by Taven Moore
“What is your command?” This, not from the shonfra, but from the deep voice in the shadows. Prime, who maintained his aura of mystery even now.
“What?” Daniel frowned. “I don’t—”
“Your command,” the voice repeated. “We cogsmith with purpose and intent, a dance where every step is expected, but the end result never fails to surprise. Commands are best when they are simple and easy to understand. This is your cogsmithing, Mr. McCoy, and you must hold fast the helm of its ship and steer it wherever you wish, for good or ill. Your command.”
Daniel frowned and looked down at Henry’s face. He didn’t want to command anything. He just wanted to hear his little boy laugh again, to see his face light up, to feel his little arms tighten around his father’s neck in a hug.
“I just want him to live,” Daniel said finally.
“Live. Live is good. That is a good command.” The shonfra scribbled something across the colorful pages of the children’s book, then ripped the whole thing to shreds, dropping them into the vial.
“One thing left. Just the one.”
The shonfra looked up at him, eyes wide. “Hold the bottle. Close your eyes. Hold the boy.”
Uncertain, Daniel did as he was bid, cradling Henry’s limp body against his chest and holding the bottle in one hand. The blue liquid had turned purple after the addition of the blood. Bits of ragged paper danced in the bottle’s heart.
He closed his eyes and heard the shonfra whisper. “This will hurt, more than a little, so they say. Eyes closed, don’t open, not for anything.”
Before he had time to worry, the pain hit.
It wasn’t pain, really. Not in the normal sense. It was like . . . it was like nothing he could describe. It was like beams of light crashing into his soul and shattering. It was like the sound of dripping water and the taste of blueberry pie and the smell of burning feathers and staring off into the stars until the worlds disappeared and the great nothingness of space pressed against the edges of his reality and twisted. He didn’t know how long his brain tried to translate all of the madness before it failed completely, and simply told him that he was in pain.
He wasn’t alone.
Inside his own skull, someone not himself stood. Daniel knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this person was the cause of his not-pain.
The person looked to his mind’s eye like a ball of white light, but he knew who it was.
“Prime,” he said, and the word spilled out from him, a flurry of colors and shapes and thoughts and emotion. The reverence of his days as a squire, the shame of his own betrayal of the order, the disappointment and shock of the Paladin’s rejection, the fear of the unknown voice in the darkness—all of these things wove together into a single name. As that name sped toward the ball of light, he realized that although he was right, although that was the mysterious Prime, in his head, it was not Prime’s true name.
“Henry,” said the ball of light, and a rush of emotions and feelings rushed at Daniel, pale and wan and weak. Pathetic. Miserable. A stick-figure of a name.
No, that wasn’t right. That wasn’t his son.
“Henry,” said Daniel, and the resulting upwelling washed across both himself and Prime, filling his mind with a rainbow of pride and happiness, and fear and worry, and the sound of crickets on a hot summer night and the feel of a lopsided card made with tiny, inexpert fingers. The smell of a baby’s head, the feel of a baby’s cheek, eyes so blue they put the sky to shame. Intelligence, so bright and eager to learn, leaps and bounds away from withered legs and weak arms. Henry was not his disease. He was so much more.
Love wrapped the other emotions and propelled the tangled mess of emotions and memories out, until it crashed into the side of his mind, encountered resistance, then blazed through.
As though summoned by his name, another figure appeared. The other figure was small and pale and had almost no light of its own. His son.
Henry.
Immediately, Daniel saw the problem. Henry couldn’t survive like that. He needed more. He needed life.
Daniel opened wide the arms of his mind and folded his son into them, willing his own life to spark something in his son.
“Henry,” he whispered, and the emotion filled every corner of himself.
Something in his head fragmented, like a crack in a mirror, and things . . . changed.
Prime was gone. The pale ball of his son’s being had, indeed, grown stronger, but Daniel’s own light seemed to fade.
Two figures joined him, standing on the edges of his consciousness, wrapped in shadows.
“Gerard,” Daniel said, recognizing one of them. Pride and strength and righteous fury. Honor and the feel of a hammer in his hands and the glory of protecting the innocent. Darkness and danger and a delight in bloodshed. These things sped from Daniel like bats to crash into the figure of Gerard.
The last figure, he did not recognize. It felt something like himself, and something like his son.
“Hank,” the final figure said. The name echoed through the cavern of his mind, and Daniel’s shattered and abused consciousness finally collapsed.
Hank woke to the sound of a shonfra humming and a headache the size of a Roc.
“You’re awake? Astounding! Astonishing! Marvelous! Happy days, we have success! Inconceivable!”
“What in the Roith’delat’en hells happened?” asked Hank.
“Where’s my son?” asked Daniel.
His headache worsened.
“It’s time for you to go.”
A familiar voice. Winry stood a few paces away. He reached up to rub his head, and she shied away at the motion, as if she were afraid of him.
Behind her, the Paladin with the hammer glared at him. “Abomination,” the man said, lip curled in disgust.
Winry shushed him. “Is that not for our lord Prime to decide? He has sanctioned this and participated in it. We do not understand his ways.”
Hank looked around the room. Daniel immediately noticed the empty table, where Henry should be. “Where’s my son?” he demanded, louder this time.
The shonfra took flight, landing on the shoulder of a nearby ticker and tapping the metal man on the head. “He’s in here,” said the shonfra, clearly pleased.
Daniel noticed the chest cavity of the mechanical man, the source it contained a familiar square-bottomed glass bottle filled with a purple liquid.
“No,” Daniel whispered. “No, the paper I brought you, it was for curing Ripley’s.”
The shonfra shook his head. “Ripley’s has no cure. The boy’s body had already died. His soul simply hadn’t realized it yet. Cannot save the body, so we saved the soul. In here!”
No, no, no.
The ticker looked around the room, eyebeams swirling through an array of different colors.
“Henry?” Daniel asked. The ticker did not respond.
The shonfra chittered. “The transfer was imperfect. Still, that was the largest soul we have ever transferred successfully! You should be honored.”
“This is not what I wanted!” Daniel wailed.
A deep and familiar voice boomed from the darkness. “‘Everything,’ you said. That was what you would give, and in the end, it did not take quite so much as that.”
Horror gripped Daniel as he stared at the ticker who had been his son. No. He couldn’t deal with this. First his wife, and now . . .
I will deal with it for you, said Hank, and Daniel withered.
Hank walked to the ticker.
“Do you remember anything?” he asked it.
“Lights. Colors.” The ticker turned his head aside. “You were there. You were new. Like me.”
“Yes. I have an airship. Would you like to visit it with me?”
“I do not know what an airship is.” The ticker thought for a moment. “I believe I would like to learn of airships. It would be logical to visit one in order to learn this information.”
Hank nodded. “You’ll need a name.”
“Do you have a name?” asked the ticker.
“Hank,” he told it without hesitation. “Hank McCoy.”
It seemed to consider that.
“That name is too long,” the ticker said, “I need my own name.”
Hank reached over and drew a line down the ticker’s metal arm. “You’re skinny enough. How about Bones?”
The ticker considered that, eyebeams whirling between a rainbow of colors. After a moment, the nodded approvingly. “Simple. Skeletal. Descriptive. I like it.”
“You have to leave,” said Winry again, voice strangled.
“Let’s go, Bones,” Hank said, standing to face Winry and her sullen companion. “I need to see a real sky again.”
Once more, the two Paladins led the way through a maze of tunnels. They arrived back at the same hidden passage behind a bookcase as they’d come through.
As Hank passed the hammer-wielding Paladin, he heard the man whisper, “Abomination,” with such vitriolic disgust that Gerard opened his eyes.
Hank fell into darkness.
When he woke, he was back on his ship, arms coated in blood up to the elbows and his cloak beyond repair, tattered and stained an ugly black.
A red-splattered Paladin’s hammer rested against a wall and Bones refused to answer any questions about what had happened.
They flew west, and Hank knew they’d need a better ship than this pathetic bird if they were going to make enough money to survive.
He just needed to remind Bones of who he was. Son to a loving father.
That was the only thing that mattered.
Editor’s Note
As we began to pull together the three volumes of Choose that comprise this Omnibus, Tami asked if I would contribute an editor’s note for the book. At first, although I was both flattered and honored that she and Steven would want something from me in their book, I demurred. However, during the course of editing this book—and, by necessity, reading and re-reading it—I decided I couldn’t pass up the chance to brag on my friends a bit.
Tami and I first “met” several years ago, when we were both blogging about the game World of Warcraft. Tami included some fan fiction in her blog, and I was immediately hooked on her writing. I was a frequent commenter on her blog (and she on mine), and our online friendship grew. Later, she cohosted a writing podcast. I was privileged to be invited on a couple occasions to discuss the processes of proofreading and copyediting.
We finally met in person when the Moores spent the Independence Day 2011 weekend with my wife and me. Tami and Steven returned the hospitality last June, when we stayed with them for a couple days en route to my niece’s wedding in Michigan. To put it quaintly, the four of us get along famously.
As our friendship grew, Tami asked me to copyedit the first two volumes of Choose, and I happily obliged. I was excited for the opportunity to practice my avocation, not to mention re-read the books to which I had contributed as a fan and website commenter. Even today, the first sentence of the first volume continues to evoke at least a grin every single time I read it.
That’s the sort of magic that Tami brings to all of her writing—not to mention the wonderful world-building she and Steven accomplish—and I eagerly devour every word she commits to paper (or electrons and pixels). No one (with the possible exception of her husband) is a bigger fan of Tami and her writing, although I’m sure many of our mutual friends would argue that their admiration is the equal my own.
As we began work on the Omnibus, Tami offered to compensate me for the time and effort I put into copyediting her work. I told her then, and it still holds: for me, this has been a labor of love, and an opportunity to give back, in some small way, for the joy of reading about the fantastic worlds and wonderful characters she and Steven—and all the website contributors to Choose—have brought to life.
I hope these adventures bring you as much joy and happiness as they’ve given me.
Steve Hall
Los Osos, California
April 2013