“Do tell.” His gun hand was trembling, his shirt soaked through the chest and down his sides.
“It’s all those charged particles swirling about each other like hornets, deflecting an assay’s line of sight as would a carefully aimed mirror. Now what do you suppose old Linus here would want to hide under all this hay?”
Foley said nothing.
“Not that it would be without some degree of difficulty. I imagine specialized schooling would be required, and the only place with a curriculum like that in the Outers is Oxford-on-Athene. Your cousin, yes? Assuming he’s not just a figment of your imagination in the first place.”
Something dark passed over Foley’s face. “I’ll thank you to speak of my family with respect, sir.”
“Strike a nerve, son?”
“Gilbert met his end when he was fourteen. We were climbing atop one of the harvester automatons and he fell. I watched him break his neck, Agent Caul. Don’t dishonor him again.”
I suddenly became aware that Foley’s vocal pattern had changed. The thick rural inflection was gone, his bearing and manner more refined. When the Hell had that happened?
“One can argue,” I countered, “that you’re better connected to the Aspects outside Harvest Home than you let on, Deputy. Your interest in Agent Plio Ah was a bit too on the beam.”
“It wasn’t a problem to switch the University records from my name to Gilbert’s. I had to.”
“You use a dead boy to hide your identity, then lecture me about respect?”
“I said it wasn’t a problem, damn you. I didn’t say it was easy.”
“He’s talkin’ bollocks, Hollis!” pleaded Caines. “Don’t pay him no mind!”
“Shut it, Linus!” Foley said. “Sweet Mother Earth, both of you just shut it! I have to think this through.”
A silhouette moved in my peripherals. Caines’s callused finger tightened around the railgun’s trigger. I needed just a few more seconds....
“Let me be honest with you, Hollis. I don’t understand what’s happening here. I truly don’t. But I will, I promise you that. Just as surely as I’m taking you down right now.”
“Drop the weapons!” Plio stood in the open barn door, thick purple fluid dripping from his ravaged torso. He had a Sharps Emancipator luminiferous carbine trained on Foley’s sidearm and looked transcendentally inconvenienced.
Foley raised his pistol. Caines flinched sideways. A ruby flash sliced across the boy’s gun hand. He screamed and fell. I grabbed the Nullifier and fired into the loft. Caines was out before he hit the hay-blanketed floor.
I held on a beat, then collapsed back into the mud and started to breathe again. It felt good.
Plio dropped his Emancipator and knelt beside me, examining my arm and the gash above my eyes. The center of his body had been shredded in the railgun blast, but he’d managed to pull most of it back together. Thank Heaven for the resilience of his liquid physiology. You can’t keep a good metamorph down.
“Honestly, Romulus, look at this mess. I can’t take you anywhere.”
I wiped blood from my eyes and sighed. “I love you too, brother.”
I dosed myself with industrial-strength pain foggers and immobilized my arm in a make-shift sling. It would’ve been easier just to detach the arm altogether, but the flanges and swivel-joint in my mangled shoulder were bent out of true. Plio bound the men’s wrists with electrick shackles and buckled a set of brain-obfuscators about their heads. An offshoot of shock therapy, the devices fed current through the cerebrum and played havoc with intelligible thought, rendering subjects quite docile in the process; provided, of course, they didn’t chew through their own tongues.
I looked back at Foley, his eyes twitching and vacant. “They’ve got a glamour, Plio.”
“I saw the analysis on my divining-assay. Romulus, these are hardly the adolescent pranks of harvest season. Something is going on. Something big.”
“You can say that again.”
“Any idea where the Engine is hidden?”
Rainwater trickled through the timbers of the barn floor, splashing down into the open space below.
“Yeah. A pretty damned good idea, at that.”
* * *
Concluded in Pt. 2, in Issue #143
Copyright © 2014 Dean Wells
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Dean Wells’s short fiction has appeared in Ideomancer, Eldritch Tales, ShadowKeep Magazine, 10Flash Quarterly, and The Nocturnal Lyric, as well as multiple times in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, and he is a member of SFWA. Visit him online at www.darkapostle.net.
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COVER ART
“Sojourn,” by Ferdinand Dumago Ladera
Ferdinand Dumago Ladera is an acclaimed artist born in Iligan, the city of waterfalls, situated in the southeastern part of the Philippines. He was trained and received a bachelor's degree in Fine Arts at FEATIUniversity in Manila, Philippines. He has a diverse background as a fine artist, graphic designer, and photographer. He specializes in fantasy and science-fiction illustration. View more of his work at his website, ferdinandladera.com.
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