At first the city merely behaved badly.
Balloons floated down instead of up.
A traffic light reflected a street that wasn’t there.
A hot-dog sign twisted, and its painted sausage briefly reached out of the board like a curious finger.
“Is the sky buffering?” the redhead asked.
Cleo ran a scan.
The little wheel at the center of her display spun twice, froze, and then gave her an answer she didn’t like.
“Guys.
The Deflation Protocol isn’t just a warning.
It’s a literal timer.”
A clock burned through the clouds.
Each digit pulsed red.
Somewhere far above them, beyond ordinary gravity and beyond the stories humans told about it, enormous figures gathered around a shining mechanism.
The Deflation Protocol proceeded.
One of the figures regarded the three tiny women below and seemed almost regretful.
It had liked the funny witches.
The city changed again.
A glass tower leaned toward its own reflection.
Pavement rose in a wave beneath their boots.
Cleo’s readings skittered wildly.
“We’re looking at pre-inversion anomalies,” she said.
“Balloon-banana levels of weird.”
The redhead touched a floating patch of color.
It popped against her fingertip, and every shop window on the block briefly showed yesterday.
“Oops,” she said.
“Touched it weird.”
“They’re going to invert physics,” Cleo said.
“Cool,” the redhead replied.
“Terrifying.
Cool.”
The sky crunched.
There was no kinder word for it.
A jagged sound ran from horizon to horizon, and the blue overhead folded into crinkled ridges.
A luminous growth opened over the avenue, dropping soft strands of color over parked cars.
“What the, why is the sky crunchy?”
“Inversion,” Cleo said.
“They’re rewriting the texture of reality.”
The dark-haired woman stared at the growth.
“I might be hallucinating.”
“Or,” Cleo said, “that’s a helium bloom.”
From the bloom came three tall silhouettes with smooth, featureless faces.
They landed without making a sound.
The one in front raised an arm, and the clock’s numbers reflected along its dark surface.
“YOU ARE OVERDUE FOR AIR REALLOCATION.”
The redhead grabbed the others.
“I do not like how she said that.”
On Cleo’s visor, another alert flashed: POP-LEVEL EVENT NEARING.
“Time to bounce!”
They ran.
A pink, inflated creature bounded across the road ahead of them.
Cleo vaulted onto its back; it compressed and sprang, launching her over a row of cars.
The redhead rode a trail of fire after her, and the dark-haired woman cleared the intersection in one impossible leap.
“If the city’s wired,” Cleo called, “I can firewall it!”
She reached into the network that held the changing streets together.
Her bubble suit split into a ring of shimmering shields.
The Undeflators struck them, each blow sending ripples across the transparent surfaces.
For a moment the shields held.
Then Cleo found an old recording buried beneath the city.
A previous Deflation.
An entire world folding inward, its buildings and oceans squeezed into nothing.
“There was a first Deflation,” she whispered.
“It wiped everything.”
The road ahead lifted into a hill of air.
At its crest stood a distant golden structure, half temple and half machine.
The same symbol appeared in Cleo’s recording, glowing at the heart of the disaster.
“We’re ballooning toward doom,” she said.
The redhead looked at the temple, then at the approaching Undeflators.
“Yup.
But stylishly.”