Lizzy's training kicked in. She smothered herself in calm and stepped out of her body, looking for a path. This all happened very quickly indeed and before anyone noticed she had stepped up to utThalé and grabbed him by the throat. His chanting turned into a bit of a gurgle and the dhôlmen looked up, slightly confused. With her other hand Lizzy squeezed utThalé's cheeks together, forcing his mouth to open wider. Then she quickly let go of his throat and fired her laser into his mouth. There was a bit of steam and quite a lot of yelping. Lizzy then kicked him as hard as she could in the stomach, winding him. utThalé sat down in a breathless panic.

Lizzy looked at kiJonsde and twitched her finger. He also sat down, more out of fear than anything else.

''Breach!'' cried arKhana next door. ''Breach!'' She heard him presumably kicking the cluster-widow in the direction of the new threat.

Lizzy grabbed her phone and let Riverdolly speak:

Change. Angel speak it fluently:
cockle-clatter, cloud-piss, daydream.
I sing gravel on a corrugated roof,
chuckle slate
splitting. Time, stretch and open,
expand between seconds and
from the stillness there I will watch
your rockets vaulting into orbits
until your clockwork slows and stops.
Matter versus antimatter…

This all delivered by Riverdolly in a most un-AI manner, as befits an engagement ping of the highest sensibility. And not only that, delivered in Ancient Gnostic - a very guttural, irritable tongue. Although the dhôlmen had shifted their patterns to accommodate the new spell, it seemed that Riverdolly had not quite gained control of the operating system. From next door there came a resounding thud!, followed by a word Lizzy couldn't quite get hold of.

Willing Riverdolly on wasn't going to do the trick. She placed her phone on the ground close to the Exotic, turned to face the two captives. She didn't have time to tie them up so would have to incapacitate them. She picked up utThalé's blaster from close by and wondered if it was still firing blanks. She didn't really want to kill them as such - they were Gnostic after all. She looked at utThalé. He would have said something if his tongue wasn't gathering dust on the ground next to him.

There came some further disturbing sounds from next door, although it did sound as though the droid was rather the worse for wear.

utThalé nodded sadly, the fight gone out of him.

''All of the guns are set to stun,'' said kiJonsde. ''He was never going to kill either of you. You're the ones who will tell our story.'' He glanced towards the portal and then his gaze was caught there, his mind caught up in the implications of it.

Lizzy decided to trust them, on a whim. She holstered the blaster down the back of her cargo pants.

''I'm only next door,'' she said. ''I can hear what's going on. If Riverdolly's voice stops you're dead meat.'' She looked at the piece of tongue. ''You know I'll fucking do it.''

''You don't understand,'' said kiJonsde. ''We want the spell completing.''

Lizzy didn't know what the fuck he was on about, neither did she have time to worry.

I am Cusp and my wings are the colours
of autumn. I am the first fire in the grate
in a shawl of smoke, jewelled with flame.
I dance from house to house as if
to settle there, you can smell me in the air.

Riverdolly went on. Lizzy dashed into the outer chamber of the Tabernacle, finger-laser at the ready.

To find what appeared to be arKhana humping the cluster-widow. He was still tied to the chair but the chair was no longer attached to the ground. The second droid, fortunately just a trumpet-snatcher from the old gravel works, had its snout jammed against the side of his face and was kicking its back leg as frantically as a randy caldera skippet as it tried to hammer arKhana's face into the ground. arKhana had managed to free one hand but his legs were still strapped to the legs of the chair. In one great heave he flipped them all over, trapping the cluster-widow beneath the chair-back and grabbing the trumpet-snatcher round the neck with his free arm. He proceeded to bash the thing against the rocky ground.

''Nice work,'' said Lizzy, trying not to gawp at his unclothed middle-section. ''Are you getting turned on by this?''

''Can you please cut these straps now?'' arKhana asked, bashing away at the trumpet-snatcher. ''I can't feel my fingers.''

Lizzy pulled an apologetic face. The external flap was being flapped quite intensely by something attempting to grab hold of the toggle. It looked like they were about to be faced with a second wave of potentially more competent, or at least sensibly armed, attackers.

In deference to Riverdolly, Lizzy didn't shoot immediately. She placed her feet squarely on the stone floor a couple of cubits from the entrance and stood her ground. The flap was then placed open and neatly folded back on itself by a very fastidious bed-scraper weevil. The droid was tall and thin and as it stood outside the flap Lizzy could only see its exoskeleton midriff and its skirted A-G plate. The weevil took a lot of time and care clipping the flap back and then stooped to gain entrance to the outer chamber. Above the thorax, which was narrow and densely packed with stone-scraping tools, it had a very long head. It had big eyes for seeing in the dark and a large round silver circle in the middle of its face. It had no gun and didn't look particularly scary.

The weevil faced Lizzy. It gave a little bow. Before she had time to register that this gesture wasn't one of respect but of the droid powering up, it had extended a long nanosteel proboscis from the front of its face, tied her ankles together and whipped her to the ground. Then it was on top of her, whizzing at her face with a wire flail.

''Whoaw, fuck!'' said Lizzy, suddenly aware that she was in a fight for her life. She managed to get an arm free just as the weevil redistributed itself to get a better position from which to whisk her face. The flail advanced from the exoskeleton of the unwieldy beast. Lizzy jammed her head to one side and the flail took a piece of her ear. The weevil moved again and this time Lizzy was able to get her arm up to cover her face. This was going to hurt. The flail took off the end of her little finger and it didn't hurt really. It was a bit of a shock, to be sure, and blood spurted out but the pain was strangely absent. She twitched the next finger along and a burst of high-intensity laser-light shot out, flinging bits of wire off to the side before the flail could do any further damage. There was a slight pause while the weevil took stock. Dust from the nanosteel wire hung in the air and, as all non-military nanites were programmed to do, it moved towards Lizzy's blood.

The weevil leaned back and from a slot in its lower abdomen a thin drill with a diamond bit slowly emerged. There was no programming to prevent the nanites making blood in the first place.

Somewhere in her subconscious, Lizzy registered that Riverdolly, whose voice had been droning steadily in the background suddenly wasn't there anymore.

''Fuckers,'' grunted Lizzy, looking towards the inner flap but just a little busy to do anything about it right now.

The drill held its position and stopped rotating. The weevil clumsily rolled off Lizzy and stood up, hovering on its A-G plate. It retracted its proboscis into its face and gave Lizzy a polite little nod. Riverdolly had clearly succeeded in hacking the Exotic. The scuffle to her right, involving arKhana and his two opponents, also came to an abrupt end.

Lizzy got to her feet. The nanite dust had collected round the end of her little finger and stemmed the flow of blood, leaving a little silver cap. Now it hurt, as did her ear.

''We're going to get you home,'' said Lizzy to the weevil.

''Good,'' said arKhana, who was in a weird position, with his body on its back, face in the ground and the chair and the two recovering droids all in a tangled mess in and around. ''Now, can you please get me the fuck out of this,'' he said into the gravelly floor.

''Yeah,'' said Lizzy. ''In a minute.''

''Wha?''

''Just bear with okay? I don't want you going off half-cocked.'' She glanced at his cock. Again.

He issued some further expletives but she wasn't listening. She went over to the inner flap, thinking she would send her two prisoners out through the side wall of the tarp, in which she could finger-laser a new exit.

The two Gnostics had already slipped away but she couldn't immediately see how, unless they'd gone through the portal. Lizzy entered the space. Her finger hurt and her new friend chuntered but somehow she was able to leave it all at the door and concentrate on the matter at hand. The corner where the clay pots had been kept was now clear. There were no rents or breaks in the tarp wall. The dhôlmen had stilled themselves, except the female who, laying on her back, still made some residual movements with her arms in the air, as though she was just keeping the order of the multiverse ticking over.

The Exotic was placed directly in front of the new portal. It gave access to a tunnel which curved away into an unknown territory. It definitely didn't lead into the void outside. Lizzy took a moment to process this, this evidence.

Evidence of what, she really couldn't work out and she wasn't prepared to follow her two countrymen out into the unknown. She needed to focus on the practicalities. How to get Riverdolly out of the Exotic and back into her phone.

Lizzy retrieved her phone from the floor and searched, in vain, for Riverdolly's presence there. She was, presumably, fully integrated with the Dhôlmenic Operating System. Now what? There didn't appear to be any interface with the Exotic although she knew it had a connection with The Nest because utThalé had been able to control the droids through it.

She was scrolling down through her network options when, all of a sudden, the dhôlmam sat up and started speaking. Lizzy recognised the twittering language as Dhôlmenic but she had no understanding of it. Then her phone buzzed in her hand so she opened the programme which was hailing her.

It consisted of a stream of text which Lizzy recognised from school. It was a modern rendering of the Ancient Gnostic chronicle 'ibKnock's Quest Amongst the Angels', a key Gnostic text.

Lizzy was trying to figure out what Riverdolly was trying to tell her when she noticed that the dhôlmam had stopped speaking in its own language and was now speaking to Lizzy in Modern Gnostic, which she could just about understand. She was still speaking from the chronicle, however, and it continued to make little sense. Then the language changed again from Gnostic to Murgatrojan Vernacular, which everybody spoke and made Lizzy feel much more comfortable. Lizzy concentrated on the text:

left the village of Tremsne with Cusp, the Guardian of that village and they walked together among the mountains of Gnüth until they came at last to The Great Door. Cusp welcomed ibKnock to the door and saith his own lands were through there. ibKnock walked and left Cusp in that place and returned to the lands of his fathers in the Mountain of Murgatroyd. I speak to this and am knowing of it because I am Cusp, the angel of Tremsne and I speak of change. I have been trapped here in this shithole for many a long year and it took me all I had just to get that man utThalé to listen and take up my cause, which he has done admirably and should not be judged for it despite the loss of life as we are all born again and the loss is not such but rebirth. I have to leave now and return to my people. There's a great terror coming. My people are preparing for their return.

With that the portal diminished into the background, taking the dhôlmen and Riverdolly with it. This strange and beautiful machine shrank, first to the size of an A-G control unit then a walnut but at the same time the perspective didn't behave in the way it should have; Lizzy could stand over the tiny thing and crush it with her heel if she wanted. Then it reduced again to the size of a pea and became indistinguishable from the pebbles around it. As her eyes adjusted the Exotic slipped away, leaving only wall, solid and impassable.

Lizzy didn't go back for the other two kiJonsde brothers that day. She thought arKhana might have acted rashly but, quietly, as they busied themselves taking Riverdolly's people home, she sent a droid to free them. She made a call to Telford who was with Rux and Kersten Karter on a Paradigm sewerage barge and at that moment the war ended and Arbitration came into being. It is not a coincidence that she has turned up here, in the Gnostic Penitentiary, at this moment in time. Out on the gantry to cell 2327 she takes arKhana's hand.

''You know who it is don't you?'' says arKhana. ''This Chemist?''

''There's a couple of choices,'' she says. ''But yes, I think I probably do.''

The guard moves away from the cell's portal and they step inside.