Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs.

Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand.

Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time.

From startups to scaleups, online, in person, and on the go.

Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you.

Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup.

Lark opens fire.

A blue-white laser beams from Larks gone like a lightning strike in the dark. A blinding freeze frame, a hairline razor of deadly light.

The air immolates from it, a 20-foot wall of just neon blue fire, gouting instantly up along the beam

of the laser as the fold ignites, billowing into the foggy darkness.

Impossibly, supernaturally direct hit. The starboard engine of the Fold Merciful explodes.

Red flames erupt, black smoke billows. The huge vessel dips violently in the air and plows

into the edge of the desert promontory, crashing into the warrant of spiking thorns and wild plants surrounding lark's house its nose hooking hanging on the cliff's edge oh did we forget to mention guns are laser guns in midst they were the whole time we just haven't seen anybody shoot them until now. That's just the way guns are here.

This is a science fantasy space western after all. You can't tell us what to do. We're not predictable.

We're mad with power. And the fold is mad with hunger. A laser is the most concentrated form of light, and the fold has this thing about light.

To the fold, a laser is an incredibly high octane, insanely potent source of irresistible energy.

We're talking moth to a flame levels of attraction, but with lasers instead of flames,

and zillions of spooky microscopic entropy

generators instead of moths.

The fold dives on the laser.

It devours it, instantaneously morphing into a stream of concentrated terrors.

There's something like a sonic boom by a thunderclap of Ford slamming into the space occupied by the light and consuming it with the ravening desperation of a swarm of piranhas.

...