“Girls!” a hard voice called from outside, giving them a bit of a spook, “I know you’re in there.” It was Kate Hex. “Now I ain’t mad, she shouted,” sounding mad, “so come on out - the house was less important than your lives!” Mistrial crawled over to the window and peaked out. A gun fired and the window exploded into Mistrial’s good eye and she grabbed her face, wailing. Heathcliff swept over her, frantically checking her over, blowing glass shards from her. “Shit,” Heath whispered, narrowing her eyes down on something. “What is it?” Mistrial blinked strenuously, trying to round up the debris that had slipped in under the lid. “You got a ball in your head,” Heathcliff whispered. “What?” “There’s a ball. It’s lodged in your skull. I can see it embedded in the bone. Just a little small bore, don’t worry ‘bout it.” “What?” “Don’t touch it.” Another shot issued through the cliffs and the ball split through the dry wood of the shack and lodged itself in Heathcliff’s breastbone and hurt her so bad that as her neck snapped back to scream in pain she unhinged her jaw. The two scrambled to the far end of the shack and pulled aside a loose slat to duck through as the next shot went out after them, shattering a window and plinking into a tin can that spun and rattled into the rocks staircase under their feet. The narrow ledge the stairs were cut into gave way as they picked their way across and dropped them in a shower of stone through a roof down into a table that exploded its contents of rotted food and insects up and outward onto the bibs of this macabre final meal’s long-dead participants. They groped their way through the dark infested home, the texture of bugs wings pattering across their bare skin, to the silver cracks of day in the front door and threw it open, nearly stepping out into thin air. They gulped as much clean air as they could before heading back into that rancid hole and drew the curtains on the side of the house, pulled the dry wood from the boarded windows and smashed the glass, emerging from that narrow break, covered in roaches, into a trash strewn yard. “Where’s the broom?” Mistrial asked. Heathcliff explained things in vowel sounds, making hysterical and unhelpful gestures with her hands regarding her jaw. Mistrial backed her into the shade of a shelf of rock, kneeling down in front of her, “is it broke?” Heathcliff whined frantically. Suddenly, the smirk of Elizar Thornbrook came rearing up into Mistrial’s mind like a floating dice clearing dark amethyst liquid, and she knew exactly what needed doing. “I’m going to treat this like a dislocation,” she said, and inserted her thumbs in either side of Heath’s mouth, locked around her teeth, fingers gripped into the jawline. “If I’m wrong, don’t hate me,” she said, and drove the jaw down, back and up producing a grisly crunching noise that made her certain she had just made things a hundred times worse. Heath shoved her aside and shot up, grabbing her jaw, her chops clapping open and shut, “Mistrial, that felt incredible.” “One hundred percent success rate on all my surgeries,” she whispered, affirming it to herself as much as to her patient. Heath’s eyes twinkled in pained joy. She cupped her mouth and called out for her broom. They waited. Nothing. “It must be stuck or someone got a hold of it,” Heathcliff murmured, “we’re gonna have to go find it,” but, suddenly sounding in the distance, the tinkling of broken glass and something heavy sliding down a rocky aluminum roof brought around the broom and skirting down after it was Kate Hex with a rifle trained on them, “Surprise, fuckers,” she said, firing a ball into Heathcliff’s teeth and blasting R7 and taking half of R6, exposing the pale pink root within. Heath grabbed Mistrial and slingshotted them into Kate, sending her flying over the next ledge and crashing over a rooftop, scrambling among the sliding tiles as they took her with her, she still managed to right herself and get off another shot that sailed up and whipped through Mistrial’s hair as they took up into the air, careening wildly in trying to get themselves situated on it, crazily climbing the height of the cloud towers as down on Lith Kate’s shots reported over and over. Mistrial looked up at her rider and a hole in Heath’s cheek was whippling out blood and where the athletic control of the broom allowed she issued more out in spurts through her cherry red lips. Higher they went, maneuvering through the constellations of wild and untame riders, skirts flapping in the sharp winds of the upper atmosphere. Then they saw her, both at once, like a bloody cloak blown over a battlefield, the great witch Vermilla came tearing up the far wall of vapor, rising into the dark accumulations above, dipping into its charged berth that buzzed and shook with her injection. Then that crimson rider pulled out and dove into the throng of broom riders below and an arc of red lightning issued from her hand and in that burst of light eight covens dropped like a sudden die-off of starlings. Glowing sigils cast at distance came firing after her, some landing their mark, and passing her through strange phases of being, transformations or diseases, traps and manipulations, yet each scenario she seemed able to transform or render immaterial at speed and with the ease and nimbleness of a fast game of cards.