Motif · Book 8, A Parade of Horribles

Crawler on crawler

What the eighth floor is designed to make happen: keys for one squad in four, doorways as hostages, Flee as theft, a floor 'to turn us against one another'. Ren denies them a fight; Imani will not take a key; Louis takes the skull so the others need not; and thirty-three thousand reach the ninth 'not scattered, not broken, and not afraid'.

Segment appearances

• Chapter 15 — The Lollipop: the crawlers' table
• Chapter 57 — The brawl; Sing for your supper
• Chapter 69 — The stables: who may leave; the Scavenger myth
• Chapter 78 — Damien's announcement; under a thousand
• Chapter 79 — 715 deals; Britney in Carl's mind; the Nothing in quotes
• Chapter 82 — Karl the dachshund; Team Sparkles ends

Progression

Prepotente's first message warns against killing other teams (ch. 3); Zhang's heat is refilled with crawlers, and Carl thinks 'And so it begins' (ch. 17); Elle's and Louis's heats are at risk (ch. 22); Zhang draws an all-crawler heat (ch. 33) and Team Flamengo lands in Carl's (ch. 40). Li Na's dread makes a heat kill itself (ch. 51); Carl asks the bar to protect every team (ch. 57); Mordecai's math wants fifteen hundred more deals, and 715 go (ch. 69, ch. 79); the final heat puts friends against friends and NPC-only heats beside them (ch. 80). 'We were crawlers, and they were not' (ch. 82).