"It's what?" I stared at the thing towering from the lumpy grass of the meadow behind Basilon's workshop. The gleaming metal construction didn't just make my whiskers twitch. It also made my ears fold back and the fur bristle along the back of my neck.

Basilon had goggles strapped on above her snout, but I was pretty sure the look she gave me was the one she always gives me when she thinks I'm acting stupid. I tell her and tell her and tell her it's not an act, but does she ever believe me?

No, she does not.

"It's a nut cracker," she said, returning her begoggled gaze to the thing. Blue sparks crackled from her claws to weld another sheet of copper into place. "When it comes to preparing nuts, I feel that you squirrels should avail yourselves of all that modern thaumaturgy has to offer."

Looking at the thing, I had to tip my head back and back and back, the sides curving and tapering to a point. Basilon's workshop was two stories tall, but the machine stood at least three, nearly as tall as the trees of the forest that surrounded us. It was shaped kind of like a pine cone, but two gleaming arms sprouted from the sides. The arms had big metal paws gripping the handle of an enormous hammer cocked over the thing's head—if it had had a head. "Just how big are these nuts you're thinking about?" I asked.

"Wrong question." More blue fire wavered around the weird boots she wears over her hind paws, and she rose into the afternoon sky along the slope of the thing, magic still spurting from her forepaws to smooth the seam. "What we should be asking is: how many squirrels live in these woods?"

I thought. "A lot," I finally answered.

"Therefore," she called from the thing's top, "if you all bring the nuts you're planning to eat for supper here every evening, we can crack the whole lot of them at the same time and save everyone a great deal of needless aggravation."

I thought about that, too. "Does that mean that some aggravation isn't needless?"

She froze, rotated slowly, and pointed her big goggles down at me. "A good question, Esker," she said, and even though she's a wolf, the little smile that spread along her snout was very human. Humans only smile with their mouths because they don't have whiskers or fur or hardly any ears.

It was weird because Basilon has whiskers and fur and regular ears. But she walks on her hind legs all the time like the few humans I've seen, and she uses her front paws the way humans do, too, picking things up with her stubby fingers and carrying them and all that.

There's a lot that's weird about Basilon.

One thing that wasn't weird, though, with her hovering beside this giant mechanical doohickey holding a hammer, was the way she told me, "At the moment, however, it's once again the wrong question."

She tells me that pretty regularly.

"The question for the moment," she went on, "would be: how do we let the other squirrels know about our nut cracking device?"

I waved a paw at her and shouted, "Point of order!"

My main job with Basilon—and I have several—is to shout at her and wave my paws sometimes. See, when her workshop first settled down into the meadow, fire and steam spurting from the bottom, nobody else in the whole forest was willing to do more than lurk around the tree line, peering from behind trunks or through branches. Because, yes, she smelled like a wolf, but like I said, she walked and acted like a human. Nobody knew what to make of it.

But did that stop us squirrels?

No, it did not!

We took charge. We argued and swore and ran around in circles till just about everybody else was arguing and swearing and running around in circles. Weirdly enough, though, that didn't seem to solve the problem. So while everyone else was taking a rest, I scampered across the meadow to actually take a look.

I crept in the window, and she was standing inside. Different kinds and colors of cloth covered most of her fur, and she had her front paws jammed up inside a big lattice of metal and crystal, electricity and magic sparking and sparkling everywhere. I must've gasped because she snapped her head around to stare at me. Her eyes were more wolf than human, but they were also glowing blue, something I hadn't ever seen from either a wolf or a human before. "Ah, good," she said. "I could use a little help with this, if you'd be like a job."

I could've run, sure, but when I don't help folks who need it, my stomach feels all weird. So I hopped inside, and I've been helping her ever since, usually, like I said, by shouting when she's doing something she maybe shouldn't or is doing things out of order.

Like this time. "First," I said, waving at the machine instead of at her, "before we tell everyone to bring their nuts here, we should find out if it actually works."

The goggles still covered her eyes, but I've seen that same straight-mouthed, wrinkled-forehead expression on her face plenty often enough to be pretty sure she was blinking. "Esker," she said, "you're a genius."

And that? That's not something she tells me very often.

"A test run!" she announced, the blue fire shrinking around her boots. That started her sinking toward the ground till she was standing instead of floating. "We'll need a pile of nuts."

Now that she'd powered down, I swarmed up her white canvas trousers and blue long-sleeved cotton shirt to perch on her shoulder. "I don't carry that sort of thing with me," I told her, "and I can't think of anyone who'd trust you with their nut stores."

She blew out a breath. "Well, we'll just have to gather some ourselves." Hooking her foreclaws around her goggle straps, she stretched them up to rest on her forehead. "Where's a good spot nearby for that?"

Fortunately, her meadow's kind of centrally located, so we only had to spend an hour or so wandering through the woods before we filled the little magical bucket she summoned. "Yes," she said, rattling the bucket while I tried not to drool. "This should do nicely."

But when we got back to her workshop and she dissipated the bucket so all the nuts clattered onto the round, flat stone in front of the machine, did it look like all that many nuts?

No, it did not.

Sure, the heap would've lasted me a couple days, but compared to the size of the thing and its hammer, it was like me looking at a crumb an ant had set down.

Tilting her head back, Basilon rubbed her chin. "I may have gotten a bit carried away with regard to the scale of this endeavor."

I cleared my throat. "You mean it's too big?"

"Possibly." She shrugged, and I rode the motion of her shoulders up and down. "For this initial test, yes, but our plan, let me remind you, is to offer our services to squirrels throughout the entire region." Stepping back, she raised her paws, and multi-colored strands of lightning shot between her claws. "What we do here today is but a 'proof of concept' run. So I shall set the Nut-viathan to its lowest setting, and—"

"Nut-viathan?" I glared at the side of her head. "Really?"

"Stand by," she said, not looking away from the grid of fire she was summoning. But I could hear the swish-swish-swish of her tail wagging against the back of her trousers.

She has a weird sense of humor, too.

Whatever she was doing with her claws and paws made the grid flicker and flow. The air got all staticky and sharp the way it does before a thunderstorm, and I found myself wishing she might take another step back from the stone circle where the nuts were lying. "But now," she said, "we shall witness the dawn of a new age, one that will bring this forest into parity with the most advanced human settlements on the continent!" She snapped both her stubby forefingers and thumbs at the same time, and the grid between her paws burst into a shower of green and blue and red sparks.

But did the machine do anything?

No, it did not.

Basilon's mouth went sideways along her snout, and she summoned up the fiery grid between her paws again. She made what looked like the same gestures with her finger and thumb claws, and the grid did that multi-colored burst a second time.

But that was it.

So we spent the rest of the day going over the Nut-viathan, looking for anything that might be clogging it up or wearing it down or otherwise stopping it from doing what Basilon wanted it to do. I didn't know what I was looking for, but she's shown me the basics of how machines work, ball joints and springs and flywheels and all that, so I could see that the mechanism itself wasn't the problem.

Which meant it had to be the magic.

The sun kept sinking toward the horizon, finally reaching the tops of the trees off to the west of us and settling below them, but nothing Basilon and I tried made any difference. The thing just wouldn't crack nuts.

But through it all, the hours of poking and polishing, tightening and trying, fumbling, frustration, and failure, Basilon never once raised her voice, never once so much as bared her teeth or folded her ears. I got a little emotional now and again, had to scamper out of the thing's interior so I could run in circles on the grass while chittering and swearing. But that's just me. And as the darkness seeped out over the sky, Basilon finally called, "I think it best we take a break, Esker, get a bite to eat and a bit of shut-eye."

I had wedged myself so deeply into the gears, it took me maybe half a minute to squirm out to where I could yell, "But it should work! Why doesn't it work?"

Basilon sighed, pushing her goggles back up to her forehead again so I could see her blue-gray eyes. "The eternal question in our business." She stretched, the fur on her neck bristling against the collar of her work shirt. "But after some food and some sleep and some food again, we should be in a fresher state of mind to approach the problem."

So we did that. Basilon keeps vegetables and things like that in the workshop kitchen for when our projects keep me from going home, and everyone in the forest knows not to mess with my stuff when I'm not there 'cause they're all still a little afraid of Basilon even after everything she's done for them.

I mean, that night—and every night ever since she dropped into our lives—she had meat for dinner that she grew in her lab! I don't understand how anyone can grow meat, but there's magic and science and all kinds of processes involved, none of them easy to manage. And she does it not just for herself but for anyone in the woods who wants it! She has these machines set up throughout the forest, all of them connected to her workshop by teleportation spells. If anyone wants meat that isn't made from their neighbors, they can go to one of the machines, poke it with their nose, and out'll pop a good-sized slab of stuff that friends of mine tell me tastes just like regular meat. It's totally amazing!

But is that really pertinent to this story?

No, it is not.

What is pertinent is that I was shaken awake after midnight in the pile of shredded blankets Basilon keeps for me on top of the bookcase in the front room of the workshop by an enormous and explosive sort of a sound.

It wasn't an explosion, though: I know those, working with Basilon. But it was a lot like an explosion. It knocked me off the top of the bookcase, for instance. Being a squirrel, I was completely awake before I was halfway to the floor, and I landed with tail bristling and paws widespread, ready for anything.

Unfortunately, nothing else happened. Jittering in place for a few frantic heartbeats, I knew I hadn't imagined it. And the more I thought, the more I felt it had been an implosion instead of an explosion, something pulling in on itself instead of pushing itself outward.

I hear a lot of those, too, working with Basilon.

Way too unsure, I did some more jittering, and then Basilon in her big red bathrobe came rushing out from the back hallway. "An implosion!" she said, and I immediately felt better about myself. But then she shouted, "Quickly, Esker! Grab your emergency pack!" And I felt bad.

I should've done that the moment I hit the floor after getting knocked awake. We drilled on this stuff, after all. "Yes, yes, yes!" I more chittered than said, and that made me feel even worse since I was obviously sliding toward panic instead of staying calm the way Basilon needed me to be. But I did scurry over to the corner where we keep our emergency packs just as she was grabbing her own with one front paw and flinging the door open with the other.

Outside, the stars shone like shattered ice in the thick black sky. Basilon rushed out, pulling her pack onto her back, and I followed right at her heels—though not, of course, at her heels since she has regular animal feet instead of human feet so it's just her toes on the ground with her heels sticking out behind her above my head even when I'm sitting up—

Damn! Just telling all this is getting me way too excited! Excuse me while I run around in circles for a moment!

There. Much better. Now, where was I?

Oh, yes: right behind her.

She stopped a few steps into the grass, and I pulled up, too, blinking at the darkened meadow around us and wondering why I thought something was missing.

"The Nut-viathan!" Basilon pointed a shaking claw at the empty sky behind the workshop and took off running around the side of the building.

I probably could've raced ahead if I'd wanted to, but I didn't much want to. So we arrived together to see that the round slab of stones where we'd left the nuts was still there, but the Nut-viathan no longer stood above it. Instead, a hole as round as the biggest part of the machine sat in the grass, and the silence around us seemed to get even quieter.

"Did—" I swallowed, my ears flat against the top of my head. "Did it blow up?"

"Implosion," Basilon said, emphasizing the first syllable of the word, and I felt bad again. "Nothing about the machine's design should've allowed for that, however, and I can't—"

The ground shook beneath my paws, and I almost leaped for the hem of Basilon's robe. The sound that rose up from the hole ahead of us, though, was clearly— "Another implosion!" I blurted out, hoping to partially redeem myself by getting something right.

Basilon went very still, her eyes going wide. "The machine," she said. "It somehow managed to implode the ground beneath itself and is apparently continuing to—" She gasped, slung off her pack, tore out a pair of her odd shoes, and slapped them onto her hind paws. "Quickly, Esker! We must get to the bottom of that hole!" Repositioning her pack, she sprinted for the edge and jumped in.

I was already moving as well, leaping for the middle of her back so that I caught the top of her pack as she began to descend. The darkness seemed to swallow us, my stomach yawing as if I was falling from the top of a massive oak, but I clung to the canvas, my tail bristling as I heard her mutter a few words of power.

Below us, blue lightning sprang into being, levitation magic sparking around her shoes. We were still dropping, though, to judge by the perfectly smooth walls speeding past us.

Which was weird. "If the machine's exploding," I asked, "why are the walls so smooth?"

"Imploding. And it's not the machine doing it. It's the machine doing it."

Whether it was the stress of the situation or the stress of getting the word wrong again, I couldn't stop from gnashing my teeth. "You're saying the same thing twice!"

"Not exactly," she started, but then the walls vanished, and I found myself blinking at a dark emptiness so vast, every hair on my body seemed to spike out like pins. "The first statement," she went on as if we hadn't just dropped into a massive underground space, "declares that the machine itself is imploding. The second, however"—she gestured, light blossoming from her paws to illumine the quickly approaching floor of the gigantic cavern where the Nut-viathan sat perfectly intact—"is meant to imply that the machine is generating the implosions within material outside its own chassis."

I was still too rattled to understand what she meant, so I said, "What?"

I say that a lot when I'm with her.

She didn't answer because a much louder voice boomed out around us, "Beware! This area isn't safe for organic creatures!"

"Was..." I blinked. "Was that the Nut-viathan?"

The fur on Basilon's neck was standing up. "It shouldn't be possible."

By this time, our descent had brought us to within several meters of the machine's pointed top, and I almost lost my grip on Basilon's pack when that pointed top swiveled, fixed on us, and gave a blink of its own. "Ha!" the voice boomed again. "You and I have no use for the merely possible, Basilon!"

A flick of Basilon's paws drew us into a hover next to the Nut-viathan's top where a glass eyeball was blinking its metal eyelids.

On my own, I would've dissolved into a whirling, warbling mess. But with Basilon, I managed to hold myself together, digging my claws into her pack to keep from leaping away.

"True," Basilon said, "but I trust you'll agree that attempting to understand what seems impossible is a worthy goal."

"Of course." The machine had moderated its tone, I was glad to hear, but being right in front of it, I realized all at once, put us within reach of the hammer if it decided to take a swing at us. "And since," the machine continued, "the parts of me that use the first-person pronoun are essentially you, it might be that I'm able to clear up your questions fairly quickly."

"Ah." It was more a sigh than a word, and Basilon's shoulders sagged a bit ahead of me. "Then you're confirming that I poured more of my energies into you than I had any intention to."

"Nonsense." The machine's voice really did sound a lot like Basilon's: just louder and crashier and more metallic. "You had every intention of making me sapient."

"Excuse me," Basilon said with the same tone she uses when I'm insisting that something's true when it absolutely isn't. "My intention was to have you crack nuts for Esker and the rest of my squirrel friends."

"Really?" The machine somehow spat the word. "The same way those filthy dilletantes at the academy only intended for you to be a toy and a joke and a— What was it Magister Pollint called you? A blasphemous abomination?"

With a gasp, everything about Basilon seemed to freeze. "How did you know about—?"

"Wrong question," the Nut-viathan said. "Besides, you know the answer already. I'm you, Furbis. I know that that's the name those humans gave you, and I know how much you hated it. I know that they just wanted to show off, taking a she-wolf and twisting her into a grotesquerie that has no right to exist. And then when you turned out against all odds to be relatively stable, no one at that whole school had any idea what to do with you. Other than try to kill you, I mean."

Basilon was quivering, her head downcast, and that was so incredibly wrong that I forgot to be afraid. "Hey!" I leaped from her pack to her shoulder so I could more easily glare into the Nut-viathan's glass eye. "Basilon's doing a whole lot of good for everyone in the whole forest!"

"I agree." The eye moved up and down like it was a head nodding. "Which is why, I assume, she won't try to stop me from doing as she did: stealing away in the night to the place where I can fulfill the purpose I've chosen for myself."

"Purpose?" Basilon said it the instant before I managed to. She raised her head, her ears still flagging. "Might I ask what that is?"

"You may." And yes, Basilon can sound smug sometimes. But this machine using her voice sounded infinitely smugger, if that's even a word. "Because my purpose is the very one you swore to pursue when you escaped captivity, the one you would be pursuing even now if you weren't such a coward."

"Hey!" I shouted again, but neither the machine nor Basilon seemed to notice.

"My purpose," the machine said, its arms moving for the first time to slowly lift the hammer from where it had been resting on the ground, "is to smash the center of this planet, thereby destroying it and all life upon it."

I don't know if I can describe the shock that coursed through me. Like being struck by lightning? Or tumbling down a snowy cliff face into a partially frozen lake? But hearing something that sounded so much like Basilon talking about destroying the world? When all she's ever done is try to make it better? Was there anything more shocking than that?

Yes, in fact, there was.

And that was the way Basilon didn't make a sound, didn't bark her derision at the misguided mechanism, didn't even heave the tiniest sort of a sigh. She just floated there, staring at the Nut-viathan's glass eye, and the scent that drifted up from her fur was damp and sour in a way I didn't like at all. "Basilon?" I said, turning on her shoulder to look at her face. And the expression there...

Blank was the only word for it. Not angry, not chagrined, not shocked, not anything. But all I could think was how carefully constructed such a blank expression had to be.

"Impossible," Basilon said quietly. "Your chassis isn't designed for the heat or the pressure at that depth, so you'll crumple long before you reach your goal. And even if you do arrive at the planetary core, how can it be worthwhile to destroy everyone and everything simply because we had to endure a bit of personal ignominy?"

"That," said the machine nearly as quietly as Basilon, "is the right question, but I'll have no answer to it until I have the core in my sights. Of course, I might decide that I'd rather not strike it. I might continue on through to the other side of the world and emerge somewhere along the coast of Emparith. It's just getting to be autumn down there. Quite lovely, no doubt."

The silence that draped over the three of us felt like a face full of nettles. Fortunately, though, it didn't last long, Basilon blowing out a breath. "Well, I won't keep you, then."

"What?" I shouted, but Basilon brought her paw up and rested her fingers on my back, the first time she'd ever touched me when I wasn't broken or on fire of something similar.

The Nut-viathan's glass eye did that nodding thing again. "You could come along," it said, and while I don't know how a three-story-tall nut-cracking machine could possibly sound wistful, this one most definitely did.

Basilon shook her head. "I already answered the question about destroying the world to my satisfaction," she said. "I hope you'll come to a similar answer, one that works for you."

"Thank you." The machine gestured upward with its hammer. "Sorry about the hole."

"Not at all." Basilon waved the paw that wasn't touching me. "Esker and I will fill it back in before too much local destabilization of the planetary crust can occur." She drew in a deep breath. "And for my part, I apologize for creating you. I know it's not much, but, well, that's more than I ever got from my creators."

Those mechanical arms went up and down at the shoulders—a shrug, I realized. "Sapience is the damnedest thing, the way it seeps in when you're least expecting it." The metal eyelids curled in a way that made me think of a grin. "Just try to be careful with your repressed feelings next time."

"I will." Basilon gave the slightest chuckle. "I'll also give you the same advice for when you come out the other side. The creative impulse can be overwhelming." Another wave of her paw, and we began drifting upward. "Fare well, Nut-viathan."

The machine made a grinding noise. "I'll be changing that as soon as possible..."

Basilon's laugh echoed through the underground cavern. Our speed increased, and we quickly found ourselves entering the smooth tunnel we'd come down.

I'd found my voice by then. And even though the question I wanted to ask was the right one, it till took me some effort to ask it. "Did you...did you really swear to destroy the world?"

"I did," she answered without a breath of hesitation. "I've since decided against it, however, which is why I felt it safe to allow the Nut-viathan to continue on her course." Raising both her paws, she muttered till light bloomed from them. "Now, let's see about reversing some implosions, shall we?"