The Prickers that remained split open.
Small gray bodies unfolded beneath their shells, each with a pin for a face.
They fell to the forest floor and advanced through the brush.
The air smelled of hot rubber and scorched metal.
“Dawn blasting on!” The red-haired witch lifted her arm.
A bright orb blossomed above the trees.
The creatures shrieked and stumbled back from the light.
“Stay rooted!” the black-haired witch ordered, and living vines surged from the ground.
Edgar drove forward with a burning branch in one fist.
“Pressure pulse pummel!” His blow struck the center of the tangled swarm.
The pressure burst outward in a golden wave.
The smaller creatures flew apart.
Astrid expected relief.
Instead she saw the web of blue lines reforming beyond the clearing.
The enemy’s signal was still there.
The machines were only limbs; somewhere behind them was the hand.
The black-haired witch saw it too.
She raised her wand, and an enormous amber circle appeared in the night.
Symbols wheeled around it.
Astrid’s game display supplied the missing colors, each one earned in a place that should never have fit inside a single day: the mermaid’s scale-light, the centaur’s sparkle, the phoenix feather, Edgar’s oath, the breath in Astrid’s bubble.
“By wax, by thread, by latex soul,” the witch chanted.
“The final seal, we now unroll.”
Astrid put her hands against the inner wall of her helmet.
Its surface became part of the circle.
The seal did not destroy the remaining Prickers.
It caught their shared signal and turned it back toward its source.
In the warehouse, every monitor filled with colored bubbles.
The Popper slammed a key.
His own controls answered with a cheerful chime: COMBO X6.
One by one, the surveillance balloons above him inflated.
Cameras vanished inside clear spheres.
The red switch drifted beyond his reach.
He clawed at the keyboard, but a final bubble closed around his chair and lifted him from the floor.
Outside, the forest grew quiet.
Edgar rested a hand against the dent in his armor.
Astrid’s helmet held firm.
The red haired witch leaned on her wand, her grin returning in stages.
“Very well done, Bubble Gurl,” said the black-haired witch.
Astrid looked at the puzzle screen.
A new arrangement of bubbles appeared.
It showed a police car, a road, and a warning she had not yet lived through, or perhaps already had.
The game did not say which.
“Are we finished?” Edgar asked.
Astrid considered the photographs that came before their subjects, the fragments of other adventures, the man floating in his office, and the tiny joystick in her hand.
“With this level,” she said.
She pushed the stick toward the next glowing bubble.
Somewhere ahead of them, a siren began to sing.