by Ryan Tang
"Kill her!"
"Burn her book!"
"Give me her body!"
The not-Bret-thing charged toward her.
The boy began to shout.
"No! Not now! You can't win now! The Eternium! Use the Eternium! Forge a Paragon!"
She'd cut his head off, but then he came back to slam her onto the floor.
He was just a boy.
He could have killed her but didn't.
She stared at Stock and the man and woman in white Southern Robotics uniforms.
The boy had been taken in by Southern Robotics, just like the rest of the colony.
Stock screeched.
"Shut up! Shut up!"
He roared at Alex, hate etched on his face and burning from his eyes.
"Kill her! Kill her! Someone kill her! This is my rematch! Someone get her! I'm killing the brat now!"
He had a tablet of his own, and he was shining it right on the boy.
The golden Noble's voice was swollen with pain, but he didn't stop shouting.
"Save them! The Spire will stand by your side! You are its Guardian! Save Jon! Save Elaine! Save them all! Please –"
The light grew brighter and brighter.
His last noise was a whimper.
A moment later, the boy was just a puddle on the floor. Molten flesh sizzled alongside boiling blood.
Alex continued shining her light, but the monster ducked back into cover, hiding behind Stock.
Stock and the not-Bret-monster continued screaming for someone to kill her.
Their two voices blended seamlessly together.
The big man shook his head.
"No. Not yet. It's too much of a risk. We'll deal with her after you've ascended."
Alex stared.
His right hand looked like cooked meat. His stiff palm looked like a giant steak. His fingers were roasted sausages.
He slammed his living hand against the wall and shouted.
"My child will be born on Earth!"
The wall flashed bright orange and swooped upward, enveloping everything but Alex herself. The monster, Stock, the big man and his partner, the oozing puddle of meat on the floor. All of it was enveloped by the orange Eternium, which then soared into the air like a rocket.
Alex sprinted to the wall.
The Guardian of the Spire put both hands on the cool metal and thought of peace and freedom for her friends, freedom from the monster who thought he was a god.
Blue flashed across black, the pale blue of a lake in winter. The metal surrounded her as she soared not into the air, but back into the book-corridors. She streaked like a missile to where her friends were waiting.
She had to warn them.
"Alex!"
"Ms. Alex! What was that?"
"Did you see that orange light?"
"Look outside! It's raining! It's raining!"
Rain pouring down from the false sky, sheets and sheets of rain, fast as a torrent.
The rain was pitch black.
The Council of Scholars droned down.
"Welcome to the first annual Southern Robotics simulator tournament!"
Alex turned back to her co-workers. The freed workers gathered around them.
"What's happening?"
"We saved as many people as we could, but then they all started stampeding outside!"
"We almost got run over!"
"Alex! Stock was mining the Eternium! He dug a big chunk from the colony! He made these people refine it with their hands! It was just like what happened to Nico!"
She had no time to talk.
"Don't go outside. Hide here. Take cover in the Spire. It's the safest place you can be right now."
The boy's last words echoed in her ears.
"Save them!"
"Forge a Paragon!"
"The Spire will stand by your side!"
Alex sprinted for her office, stretching both hands far behind her. Her fingers dug into the black Eternium walls, which burned hotter than any fire. The metal shifted and turned. Blue of every shade danced at her fingertips. More and more Eternium gathered until an immense wave was following her.
Stock.
The monster.
She'd beaten them before, and she'd beat them again.
She threw open the door of her office.
The metal streaked ahead, twisting and turning in front of her.
Her office shifted as the strands danced across the walls.
Her model Paragons were whisked through the air and then lined up against the windows, glowing in their usual blue hues, proudly displaying the colors she'd flown since she was a little girl. The plastic was now infused with shimmering Eternium.
The window transformed into the familiar panoramic screen from the simulator.
It was not a process of conscious forging.
She didn't tell the Eternium where everything should go.
Instead, the metal read her soul to create a machine that was unmistakably hers.
Everything, from the blue color to the weapons to the fact that it'd been forged from the Spire, screamed that it'd been made for her.
The specs winked onto her screen, showing her what the machine looked like from the outside.
A single finger pointed high into the sky, pointing in the victory pose that had graced her screen time and time again.
The other hand wielded a sword with an elaborate handguard and a wickedly curved blade. A pirate's cutlass, just like the one she used in the simulator. But the ornate design had beauty and detail the simulator could never match.
The handle of the blade was a carved shellfish. Its spiraling shell was the pommel. Its flesh was sky-blue. Its flinty eyes the color of the ocean's depths. The tentacles were both handguards and handle, twisting into the blade before fading beneath the ocean-like edge. The sword rippled like the ocean – deepest blue on jarring white, the two colors battling endlessly against each other on the Eternium canvas.
Inside the noble blade was row after row of the Spire's books. Black ink dripped from the tip like blood as the Eternium of the sword filtered away the countless years of sabotage. It was a weapon forged to slay Ignorant gods. Tendrils of Eternium opened her backpack and pulled out A Recent History of Plenty. The red and gold cover whirled through the air before being placed at its rightful spot at the very tip of the sword.
Her tablet was yanked out of her pack. The screen shifted, and her parent's hand-drawn story shone proudly from the screen.
Blue tendrils spun around it, turning over and over as a barrel was slowly forged. Soon her rifle emerged, just as menacingly beautiful as her sword. The great gun was a grim blue, the blue of an unforgiving sea.
Creatures from Old Earth's sea swam along the side of the rifle. If she pulled her sketchbook out of her bag, she could have matched the pictures directly. She saw sharks ranging from great whites to whales. There were small sharks too. Pups and leopard sharks and countless others. Most common of all were the hammerheads, the strange ones she loved the most. There were other animals of every type, more than she could count – octopi and eels, clownfish and dolphins, narwhals, and crabs. The gun's sight was a single haunting fin that surfaced out the barrel.
The rest of her Paragon continued emerging, slowly surfacing from the metal of the Spire.
Just like in the simulator, her model had no legs.
Instead, the torso was comfortably nested inside of an arced shell shaped like a crescent moon and covered with elegant thrusters and small lined missile ports.
The head stared back at her from her screen, identical to the one from the simulator. She smiled at the familiar flanged crest, prominent sensor, and the strange toothy smile she'd modeled after a shark's wicked smirk. One of the eyes was bright as the sky, and the other gleamed a blue so dark it was almost black.
The coat of paint was better than she ever imagined. The Eternium shifted endlessly before her eyes, changing not only between different shades of blue but also dancing between formati
ons. Stars became violent waves that became ripples that transformed into clouds. Only the eyes and the weapons had a stationary color.
Her soul thrummed.
She heard what the machine was saying.
"It means the Spire loves you."
The controls emerged behind her old desk, the one she'd spent so much time in.
Sometimes, she'd sat there and dreamed about piloting Paragons.
Her familiar computer sat at the side, gently shifted to accommodate the new dashboard and controls. Her chair was there too, the big comfy one that she'd inherited from Mrs. T two years ago.
Her hands reached out and gripped the worn-out controls. The controls were made of Eternium but looked, felt, and acted like cheap plastic.
Her cloak shifted and became a pilot's suit.
A surge of joy swept through her.
Alex spoke the words and they reverberated against Eternium for the first time in over a hundred years.
"A woman pursues her greatest desire."
CHAPTER 30: THE PEACEFUL ENGINEER, PART 3
The people they'd met on their way to the Spire – the lost citizens of Block 12 – were white as wraiths and thinner than anyone Jared had ever seen in his life.
He shook his head as he stared at the children riding on his hand. He remembered telling Alex that Block 12 was nothing more than a conspiracy theory. If Jared didn't speak now, that was how what happened to his family would be remembered too.
"What the hell is happening?"
"Holy shit. What is wrong with them?"
The long line of Southern Robotics employees in their white uniforms stared back at them, as dead as they were in his dad's photographs. Southern Robotics had cleaned them up. Their faces were shaved. Their bodies were bathed. Their clothes had been repaired.
But anyone who looked closely could tell the truth.
Their eyes had no life, no life at all.
"Keep going! Keep going! We need to get to the Spire!"
"Yes! Yes! To the Spire!"
There were a loose handful of leaders, people who turned heads as soon as they spoke. A short girl with long and frizzly hair. The man with the broken nose. The people from Block 12 – which they called The Wastes – had a leader of their own, an older man who led the pack despite his frail figure.
They listened to Jared too, but that was only because of his Paragon.
He stared uneasily at the silent wall of workers surrounding the Spire courtyard. In their matching uniforms, they almost looked like soldiers. Would they charge at his group? Would they recognize his machine as they walked past? Would they respond to their chant?
How much of them was left inside?
As they drew closer, he searched their faces.
He knew some of them. Technicians, assembly-workers, even low-level engineers.
He thought of Duncan's silence and shuddered. If Duncan were still alive, he would have responded to Jared's messages.
Jared searched and searched, but he couldn't see his friend in the crowd.
He almost stopped his machine to get a closer look, but it wouldn't be any good even if Jared found him.
This was the only way to help him.
Jared's voice faltered, but then he raised it again.
It was too late to back down now.
The crowd continued chanting behind him. At first, they'd all talked individually about what the company had done. They'd listed out their demands.
"Fix our homes!"
"Open up The Wastes!"
"Look at the truth!"
"This is what trusting Southern Robotics gets you!"
Jared had liked the last one, but it rolled off the tongue very poorly.
But soon, the cries had all fused into a single angry chant, one that every single one of them could agree to, from the people locked away in a dark prison to the ones left sleeping on the streets.
"Fuck Stock!"
"Fuck Stock!"
"Fuck Stock!"
The harsh word felt strange rolling off his tongue, but Jared chanted with all the rest of them, the message blaring out from his Paragon's speakers.
Jared's parents had always taught him to stay polite and gentle with his language. It was another way of staying political, another way of seeming agreeable. But Stock had killed them both.
The marchers' cry was so loud it drowned out the sky.
The Scholars gesticulated wildly, but nobody could hear what they were saying. For a moment, Jared wondered if they were discussing him and his group, but then he remembered that they were only an image in the sky. The Scholars couldn't see him.
"Fuck Stock!"
"Fuck Stock!"
"Fuck Stock!"
The first of their group walked right by the workers, shouting as loud as they could. Some of their voices quavered a little. Jared could hear his voice wavering, too, so he stopped and took a deep breath.
It was a difficult thing chanting in public, especially when you had no idea how the people near you would react.
But they'd gathered so many people that the chant was just as loud without a Paragon.
The chant gave everyone courage. It stirred them all forward.
They continued unencumbered into the actual courtyard. The wall of workers didn't respond as they passed by them.
It was like they hadn't noticed his crowd at all.
"Welcome to the first annual Southern Robotics simulator tournament! Prepare for a humanity transforming event!"
They said the same two sentences over and over again, repeating them for every person who walked by.
Their voices were completely flat, a low and hollow drone that passed in and out of Jared's ears like a malevolent spirit.
"Hey!"
It was only when they entered that the shouts began.
The dead stayed outside, but the living sat around the Spire. Stock had erected a massive stadium-like structure around the library courtyard.
They shouted and pointed as they saw him.
"That's the Hands Paragon!"
He stared at the crowd.
He saw so many people he recognized – members of the Inner Circle, friends of his father's, even some young engineers he'd worked with.
Surely they didn't believe he was a traitor. Surely they would see what was happening, now that he was right in front of them.
"What are they saying? 'Fuck Stock?' Why are they saying that?"
"How vulgar!"
"It's just like the Scholars said! Look who he's brought! An army of losers!"
"They're here to divide us!"
One of the kids he was walking with shouted.
"Look at that! Look at that thing!"
In the very middle of the stage was a gleaming white Paragon built to look like an angel. The wings and glorious plumed helmet were built from mechanical feathers. Countless weapons hung from its arms, hips, and back. It was the most beautiful machine Jared had ever seen.
But most of the crowd beneath him cursed and jeered.
"Shit! It's another one!"
"Don't worry, Hands will kill it too!"
The crowd's retort was instant and furious.
"They hate it!"
"It's just like Bret said! They hate the Paragons!"
"What's that thing in his hands! Oh my god! He destroyed a Paragon! Look! He's carrying a destroyed Paragon!"
"We're all going to die!"
The Paragon shone far brighter than the Eternium-coated fraud Executioner Henry had flown against him.
Jared instinctively knew it was a real machine.
Stock had done as he'd promised. He'd created a Paragon. Jared didn't know if the audience would believe him, not after seeing a machine like that.
The beautiful Paragon was their hope.
It was a sign that they'd go home to Old Earth.
But he had to try to convince them otherwise.
Jared flicked a switch and a light shone from the wrist of his hand, projecting the images his pa
rents had died for.
He set the false Paragon on the ground where everyone could see it.
"Look! Look at what Southern Robotics has done! Look!"
The faces he displayed were dead, just like the people waiting outside. The tattered clothes and inhuman coordination in his father's film made it clear that something very wrong had happened.
There was an immediate outcry.
"Lies! Lies!"
"Bret warned us about this! He said he'd bring fake photos!"
"Shut up! Look at that machine! Look at yours! Just slink away!"
"Wait, no! Look at the pictures! We need to listen!"
"We need to tell Stock! We need to tell the Scholars!"
"I said that the people outside were creepy! Dad! I said so!"
The people beneath him continued shouting. Their chant was temporarily disorganized, but it soon reformed.
"Look at us! Look at us! Look at us!"
The escaped prisoners of Block 12 were pale as ghosts. Perhaps you could doctor a video, but you couldn't doctor a person.
All the crowd needed to do was look at them!
Jared shouted into his speaker, amplifying their message.
"Plenty! The lost citizens of Block 12 marched with us! Look at them! Trapped forever in the darkness. Starved out for years and years. I thought it was just a conspiracy theory too! But look at them!"
More and more people began telling their neighbors to listen.
Just as Jared suspected, some could not deny the truth before their eyes.
But they were still a distinct minority.
It seemed like for every person who said they should listen, there were three or four others who were panicking.
"Stop him! Stop him!"
"This is dangerous! We need Stock!"
"Tell Southern Robotics the Hands Paragon is here!"
"Call the Security Force! Where the hell are they!"
"What about the Hero Force! There should be a Hero Force now! Send in the Paragons!"
Most of them were furious that Jared was trying to divide the colony in their time of need. Jared knew that he and his father might have responded the same way, once upon a time, especially after seeing that beautiful Paragon.
Others were terrified. The sight of a rogue Paragon accompanied by a crowd of angry people, some of whom looked like ghosts, had blanked out any possibility of discussion from their minds.