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his spear flying as we skidded across the floor to smack into a wall. I came up straddling him and got a hand around his throat, then raised the other in a fist. My ribs hurt like fuck, but I did my best not to show it.
    “Alright, you purple pipsqueak, where’s Lhan?”
    “Wh-who?”
    I bounced his head off the linoleum. “Lhan! Dhan Lhan-Lar of Herva! You know, the guy who was with me the night you and your fucking inquisition kidnapped me and sent me back to Earth !”
    His pals had stopped by this time, and were looking back, weapons raised, but didn’t look like they wanted to come any closer. One of ’em ran to another ATM on the wall.
    Pipsqueak squirmed under me. “Please, demon! I—I know not this person! Let me—”
    WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!
    A deafening siren went off right over my head and I cringed down like I’d been slapped by the hand of god. Pipsqueak’s pals fled down the hall and I looked up and around, taking in where I was for the first time.
    The hallway we were in now was wider than the first one—much wider—and curved away to the left and right in a way that made me guess it would eventually make a circle at some point. In both directions, orange-robed priests stood staring at me with slaves cowering behind them, carrying their books and papers. Directly to my left was a pair of giant double doors with big looping silver symbols inlaid in them, but they only held my attention for a second, ’cause the wall they were set in stopped me cold.
    Actually, it wasn’t the wall that had me staring, even though it was pretty amazing—a seamless floor-to-ceiling glass window that went left and right down the hall as far as I could see. That just made the whole place feel even more future-seventies theme-park than it had before. And it wasn’t the view behind the wall either. That was just a big circular open space, more than a football field across that looked like the atrium of one of those fancy hotels where all the floors look down to the lobby below, except so high and deep that it seemed to go up and down forever. No, what was making me gape like a hooked trout was that the floors on the far side of the atrium were all warped and distorted like I was looking at them through a bottle. The atrium was filled with water! I was looking at the biggest aquarium I’d ever seen, but there were no fishes. What the hell was it for?
    The sound of running feet brought my head around. More guys in orange and white were jogging up the hall from the left, but these were wearing armor, and looked like they knew how to use their weapons.
    “Fuck! Sorry, pal. Gotta go.”
    I hopped up off Pipsqueak, grabbed his spear, then jumped to the doors with the silver squiggles on them. They didn’t open. I looked around for a button or switch and saw a glowing white circle to the right of the door at about shoulder height. I pressed it and the light pulsed a little brighter, but nothing else happened. The spear guys were jogging closer.
    “Goddamn it.”
    I ran right, taking wobbly ten-foot strides and sending panicked priests and slaves scattering, but before I’d got more than a few steps I saw more guards coming in the other direction—a lot more. There musta been twenty of the fuckers.
    I skidded to a stop and looked around for a way out. There. A door on the outer wall. It was smaller and plainer than the others, but at least this one whooshed open when I ran to it. I looked in. A little hallway, dark and empty.
    I ducked in and the door whooshed closed behind me as I ran on. There were more doors along both walls and one at the end. All the curved white smoothness was missing here, replaced by unpainted concrete and exposed lighting fixtures, and a muffled roar came from somewhere below that sounded like an air conditioning system.
    I tried the doors on the walls, which, though they were as big as the ones in the main hall, were just plain old doors, with plain old latches. They all opened into plain old