The mansion creaked like a wooden coffin, tall, imperious, and monstrous in its age. One of the last surviving structures on Old Earth. Harkwell House: the dream of so many relic rats like Svella, the death of so many more.

Legend said Nathan Harkwell had known the Lunanite invasion was coming, but no one had believed him. So he forsook the world and built the House. He barricaded himself and his armory inside and set traps for both invader and petitioner. Harkwell notoriously had no patience for those who didn't listen.

The world hadn't listened and it had perished.

But that was okay, because perished worlds made Svella rich. And Harkwell's legendary armory of phase-tech was the hoard of all hoards.

It was also a pain in the ass to get to.

Step one: anyone who wandered within two hundred feet of the House's walls got picked up by its neural net. Forcibly ousted from their body and rebuilt into an exact avatar replica. A nasty trick that fresh-faced ratlings might not notice. Since a body could only survive so long without its consciousness within its skin, the neural net became a ticking clock that could kill just as surely as a well-aimed, slow-motion knife to a paralyzed victim.

Step two: the puzzles. Harkwell House absolutely bristled with puzzles. Traps and mockeries all in one, they taunted trespassers for their imagined progress just as Harkwell himself had been known to taunt those of inferior intellect, which in his mind was everyone.

Harkwell had never met Svella. But she sure as hell planned to meet him. March right to the top of his rickety mansion-trap and laugh in his rotting corpse face where he'd lain for decades, refusing pleas for help when the Lunanites came.

Well, Svella didn't want his help. She just wanted his stuff, and dammit she'd get it. As soon as she figured this out.

Rain sheeted against the floor-to-ceiling window in the hallway she stood in, casting slithering shadows across the narrow boards and the peeling walls. There were four doors, all closed, the staircase she'd come up had folded itself neatly into the floor, and the window itself appeared to be indestructible. All that was left was the garden gnome.

A hideous, squat little man-creature with a crooked hat, jeering eyebrows, and a suspiciously sharp shovel. It sat in an alcove, the only interesting feature in the hallway and odd as a flux bug on fire. Its free arm pointed over its shoulder back into the alcove, and its shovel pointed at the opposite wall, in which—Svella peered closer—there appeared to be a handle and the vague outline of a hatch.

Here was the thing: being a neural avatar meant she could only interact with the real world via shadows and reflections. It was somewhat like trying to swat a five-foot rexfly with a piece of paper, or picking up a glass with only a wet noodle.

It basically sucked. But not more than letting the neural net keep her until her body back at the gate withered to corpse mush. Svella glanced at the AI-ssistant on her wrist, a bit of inkcode that showed up as a small dragonpup. It did a cartwheel and held up two fingers. Two hours left before she cashed out forever.

"But the cash comes with me," Svella muttered, glaring at the gnome. Its malicious smile showed a bit of teeth.

She'd come this far, to the fourth floor of the House, past the shadow puppets with knives, the prismatic maze, and the complete black box of the third floor. Harkwell wouldn't stop her now. She'd show the other relic rats, she'd show them all that Svella Sarfrondia was the best there ever was.

So she breathed, timing the swathes of lightning filling the hall, reaching into the shadows behind the gnome's head. From there she pulled out fistfuls of shadow like cotton candy, molding it, stretching it until she'd made a rope. Between lightning strikes—so it wouldn't be disintegrated—she swung the rope of shadow out again and again until it wrapped and pulled tight around the handle of the hatch across the hall.

Svella pulled. The hatch popped out and the next flare of lightning puffed the shadow rope away in her hands. Inside the hatch sat a fishbowl and a hand mirror, and with a clunk, another hatch popped open in the wall high above the gnome's head. Just below the arc of the ceiling sat an hourglass spilling sand into its bottom half, the sand lurid red as Lunanite eyes.

"Okay, you old bastard," said Svella. "All that's left is the attic. I know you're in there, and I'm coming for you." She reached once more into the shadows behind the gnome, this time forming gloves to slide onto her hands. Then she picked up the mirror. Lightning pinged against its surface and beamed over the wall in a fiery streak.

Step three: Make it to the hoard.

Svella grinned. Sticking the mirror under her arm, she picked up the fishbowl. Tepid water swayed inside, a belly-up goldfish coasting limply around the scummy rim. Keeping her hands in the shadow of her body so the lightning wouldn't snuff her gloves, she placed the fishbowl on top of the gnome's extended shovel. Then she backed away, ready to catch lightning in a bottle, or an hourglass, as it were.

She held the mirror and her breath.

Lightning cracked.

The hall struck white, a crackling line of luminescence jumping from the fishbowl to the mirror that Svella had angled just so. The hourglass glowed...and spun.

Everything shuttered dark.

Rain sheeted against the floor-to-ceiling window in the hallway she stood in, casting slithering shadows across the narrow boards and the peeling walls. There were four doors, all closed, the staircase she'd come up had folded itself neatly into the floor, and the window itself appeared to be indestructible.

All that was left was the garden gnome....