Id, Singer, and friends pursue Reg through the various possible worlds along the ritual trail known as a hej machet.

Two men, a woman, and another being, more difficult to classify, trudge through the stone forest in which they have been moving for the past week.
Id walks at the head of the column. His face is schooled to near perfect blankness, though sometimes a flash of bitterness, nausea, or resignation, impossible to control, passes across it. His brain is stuffed with the murders of his companions, fantasies that culminate in the moment when he jams the gun’s barrel against the roof of his own mouth. He hopes to pull the trigger more than once, damaging his head beyond the possibility of the Company reviving him once again. A quick look back at Singer enforces the necessity of destroying his brain. Perhaps a grenade.
Since being summoned back to life his memories have largely returned, intruding like thick spikes into a reality that he has trouble differentiating from the bubbling mess in his head. The hej machet is a constant, tangible presence in his mind, a collection of strange impulses that itch at him, demanding total concentration before they will resolve into useful information about the route they are to take.
Behind Id walks Quinine Tinsel, their very own pivot-capable executive. As far as Id can determine the tiny, shaven-headed woman must defer to him on matters relating to their route, and to Singer on any other matter, unless Singer’s precarious mental state seems to be responsible for any incomprehensible order, in which case she is to use her own judgement, or possibly defer to Id’s. So far she has simply followed their lead through various worlds, usually spotting the fulcrum before Id. At first she offered conversation that had fallen like a stone into the party’s cold silence. Now she keeps silent, her thoughts her own.
Torch Singer walks next in line, a slight shamble to his step. His face is unlined and smooth, only weeks out of the vat in which the Company has regrown him. The expression on this fresh visage is somewhat slack, as if the muscles are still unsure. Id keeps expecting to see a line of saliva run from one corner of his mouth. The metal filled scar that once bit into his jaw has never marked this facsimile, and the absence is merely flesh.
Id almost feels sorry for him. The sharp intensity that once characterised the man has been smoothed away. The soft ‘ahs’ that punctuated his speech are still there, but bracketed now by longer silences as the remnants of the mind behind them struggles for the correct word. The thoughts themselves are still hard and cold, but their motive force has shifted into a lower gear. He seems confused and frustrated with his new existence, perhaps angry to discover that his plan to trap Reg at the Fibonacci Transit has failed, leaving him nothing more than a poor replacement of his former self. Id often wonders if Singer still has the will to feel any hatred towards him, and it pleases him to imagine that this is indeed the case.
The being bringing up the rear is by far the strangest member of their party. It is what the Company calls a misanthropic entity, but as far as Id can determine it is a monster that has been somehow genetically linked to Registered.
He cannot remember whether misanthropic entities were covered in his training. He suspects not - certainly Quin knows nothing about them, and she seems as disquieted by the thing as Id.
He had eventually persuaded Singer to tell him about the thing, learning that the process for creating such beings was discovered far back in the Company’s history, and involves growing a clone of the entity’s eventual target - in this case Registered - and subjecting it to a number of specific mutations, all of which somehow allowed an actual ‘misanthropic entity’ to invade the clone. Singer had explained how the Company had once taught one to speak, a painstaking process that revealed little more than how vastly removed the thing’s thought processes were to their own.
“It told us there were only 4 such ah ... creatures like it,” Singer had said. “It was correct too, if we tried to make more than 4 at any one time the process would fail. It explained they were from a place - if that is the right word, the translation was ah ... awkward - that it was from a place it referred to as the ah ... ‘Feed-Kill-Chain.’ The one we taught to speak called itself ‘Knocker.’ The others, if I remember correctly, were known as ‘Sticker,’ ‘Shackler’ and ‘Splitter,’ quite the ah ... boys about town I imagine,” he had said, deadpan, with a quick twist of the lips.
“In making them it seemed we were extracting them from the Feed-Kill-Chain and ah ... tying them into our reality, bonded to the individual whose DNA had been used to make them. They seem to hate it here, but they cannot return until they have killed the person whose DNA they have been cloned from. In that respect they are tenacious, a very vicious ah ... hunting dog if you will.” Physically the misanthropic entity resembles a pale, bald, and slightly deformed version of Reg - though heavily muscled, and possessing ferocious claws and teeth. The Arrant have complex DNA that makes them difficult to clone and, having none of the highly developed mental skills possessed by Reg, the creature is unable to control its appearance as he can.