by Molles, DJ
Whimsby shook his head. “I’m afraid not. All files on the East Ruins are sealed to the highest levels.”
“There’s a tower about a mile northwest of us,” Perry said. “If I can get you to the top of that thing, do you think you can get a general idea of what we’re looking at?”
Whimsby nodded. “An aerial view would be very helpful. I can conduct a scan and create a workable map from that.”
“Slow down a second, Shortstack.” Stuber leaned forward, wincing as he did. He skewered Perry with a look. “Surely, after all that’s happened, you’re not considering leaving us again and running off to do some hero shit? Surely not.”
Perry drummed his fingers on the side of his longstaff. “No. I’m just helping Whimsby get to a vantage point where he can scan the city and make a map for us.”
Stuber’s eyes narrowed. “You know, I’m beginning to think that you forget about all the other times that you’ve left us behind and something bad happens.”
Perry felt heat creeping up the back of his neck. A sure sign that Stuber was prodding something in him that he didn’t want prodded. “You’re all banged up. None of you are in the shape to go running around out there. You need rest.”
Stuber rose to his feet. He bared his teeth as he did it, and a vein popped out on his forehead, but he gave no other sign of pain. “Even at half strength, I’m—”
“Oh, can you spare me the bravado?” Perry cut him off. “I know that you can still fight. No one is challenging your ability to fight. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.”
“No.” Stuber pointed at him. “We’re talking about you running off alone again.”
“I won’t be alone. I’ll have Whimsby with me.”
“Whimsby is quite capable on his own. He doesn’t need you to accompany him, and in fact, there’s very little you can do for him, since putting your shield around him gives him seizures or some shit. So why exactly are you going?”
Whimsby politely ahemed. “Stuber is correct, Perry. Actually, I’ll be able to make it up the tower and back much faster if you’re not with me. And there’s not much you can do for me in a tactical scenario.”
Perry’s cheeks felt hot. An ugly form of the Calm came up to greet him, not calm at all, but angry. Buzzing.
They don’t think I’m capable.
But Perry had no logical reason to stand on. Whimsby was right. He didn’t need Perry, and, in fact, would be hampered by his presence. Which caused Perry all sorts of heaving emotions in his chest that didn’t make any sense to him in the moment. It just made him angry.
Ashamed.
Incapable.
Runt.
“Fine,” Perry grunted. “Whimsby, go to the tower. Alone.”
Whimsby stood there for a moment, his eyes glancing between Perry and Stuber, as though waiting to see if that was really it. But when no one said anything else, he straightened, clapped his hands together, and said, “Alright. Well. I’ll just be going then. I’ll be back shortly.”
And then he departed.
Perry found an unpopulated corner of their hideout to glare at, as though it had done something to wrong him. He could still feel Stuber’s eyes on him, which divided his attention from trying to parse through his thoughts and make sense of his own reactions.
After a moment, when Stuber seemed disinclined to remove his gaze, Perry could take it no longer. He whirled on the ex-legionnaire and thrust his arms out. “What?”
But it was Teran that answered him: “What’s your problem, Perry?”
He turned to her, his eyes wide, surprised. What was his problem?
Teran still sat on the ground, looking up at Perry with an expression on her face that made everything worse. It may have been a million different things, but Perry read it through the coloring of his own worldview, and recoiled from it, immediately going on the defensive.
“I don’t have a problem.” Perry swept a finger across his three companions. “You all have the fucking problem. I’m just trying to do what my father sent me to do. I’m just trying to get shit done, and you…you…”
“We what?” Teran bristled, surging up to her feet. Her leg wobbled under her weight, but she snatched out a hand and grabbed Stuber’s arm to steady herself. “We what? Go ahead and finish your sentence.”
Perry had wanted to say You keep holding me back! but knew he couldn’t say it. So he clamped down on the words with a savage grin and shook his head. “Forget it. It’s stupid. It doesn’t matter. You got what you wanted: I’m here; I didn’t go. That’s it. Nothing else to be said.”
“Oh, well thank the gods that you’re here,” Teran fumed. “I’m so fucking glad we got what we wanted.”
“What do you want me to say, Teran?”
“I want you to say why you think you have to run out there alone all the time!”
“Because I can’t live up to my father!” Perry suddenly shouted. And then, like an animal flushed out of hiding, he could do nothing now but attack. He took a single step towards them, feeling the heat exploding out of him now, burning his ears and his chest. “Because I was given this mission to complete and every time I try to do it there’s another reminder of why I’m not up to the task! Every time I think I’m getting closer, every time I think I’m going to prove it to myself that I can do what he sent me to do, I get pushed back, and pushed back, and pushed back! And if I can’t protect the people that are with me, if I can’t save you all from getting hurt any more than you already have, then how the hell am I going to do this? How the hell can I tell myself I’m capable when the people that are closest to me don’t even think I can do it?”
Teran pushed herself forward, as though she wanted to go nose-to-nose with Perry and shout it out, but Stuber put a hand on her chest, keeping her back. She shouted anyways. “We don’t need you to save us!”
“So I guess you could’ve gotten out of the House of Inquisitions all by yourself, still strapped to the fucking Surgeon?”
She jabbed her finger in the air at him. “We would’ve never even been in that situation if you hadn’t run off!” She kicked at the ground, sending a chunk of concrete skittering over his boot. “We’re not the problem here, Perry—it’s you!”
Stuber wrangled her backwards with a single hand. She batted at him, but he failed to react to it, and eventually she stilled. The sudden silence rushed in at them like displaced water after a meteor strike. It engulfed them and drowned them. It gave them no more breath to say anything further.
The truth is funny sometimes. They say it hurts. They say it sets you free. But that’s only if you can manage to accept it. Most of the time, we delude ourselves into believing that our lesser natures have a great, logical reason to them. Often, we need to be smacked in the face to wake us up from the thrall of our own rationalizations.
That’s when it hurts. But it still won’t set you free unless you let it.
Perry was no different. He was like every other man that’d ever been born on this rock, and when Teran’s words slapped him in the face, he drew back and erected defenses. His eyes shot to Stuber, and then to Sagum, hoping for one of them to chime in and tell him that it wasn’t true, that Teran was wrong, that they were all just tired and worn thin, and that things had been said that they didn’t mean.
No one said that. Their eyes held the truth that Teran had already spoken.
Surrounded by his own inner defenses, Perry peered out at them and saw himself under siege. And when you see it like that, it’s very difficult to let it get inside and liberate you. In order to do that, you’d have to open the gates, and they were closed for a good godsdamned reason.
Weren’t they?
“You guys think all of this is my fault?” Perry asked, when his breath returned to him.
Sagum, the only one still sitting, cracked his knuckles nervously. “Perry. We’re not saying you’re the only one to blame.”
Teran burst out again: “Oh, don’t give him an out, Sagum!”
/> Sagum snapped his head up to Teran. “Could you stop shouting at everyone, for Primus’s sake? How often do I get a word in? Can you just let me speak? For once?”
Teran’s jaw worked, but she held up a hand in surrender.
Sagum turned back to Perry. His face showed an odd set to it that Perry was wholly unfamiliar with. He spoke in a tone that only told the facts, and seemed confident that these facts were irrefutable. “We couldn’t have survived without you. You saved us on more than one occasion. You got us out of Praesidium. But…we wouldn’t have been captured if you hadn’t gotten taken by the Wasp-Men in the first place. And you got us out of the House of Inquisitions. We would have died there if you hadn’t come back for us. But we wouldn’t have been taken if you hadn’t run off into the woods to fight that paladin.”
Sagum weighed the affect of his words on Perry, and when he perceived that Perry was not going to interrupt him, he settled. “Now, I get that you think you’re incompetent. But that’s ridiculous. None of the facts support that conclusion. That’s something inside of you that you’re going to have to get a handle on, but none of us in this room have ever thought you were incompetent, and frankly, what you’ve been able to learn about the longstaff and the shield say that you’re quite capable. The issue at point here isn’t whether or not you’re capable, but why you don’t trust us.”
“Don’t trust you?” Perry balked, the shame turning ice cold inside of him. “Of course I trust you! I trust every one of you with my life!”
Sagum held up a hand, and Perry silenced himself, finding it odd that Sagum was suddenly commanding such deference. He gestured to each of them as he spoke. “You have one of the best soldiers you can find, an experienced thief, and a good-looking young man who’s a wizard with technology. But what’s the point of us even being here if you won’t let us help you? What’s the point of us being here if you still think you’re the only one that can accomplish the mission?”
Sagum interlocked his fingers, resting his arms on his knees. He raised his eyebrows. “If you think we’re dead weight, then say so, Perry. If you think you can do this all on your own, then leave us all here, and go and get it done. But I think you’re smart enough to realize that it doesn’t matter who you are—this isn’t a job for one person. The demigods themselves are terrified of this place. So it doesn’t matter how capable you are, Perry. You’re never going to be capable enough to do this alone. No one is. That’s why you have a team with you.”
Perry’s grip on his longstaff felt strange. Like he wanted to do something with his hands, but couldn’t figure out what. Like a spotlight had illuminated him, exposed him, and he itched to move, but every movement felt wrong. Every movement felt like idiocy.
The time under their stares stretched Perry’s ability to withstand discomfort. All the fire had gone out of him. All the heat had receded, leaving his toes and fingers feeling cold and clammy.
Gods, Perry swore at himself. You never learn, do you?
But he could learn. If there was one thing that he knew about himself now, it was that he could learn, but that learning wasn’t some massive flash of insight, though often that’s what it takes to shove you down the right path. Learning to overcome a lifetime of bad thinking didn’t happen in an instant. Old habits, old ways of seeing the world—and seeing yourself—died slow, agonizing deaths. It took time to pave a new path in your brain. But that’s what learning was.
Time and practice.
He had the sudden urge to drop the longstaff. It felt so conceited to stand there holding it. A whole tirade of voices clambered around in the back of his head, shaming him, telling him he was a fraud, he was a runt, he was a peon—
You’re no godbreaker.
Selos.
And Tiller. And his instructors from Hell’s Hollow. And all of his classmates.
He’d never be rid of them. But that didn’t mean he had to let them shape his actions.
He made his own decisions. He chose his own path.
Time and practice.
He held onto the longstaff. Not because he deserved it. But because it was his weapon, and it was useful. The same as his abilities. They didn’t pave the way for him, but they did give him an edge. Not enough to do it all on his own, but enough that, with the help of some others, he might have a chance.
Perry breathed in a deep, shuddering breath, and let it out in a whoosh. “First of all…” he looked at Teran and saw her tense, expecting a return to hostilities. He raised a hand to stay her. “I’m an idiot. I’ll admit that. But I’m working on it. I’m slightly less of an idiot now than I was a few weeks ago when all of this started. But I’m still prone to doing dumb shit. You’re all just going to have to be patient with me as I gradually unfuck myself.”
Stuber nodded sagely. “It’s a long process.”
“Sagum’s right,” Perry said, finding it easier to look at his boots now. “There’s no way I can do this on my own. Teran, you’re right. I got you all into this shit. And next time you see me trying to be a demigod, do us all a favor and remind me that I’m only half-god.”
“Well,” Sagum sniffed. “Half-demigod. Which is basically a quarter-god.”
“Even better,” Perry sighed. “Remind me that I’m only quarter-god.”
Stuber raised his hand. “I did tell you not to go out and fight the paladin. I just…wanted to make that clear. I tried to stop you.”
“Thank you, Stuber. I should have listened to you. But I wasn’t ready.”
“Are you ready to listen now?” Teran asked, though most of the anger had fled her as well. A small smirk captured the corner of her mouth, and seeing it made Perry feel enormously better. Relieved. Absolved.
“Yes,” Perry nodded. “I’m ready to listen.”
Stuber took a step forward, smiling as though they were long-lost friends seeing each other for the first time in a long while. He extended his arms and rested his heavy hands on Perry’s shoulders. “That’s good, Perry. Leadership isn’t being the best. It’s helping everyone around you be their best.”
Perry looked at the friends gathered around him. His team. “A soldier, a thief, a tinkerer, and a quarter-god runt. Yeah. We can do this.”
“And a mech,” came Whimsby’s voice from behind them.
Perry turned and found the mech stepping back into the hideout.
Whimsby smiled at them as he approached. “Don’t forget about me. I see we all seem to have buried the proverbial hatchet. That’s excellent. I, for one, feel very relieved.” He kept smiling, but his face grew more serious. “Because we have some serious problems to overcome.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
PATTERN RECOGNITION
Whimsby squatted down in the middle of the group, and the others gathered around.
“From the vantage point on top of the tower I was able to scan our environs.” He held out his hand, placing it low to the ground with his palm up. With his other hand, he removed a flap of flesh-like material from his palm that Perry had never noticed. Inside of it, a small blue orb glowed, and a projection jumped into the air, illuminating their faces in a cold light.
“This is the map I was able to make from that scan.” The image shifted around and he showed them where they were: a tiny red icon on the very edges of a massive urban sprawl. “Some of it I had to extrapolate from what I observed from that single vantage point. But I’d estimate it’s ninety-six-percent accurate.”
“Alright.” Perry’s eyes coursed over the three-dimensional map in front of him, like a model city in glowing miniature. “So do you have any idea where we should start looking for The Source?”
“Well, yes and no,” Whimsby replied. “I observed ten Guardians circulating the city. Based on their movement patterns, it is my opinion that these machines, be they controlled by something organic or an artificial intelligence system, are all individualized. I’m sure they’re able to communicate to each other, but their movements make it seem that they are separate entities.”<
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“I guess that’s a good thing?” Stuber offered.
Sagum nodded, then looked to Whimsby for confirmation. “It means that they aren’t part of a single ‘brain,’ so to speak. Which could be good for us, as we may be able to take them on individually.”
“Sagum is correct.” Whimsby grimaced. “But I don’t think we’ll want to take them on, individually or otherwise. Their weaponry and scanning equipment is far beyond anything I’m aware of, and likely extremely dangerous.”
Perry shifted on his knee. “Sorry. How does this factor in to where we should start searching?”
“Right,” Whimsby nodded, as though coming out of his own thoughts. “Well, again, that has to do with their movements. While they were very random, by averaging out where they chose to move, and triangulating based off of that, their central focus seems to be around this specific area here.”
A single building became highlighted in yellow. Deep in the center of the city.
Teran raised an eyebrow. “You were able to figure that out from their movements?”
“That. And the fact that this building also appears to be the center of the energy field emanating from this city.”
A spark of excitement took Perry, looking at that yellow-highlighted building. “Shit, Whimsby. You should’ve led with that.”
“I was getting there.”
Stuber reached out and touched the highlighted building. “So this is where we need to be. How do we get there, and what do we expect to find?”
Whimsby looked thoughtful. “I expect to find it underground. Calculating for the dispersion of the energy field radiating outwards from that location, its center point appears to be ten meters below the the surface. As to how to get there…well, that I’m not entirely sure of.”
“We’ll need to get past the machines,” Perry said, holding his chin in his hand. He wracked his brains for how exactly to do that, but then realized he wasn’t alone. He raised his eyes from the map to his team. “What do you guys think? Any ideas?”
“Sneaking past the guards,” Teran said. “How likely is that?”