The Nine

by Molles, DJ

Teran’s face seemed to tremble. Rage and fear mixing beneath a barely-maintained façade of calm. “So, once again, my people are caught in the middle. Caught between the Guardians and the gods. No allies.”

  Perry looked at Mala. “Anyone who wants to live will have to become allies.”

  “The sons of Primus will never ally themselves with the humans,” Mala asserted. “They will fight back against the coming destruction, but they will not help the humans. And there will be many paladins who side with them.”

  Perry searched Mala’s face, and then Lux’s. “And will there be any paladins who side with the humans?”

  ***

  They found the core processor, still attached to a chunk of metal that had once been the Guardian’s hull. It no longer looked like copper. A crust of char darkened the surface of it.

  Perry straddled a large block of concrete and negotiated himself around a few twisted pieces of steel that looked ready to disembowel anyone that came too close. He rubbed a finger against the blackened shell. The soot wiped away, revealing the copper underneath.

  The core processor was dark. A large-caliber bullet hole shown in the side of it, blasted through a section of Sagum’s field-expedient wiring.

  “Sagum,” Perry called over his shoulder. “Help me. Watch out for that steel.”

  Perry gripped the core processor and pulled, but it didn’t budge from where it was attached. Sagum worked his way to Perry’s side. “I’ll have to de-magnetize it. Hold on.”

  Perry let Sagum slip his hands in. His long fingers pressed into the section that had been blasted by the bullet hole, questing about. His eyes shot up to Perry’s, a brief look of concern in them.

  “Do you think he’s still alive in there?” Perry asked, surprised that his voice sounded so tense.

  He shouldn’t have been surprised. Whimsby had been more than just a mechanical man. He’d been…a man. Perry didn’t know how these things worked, and what firing of special synapses made something conscious, and what delineated that from a machine. But Whimsby had had something no other machine had. He’d had a soul.

  And he’d had friends. Perry was one of them.

  Sagum shrugged. “I don’t know, Perry.”

  His fingers found whatever it was that he sought in those innards, and the core processor released its grip on the hull with a faint thunk. Perry bent down and hefted the contraption, looking at the damage, looking at how that bright diamond in the center was so dark now.

  Like the light gone out of a dead man’s eyes.

  Something Perry had seen so many times.

  Be at peace, and go to The After.

  “Is that the one?” a voice called out from behind Perry.

  He twisted, balancing carefully on the tumble of wreckage where he was perched.

  On the street below that pile of rubble, a praetor stood, his helmet under his arm, rifle slung. The praetor watched Perry, and once again, he felt that strange sensation of meeting the gaze of someone who would have killed him in any other time, but for now, that was pushed aside. Not forgotten, but ignored. The circumstances demanded it.

  “Is that the one that fought against the others?” the praetor asked.

  Perry clutched the core processor to his chest. Protectively. “Yes. This was the one.”

  The praetor tilted his head, curious. “Who had control of the Guardian? What was his name?”

  “A man named Whimsby,” Perry answered.

  The praetor nodded once, seeming reflective. Then he bowed his head. “I don’t know what happened to him, but he fought like no one I’d ever seen before. Not sure how he controlled the Guardian, but he saved my ass, and every one of my men. He has my thanks.”

  Perry’s fingers touched the bullet hole in the core processor. “I’ll let him know.”

  The praetor turned and marched away, towards the ranks of his brethren boarding the line of skiffs. Perry looked across their capes turned tan with dust. Mala stood at the fore of the lead skiff, longstaff held at her side. Lux stood near her, but his shoulders were slumped, his body facing east.

  Where would they go? What would they do?

  Perry swallowed down the thoughts of what if and what’s next because there was no way to know. Whatever happened in the near future, they wouldn’t know what they were up against until they faced it, head on.

  He and Sagum picked their way off the pile of rubble as another skiff hummed up to them, casting a cloud of dust over their faces and forcing them to shield their eyes as they ran up and climbed aboard.

  Stuber stood at the controls. Teran knelt over Whimsby’s body.

  “We found him,” Teran said, but when she looked at the damaged core processor, she grimaced. “Can Sagum fix him?”

  Sagum knelt on the other side of Whimsby’s body and held his hand out for the core processor. Perry relinquished it after a moment of hesitation. “I’ll try.”

  Perry nodded, grasped Sagum’s shoulder. “That’s all you can do.”

  Perry looked at Teran then. He opened his mouth to speak, but found a dozen things to say, none of which were right, none of which really articulated what he thought, and what he felt.

  She watched him struggle for a moment that seemed to stretch.

  Perry closed his mouth, feeling his face flush.

  The shadow of something meaningful passed through Teran’s eyes. Perhaps disappointment. Perhaps words of her own that she didn’t dare speak, or couldn’t quite conjure. In the end, she gave him a small smile, and a nod. Then she looked to the aft. “Stuber’s waiting for you.”

  “Right,” Perry murmured. He strode to the aft, feeling some tether between him and Teran, pulling him back, compelling him to turn around and speak his mind. But he didn’t. He stopped where Stuber stood over the controls.

  Perry gestured towards the praetors and demigods. “Did they make a decision?”

  Stuber cast a beleaguered glance over his shoulder. “Bah. We don’t need them.”

  “So, they sided with The Nine?”

  “Fuck if I know. They were still bickering about it when I scooped this skiff up. I don’t even think they noticed.” Stuber sighed. “Either way, they won’t miss it. Not with three squads dead down there. I say we just fly out of here, and if they follow, they follow.”

  “I’ll give them a minute,” Perry replied.

  Stuber grunted, then glowered over his controls. “Buncha stuck up praetors. I hope they don’t come.”

  “We’re gonna need all the help we can get.”

  Stuber made an ornery noise, like an old dog being forced to do something he didn’t want to do. But he raised no more objections.

  Perry watched Mala and Lux as their skiff was boarded by a small team of praetors. One of the praetors—perhaps the newly-minted Centurion Pimms—took the controls, and Mala looked out, making eye-contact with Perry, and gesturing in his direction.

  The skiff tilted, thrummed to half-power, and sidled out of ranks with the others. It crossed the war-torn streets and then slowed, coming to a hover broadside to Perry’s skiff.

  Perry on one side. Mala on the other.

  Lux did not appear inclined to speak, or even look at them.

  Mala shifted her grip on her longstaff, then rubbed some of the crusted blood from the side of her face. Her black hair looked bleached with dust. “Where are you going?”

  Perry eyed her. “West. Back to the Wastelands. Back to humanity.”

  Mala took a big breath. Looked away from him. “Alright. We’ll follow. For the time being.” Her eyes jerked back to his. “That doesn’t mean we’re under your command.”

  Perry smirked. “I’d never dream of it.”

  “Only that we’re…allies. For now.”

  Perry watched her carefully, trying to divine from her eyes what lay deep inside of her, but her eyes gave nothing away. So he tilted his head. Not quite a bow. Just an acknowledgement.

  “For now, then.”

  Stuber did not seem to have anything to
add to the conversation, and the moment that it seemed to be concluded, he took the yoke, giving Mala only the barest of nods before he pulled their skiff into the air, pointed it west, and hit the thrusters.

  Perry looked behind them, for a moment wondering if Mala’s skiff would actually follow them. But then it did. And behind hers, one by one, the skiffs full of praetors rose, and trailed after.

  Perry turned and faced into the wind. He glanced sideways at Stuber and saw the set of his jaws, the keen squint of his eyes, peering through the wind, and through the hundreds of miles between him and the destination for which he was bound.

  “Oksidado?” Perry asked, though he already knew the answer.

  Stuber nodded. “Oksidado. I’d hoped to return to Petra with better news than this. But I realized something, right about the time I was telling you to pull your head out of your ass: You can’t protect us from everything; and neither can I protect Petra from the inherent dangers of being my husband. This isn’t exactly the chance for a better life that I’d hoped to give her. But it is a life. For now.”

  “I don’t think any of this turned out the way that we hoped for.”

  Stuber eyed him. “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far. You succeeded in what you set out to do.”

  Perry stared, flummoxed. “Stuber, I completely failed. There was no ‘Source.’ There was nothing here that could help humanity. We’ve done nothing more than doom them to another war—one that they have almost no chance of winning.”

  “Don’t count them out just yet. And don’t count yourself out. You didn’t fail. Your father told you to uncover the truth, and to change the tides of history. The truth has been uncovered. And now, the nine sons of Primus have been released, the power structure of the demigods has been completely destroyed, and we’re moving headlong into the apocalypse. Paladins and praetors and peons, all working together to try to save their skins.” Stuber flashed a grin. “I’d say the tides of history have been changed.”

  Perry gave a rueful laugh. “I don’t think this is exactly the change he had in mind.”

  Stuber shrugged. “Your father did the best he could with what he had, but he didn’t have all the pieces. You do. And it’s time for you to see how far you can take it.” Stuber kept one hand on the yoke of the craft and with the other, clapped Perry on the shoulder. He shook him, in the way that he always did—like a favored dog. But Perry didn’t mind. “You did more than deserve his faith, Perry. You earned it. You earned all of our faith.”

  Perry looked into the distance as they broke free of the mists that clung to the East Ruins. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”

  “Well, naturally.”

  Flying out over the wild lands between the East Ruins and the Glass Flats, towards the remains of humanity that lay beyond, Stuber picked up the pace.

  ***

  Far above The Clouds, and above the sky, where the blue glow of the planet below became the blackness of space, a large object sat in orbit. It had been in this orbit for five hundred years. It had been placed there by the All-Kind, after the destruction of the earth, and after those responsible had been imprisoned. It had only one task.

  The Directive.

  I WATCH.

  I ENSURE THE COMMANDMENTS OF THE MASTERS ARE OBEYED.

  IF ANY BEING BREAKS THE COMMANDMENTS OF THE MASTERS, THEN I WILL DESTROY.

  In the center of that large object, a single, red orb glowed. An eye. Never blinking. Never looking away. Always fixed upon its objective.

  Like a dragon that always slept with one eye open, it had been sleeping for five hundred years.

  But now, The Watcher awoke.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  D.J. Molles is the New York Times bestselling author of The Remaining series, which was originally self-published in 2012 and quickly became an internet bestseller, and is the basis for his hit Lee Harden series, which will release its third title in late 2019. He is also the author of Wolves, a 2016 winner in the Horror category for the Foreword INDIES Book Awards. His other works include the Grower's War series, and the Audible original, Johnny. When he's not writing, he's taking care of his property in North Carolina, and training to be at least half as hard to kill as Lee Harden. He also enjoys playing his guitar and drums, drawing, painting, and lots of other artsy fartsy stuff

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