Issac stumbled into the opening without looking and it took him by surprise. It felt as though they stood at the bottom of the deepest well, a square shaft formed in the gap between some titan's building blocks, with only the crack they followed to enter or leave by. A dead end.

"No water." Issac let his back slide against the stone behind him and slumped to the ground, Lilly in his lap. "Need to rest my legs a moment." He drew in a breath of hot dry air and let it rattle in his lungs. The girl's eyes were slitted, almost closed, a faint glitter as if she watched him. Somewhere along the line she'd lost the bonnet and skirt. Her skin looked dark in places, her ears oddly pointed.

"It'll be okay," Issac told her. He didn't know if she heard him. He was lying anyhow. He didn't think he could stand again, let alone walk, and the water had always been a dream.

Issac felt his exhaustion like a weight pressing on him, closing his sore eyes, squeezing all the want from him save the agony of thirst. He drifted, thinking of Iowa winters from his childhood. At first the faint scratching came to him as the sound of the bare trees, their twigs twitching in the north wind. But the sound grew clearer, louder, closer, and he jolted from his daze, suddenly cold despite the heat.

"Oh hell."

He could hear the insect scraping itself against the stone as it inched along the crack that had led them to the opening. The black and thrashing shape of it brought bile into his mouth. In his lap Lilly lay still, the faint glitter from her slitted eyes the only hint of life.

The guns!

Issac pulled one of the heavy six shooters he'd been lugging around ever since Karly-with-a-Kay buckled them on for him a thousand years ago back in the stage 4 props room. He pointed it in the creature's general direction and squeezed the trigger. Perhaps the bang would scare the thing off. Do nightmares run when you shout boo?

The shot boomed out, echoing in the stone throat of the ruins. "Hey!" The gun kicked so hard he thought he'd broken his wrist for a second. Harder than a blank should kick. A puff of pulverised stone blew out somewhere down the crack.

"They're not blanks!" He stared at the gun in wonder. Just for a moment. Then with a savage glee he'd not known before he fired five shots at the black heart from where those thrashing scratching legs radiated. He shot until the bullets stopped coming and the barrel span.

"Eat that! Eat that!" Adrenaline helped him to sit up.

He stared into the gloom. He could see nothing but clots of darkness and a few thin and jointed legs, motionless.

"I got it, Lilly. I got it!"

A thin hiss escaped the insect. Not loud, and all the more menacing for it. The legs spasmed. A dark bulk lifted. Issac hauled out his other gun.

"Die!" He shot and shot again. "Just die!" The barrel span and bullets spat.

This time the insect propelled itself into the bullets, as if welcoming them. Issac saw pieces fly from the creature, fragments of black chitin as its exoskeleton fractured, a whole leg shattered and blown away. And then the gun lay empty. And the insect rested half in the crack, and half out, its legs reaching toward them across the sand and stone, ichor dripping from its wounds. Its glistening eyes, like a cluster of black grapes, watched them.

                                                                                         ***

Aska hung in a daze of pain and thirst until the blasts shook her back into waking. The loudest noises in the world, like the crack of a whip and the boom of a drum rolled into one and multiplied.

She found herself on Sykes's lap. As the echoes of the last series of blasts died away Aska turned her head. The muscles in her neck screamed, vertebrae grated, but something stronger than her will drew Aska's gaze.

The insect regarded her with many black eyes. Like the house of the gods all around her the insect lay in ruins but defying the power of the desert. Its dark mind flooded her. Its will used her without mercy, raiding her memories, cracking open her mouth to speak and putting on her lips words that she had stolen from the man.

"Give me the child." Aska felt Sykes flinch beneath her when she spoke. She knew that with her juices, with the marrow from her bones, the insect could heal itself. "Give me the child and I will go."

Sykes stared at her, then at the insect. He lifted his gun as though it weighed more than he did, arm trembling with effort.

"Your weapons are spent," Aska said. The insect understood killing. Sykes would not have stopped if he had a choice.

"You go to hell," Sykes said. Aska felt his hand come to rest upon her shoulder. The touch put her back in her cave with Mutti. Even now she pressed that memory away, not wanting the insect to touch it.

"You are not going to eat her. Give her up. I will go," Aska said, the insect moving her mouth while the wet complexity of its own remained still.

The insect moved, its legs gathering beneath it, less frenzied than before, purposeful. Aska could feel its pain and its hunger. Despite its wounds the insect's strength remained. She understood it, this nightmare creature of hate and venom. The other traveller, holding her like her Mutti did, protecting her despite the odds, was somehow more alien. She saw no sense in his actions.

"Give me." She used his words less well than the insect did. "Leave me, Sykes."

                                                                                     ***

"The hell I will," Issac said.

I should though. I don't even think she's human. She's changing. That's fur on her arms. And her eyes – like a cat's.

He hated that voice, that sly whispering at the back of his mind.

Give her over and it will go away. Even if the desert kills you you'll die clean.

The insect insinuated itself into the opening, emerging from the crack to reveal the gleaming horror of its body, all hard black carapace and short jutting hairs.

You're not a damn cowboy. You're a kid out of LA. You should be serving on a damn till. And all that gunslinger stuff is just rot for films. All those brave lines written by little men who scribbled them at night and would never speak them. The real men who won the west were as weak and grasping and dirty as the rest of us. Give her over. She's so light. You could just toss her over. You—

The insect moved closer and in that moment Issac threw his gun. As the insect flinched and beat at the weapon with its legs Issac surged to his feet, Lilly falling to the side. In one hand he snatched up a chunk of rubble, a wedge-shaped piece, sharp edged, a giant hand-axe.

The insect's forelegs impaled him as he charged, like metal rods, one through his side, the other through the chest, emerging from his shoulder. Momentum carried him on, driving himself further onto the skewers. And he hammered his stone blade into the midst of those mad eyes.

The insect's death throes hurled him clear. He fetched up close to Lilly. He watched as it jerked and convulsed, nearly silent, just a faint hiss and the scrabbling of legs on stone. His eyes dimmed. The blood ran from him, spilling from gaping wounds. With immense effort he reached for his hat. Somehow it seemed important, sat there in the corner of his eye. His hand crawled across the sand and stone, pulling its way finger by finger. And stopped. He stopped. It all stopped.

                                                                                         ***

A figure stepped into the opening, into the deep well in the ruins, picking its way around the corpses. A short man, thin, wrapped up despite the heat, hat and scarf, sunglasses – as if he wanted to die of sweating. He took off the glasses to reveal large eyes without pupil or iris, the colour of burnished steel. He shook the clothing from him, the unnatural pink of his skin turning to grey.

"I know you're watching," he said.

Silence.

"I can feel you watching."

Vitality flowed into the smallest of the corpses, something at once new and very old. Aska's body stood, her movements easy, relaxed. "Why must you always disturb me?"

"You've been sleeping so long a desert has swept around your home and the earth has all but swallowed what you built."

"I wasn't sleeping. I was thinking with my eyes closed," Aska said. She frowned. "You don't feel the same. You are my kin, but somehow less."

"I have become many once more," the Kin said.

"You have become less."

"And more," the Kin said.

"Why are these creatures here?" Aska asked, peering at the insect and the man. "And what is this?" She held up her hand to inspect it.

"A lot can happen in the passing of years," the Kin said. He smiled though his mouth was not made for smiling. "The pets we had, the livestock, in the time before we became just three, before I left to wander and our brother grew strange, they have changed, grown wise in their kind. You wear the body of a hunska. The taur and the domen have also grown to talk and count and invent."

"Why have you come back, Kin? Why bring these others?" She waved at the corpses.

"I've been to many places, sister, seen worlds, peoples, spoken with minds even older than our own. I've walked the paths our brother walked."

"Have you seen him?" Urgent now.

"No, but this is his. This sect creature." The Kin pointed to the broken insect. "He has many such."

"Why do you disturb me?" the old one asked with Aska's mouth.

"I've come to wake you up. To turn your thoughts outward. To bring new ideas. To refresh our stock. I've opened the ways, opened the doors of this world to whatever will come. The best and the worst. I'll leave it to you to decide which is which."

Aska frowned. "They did have something about them, these two, the man and the sect." Her gaze swept the insect, "A rare purity of focus." She turned to the man, "And a strange depth of heart."

The Kin worked his smile again. He raised a finger and the corpses lifted smoothly into the air. "I'll take them back. Squeeze their lives back into them. The little hunska too."

"No," said Aska. "I'll keep her."

"You always did like your pets," the Kin said.

"I will be Lilliana," she said.

"And the child?" the Kin said.

"I've made a home for her in my mind. In a green land, with fat rabbits, and her Mutti and her Da. And a mischievous brother. Everyone should have one of those. She can play there until I'm done."

"Farewell, sister." The Kin bowed. "May you live in interesting times."

Lilly sketched a curtsy. "I think I will."

The Kin left along the passage that brought the man, and for a time Lilly stood alone. Jenna wondered what the Old One would do next, and in that instant, as Jenna remembered herself, remembered the fact of her own existence, Lilliana tilted her head and stared at the point from which the hex-witch watched.

"Now you've seen, child. This was the first man. Kin will bring more. Not many, but more. And in after the passing of centuries, I'll meet you in an alley at the Five-oh-Seven.