more ra'ak in humanoid form were at the very core of the planetoid, where there were round tunnels carved out of the rock, each large enough for a sixty-foot ra'ak to slither through. i passed several ra'ak that were forty feet in length as i made my way downward. they were guarding something. it wasn't hard to guess what that something might be. two more ra'ak snarled and lunged at each other as i passed them by-none of them had a clue i was there. part of that untraceable ability i had, i suppose.

what i searched for i found at the center of the planetoid. a circular prison held him captive, with bars all around and solid rock over his head and beneath his feet. he was chained, too. dark haired, quite young looking and perhaps a half-inch taller than i. i circled his cage in silent regard, studying him. if i'd been solid, i would have shook my head at what the scents were telling me. it was shocking, what i learned through scent.

gathering more energy around me, i wove a shield around the khos'mirai's cage. to the ra'ak outside, it would appear that he slept-he was lying on the bare rock of his cell. once the shield was in place, i turned first to mist and then to myself inside the cage.

"i wondered when you would get here," he sighed, sitting up and blinking at me. "they can't see or hear us, can they?"

"no. we're completely shielded. the image they see is of you sleeping."

"i don't mean to do wrong-most of the time."

"i can see that," i said, watching as he nervously twisted his fingers together. "but there is total chaos going on out there in the real world and you're sort of at the bottom of it."

"i know. i remember doing and saying some of those things, though i sometimes regret them later." he was now rubbing his arms-as if he were cold. i watched him carefully. the ra'ak kept everybody else warm but didn't worry so much about this one. mentally shaking myself, i shoved that thought aside.

"i knew what was going to happen to the others-the elemaiya. that made me happy. both bright and dark, wiped out with a single blow." i could understand how he might feel that way-he'd been sold to the ra'ak twice. the other things he'd done, though-i didn't understand that at all. but he wasn't sane-one look into those hazel eyes and anyone could tell. i moved backward as he stood, rattling his chains with the slow and deliberate effort.

"so, you saw that, huh?" i asked, keeping an eye on his movements.

"saw it?" he laughed. it was nasty, that laugh. "i planned it. i knew you would come. friesianna and baltis just couldn't help themselves. they didn't forbid their subjects from breeding indiscriminately with any other race, but they never hesitated to kick out the undesirables, did they?" the khos'mirai leaned against the bars of his cage. his dark hair was shaggy but not unnaturally so, and he was clean and dressed in something similar to a healer's scrubs. bare feet stood on the rock floor of his prison and i focused on his toenails for a moment before going back to his face.

"they weren't particularly kind to their quarter-blood children," i agreed. "they are paying for their abuse now."

"hmmph. you should have killed them, but no matter," he tossed up a hand. "they'll all die, eventually. you should have made them suffer more. i wanted to see that."

"i don't do suffering," i said.

"such a shame," he dipped his chin and shook his head in confusion before lifting his eyes to mine again. "i lost sight of you for three hundred years. why is that?"

"i can't really explain that," i hedged. something wasn't right, but i couldn't put my finger on it. still, he hadn't moved toward me and didn't appear threatening in any way. i hadn't seen anything from him that might be truly threatening. yet.

"but you don't see," he laughed as his eyes filmed over in a strange glow. "i know i'm going to die. but i'm going to live." the grin he offered was unholy in its glee. well, he was insane. still, there was a touch of truth in his words. that frightened me.

"see me now?" his chains dropped away and he changed. ra'ak were frightening when they turned, but this-he was a terrible experiment gone awry. half humanoid, half ra'ak, with a ra'ak's scaled body, he grew and elongated on the opposite side of his cage. the scales covering his snake-like body were flesh-colored and poisonous. a flattened, humanoid head sat atop a thirty-foot body when the change was complete. his arms and legs, shrunken and stick-like, were still attached to the reptilian torso.

ra'ak have a terrible, gleaming beauty about them when they transform. there was nothing redeemable in this monster. "i knew you'd find me repulsive," he laughed. "i asked them to do this-to experiment to make a hybrid. i'm almost as poisonous as they are, if you touch me." eyes that were larger and rounder than they'd been in his humanoid shape still glowed, although they were slitted, now.

"you know i killed bigger and stronger than you on kifirin," i pointed out, watching him warily.

"oh, but you didn't kill smarter," he snapped and rows of long, sharp teeth clicked as he bit off his words. i'd hit a nerve, looked like. "you can kill me-i've already said that. but you can't kill all of me."

"look, stop talking in riddles and just tell me what the hell you mean," i snapped. yeah, i was getting a little testy, too.

"do you think," he hissed, his lengthy body uncoiling and beginning to move toward me, "that they'd be satisfied in creating just one of me? that's so limiting," he growled a laugh. "there are hundreds. thousands. who knows how many of me there are? and the best part?" his eyes glowed brighter as he glared at me.

"i'm sure you're going to tell me," i muttered, shocked and angered at his words. there were thousands, just like him? could all of them do what the khos'mirai could do? create havoc and destroy?

"oh, yes. all of who i am-what i am, can do everything i can do." he'd pulled the thoughts straight from my mind-i hadn't shielded them as i should. "i am the collective me. you can kill me, but you can't kill me."

"but what about the ra'ak?" i asked, stalling for time while i searched desperately for an answer to this new and horrible reality. "aren't they pulling your strings? you're in their prison, after all."

"you take things so literally," he pointed out. "they've done exactly as i wanted them to do-for a very long time. once i saw they wouldn't let me go, i began to work on this from another angle. they ask, i answer. you see they're still around after you thought you'd destroyed all of them. not a problem if you can manipulate time, you see."

i almost said it before thinking better of it. yes, the ra'ak could manipulate time. and this one admitted that he knew i was coming. but the khos'mirai had also admitted that he'd lost track of me for three hundred years. somebody had covered up evidence of my existence except to a select few during that time. i desperately needed more time to think and i didn't have it. not here, facing down what may or may not be the original khos'mirai.

you're not thinking big enough. or small enough, the voice filtered into my brain. well, he was right. i wasn't. it had taken me months just to locate this khos'mirai. how much longer might it take if i used my usual, humanoid way of measuring space? how long would it take me to hunt down thousands of these monsters, when each of them might see me coming? squaring my shoulders, i focused on the job at hand.

"figured out that it's useless to fight me?" that many teeth definitely did not fit in so small a mouth as he laughed. and then he struck.

it was a joy to rip into them-they moved swiftly but not swiftly enough. his canines shredded ra'ak-enhanced flesh as they attempted to land blows. a few did land but they were shrugged off as he decapitated one after another. he'd been powerful before but this-this went beyond his expectations. and the reward at the end? well, that had been promised long ago. it would be in his grasp-soon.

"now what?" i sat on a stainless steel table with my head in my hands. the khos'mirai-this incarnation of him anyway-had been quickly dispatched, as had the fifty-odd ra'ak living inside the planetoid. machines softly beeped around me as the ra'ak-enhanced slept in their small, coffin-sized spaces.

before i'd killed the last ra'ak (who was still in humanoid form), i'd forced him to tell me how many clones of the khos'mirai they'd made. there were more than thirty thousand. thirty thousand, each with guardian ra'ak in attendance, spread across the dark and light halves of the universe. and each of them was busy creating an army of ra'ak-enhanced humanoids. the elemaiya, bright and dark, had unwittingly spread their quarter-blood children across the galaxies, seeding unsuspecting planets with the fodder the khos'mirai and his flunky ra'ak needed to kill everything. and that didn't include the quarter and eighth-bloods the ra'ak had purposely bred.

me? i'd killed a clone. not the original as i'd hoped. he was still out there. i would have to find him and his artificially produced brothers and kill all of them. the prospect was wearying. what was it the voice had whispered? that i wasn't thinking big enough or small enough? what did that mean?

"here." he handed me a tennis ball. "it's the one the cat plays with," he added, flashing me a grin. he'd appeared from nothing and was now sitting beside me.

"i thought you couldn't help me again," i grumped.

"i didn't say that. i only said i couldn't hold your corporeal body together while you did your best to blast it apart with power," he said.

"picky, picky," i muttered.

"besides, you can figure this out on your own if you stare at that tennis ball long enough. when you're done, send it back. the cat sort of likes it." he disappeared.

"what the?" i stared at the tennis ball. it was dirty; i could see that, with smudges everywhere. muddy brown instead of its original yellow, the ball had bits of fuzz missing. they'd been ripped away by an animal that had played with it for who knew how long. what did he expect me to find in this? under normal circumstances, i might not have picked it up to begin with. and then it hit me.