“Yeah,” said Tamara. “Touch Callum and I’ll burn your fingers off.”

Call looked at her in frank amazement. He thought that she understood that he wasn’t actually evil, but he figured he’d lost her friendship forever.

But when he gave her a wobbly smile, even though there were tears in her eyes, she smiled back at him.

And then out of the crowd came a barking. Call turned in time for Havoc to bound up to him. Call threw his arms around his wolf’s neck and buried his face in the warm fur.

“You’re okay,” he whispered.

Then he pulled back to make sure. And staring into Havoc’s face, he noticed that Havoc’s eyes were no longer coruscating. They were a deep, steady gold. The Alkahest must have struck Havoc after all, but instead of killing him, it had taken the chaos from him. Havoc was a regular wolf now.

A regular wolf that licked Call’s cheek with a pink tongue.

Master Rufus and Tamara helped Call to his feet. And as the mages flew over the battlefield, putting out fires and arresting the last of the renegade mages, Call and his friends limped toward where Ravan stood like a flaming column beside the other elementals being prepared for the flight back to the Magisterium.

They had almost reached her when Call heard it. A tiny whisper in the back of his head. A voice, fond and curious and friendly, so familiar it seemed to punch a hole right through his chest. So familiar he felt the echo of the soul tap all the way through him, and almost stumbled.

I think I really am back this time, Call, Aaron’s voice said. Now what the heck are we going to do?

IT WAS A bright day, and the sun shone down on a small town cradled by mountains. The town had stood for hundreds of years; its walls were washed by rain and snow to a mellow gold. The light was slanting toward afternoon, and the townspeople were starting to trickle out into the streets to do their evening shopping, when the sound of an enormous explosion split the sky.

In the space between two mountains, above a valley of green grass, the sky seemed to have torn in half, revealing a terrible blackness. It was a darkness more than darkness. It was not a lack of light, but a lack of anything at all. It was the void.

The animals in the valley began to scatter as a rumbling noise came from inside the void. There was a ripping sound, and then from the darkness came Alex Strike, riding on the back of a great metal monster that the mages of the Assembly had once named Automotones.

Alex was no longer human. He had become a thing the world had never seen before. He had become a Devoured of chaos. He was chaos, and chaos lived inside him and flickered behind his black eyes. It crackled in his bones and hair and blood. The silver mask was no longer an independent thing. It had replaced his face, mobile and expressive as his own features had once been.

Behind him flowed a river of elementals and animals that had been once consigned to chaos. There were wolves with coruscating eyes, and dead-eyed mages holding weapons, and the serpent elemental Skelmis hovered over them, hissing and whipping its tail made of air.

Alex rode Automotones to the edge of the valley. He looked down into the town below, where the people were already running in the streets like frightened black ants.

He held out a hand, and in his palm, chaos coiled like smoke.

He smiled.