And that was when the first Mokian I had helped got shot in the back.
16
Stoopid, elegant, skinny, odd, extravagant.
These words all share something, something you’re not expecting. If you can figure it out, I’ll give you a cookie. (Answer is at the beginning of the next chapter.)
I’ll give you a hint: It has to do with the meaning of the word awful.
‘No!’ I said, watching as the Mokian tumbled to the ground, dropping his bear and rolling to a stop. The Librarians rushed up behind him, surrounding him then prodding him with their rifles. He was out cold.
Just like that, the plan fell apart. Another robot dropped as one of the three remaining runners hit their target. Another soon followed, leaving only two robots up. But that was enough. Another rock fell, and a chunk of glass nearby cracked free.
I looked up. There were so many cracks in the dome that I could barely see the sky.
‘I’d guess one more rock will drop it,’ Mink the adviser said from beside me. ‘Two at the most.’
‘We can’t let that happen!’ I said. The two remaining robots were lifting arms to throw. Another of the runners fell – one that had already destroyed her robot – blasted in the side by Librarians.
Guns were firing all over now, flashing in the night like the lights of some insane disco. I guess the Librarians finally realized what we were doing – at first, they likely thought we were just trying to get messengers out.
A Mokian still ran for one of the remaining robots. Gun blasts fell around him. ‘Run!’ I said, focusing on him. Giving him strength, speed, jumping ability, everything I could leech out of myself. He dodged about on fleet feet, inhumanly fast. But a contingent of Librarian riflemen set up just beside him.
‘NO!’ I screamed even louder, letting out a jolt of something through my Lenses. I could almost see it. A black arrow that streaked through the air, striking the Mokian.
The Librarians pulled triggers. And their guns exploded.
I froze, shocked, as the Mokian runner leaped one final bound over a fallen log then threw his bear. It smacked into the robot’s leg, exploding. The robot tried to throw its boulder, but didn’t have the leverage, and the stone fell to the ground out of its grasp. The robot followed, crashing to the ground.
The Mokian skidded to the ground, and a Librarian shot him a moment later, knocking him out.
That was my Talent, I realized. For a brief moment, I used the Lenses to grant that runner my Talent. It broke the guns when they tried to fire on him.
The last remaining robot tossed its boulder. We all held our breath as it flew, then smashed into the dome, crashing through it completely and falling into the city. Shards of glass rained down on us. It left a gaping hole in the roof.
Outside, the Librarians cheered. Behind them, I noticed three scrambling forms congregating. Kaz had met up with the two remaining Mokian runners. Kaz hesitated just briefly, but obviously realized that he couldn’t wait any longer. A Librarian’s rifle shot hit the ground next to them, spraying up dirt and smoke, giving Kaz the moment of disorientation he needed to engage his Talent. As the smoke passed, the three of them were gone, carried to safety.
The last robot leaned down to get another boulder. The hole in the ceiling was bad enough; this final boulder would shatter the dome entirely. Around me, the Mokians hushed as the final robot raised the enormous rock. The Librarians below lined up, moving back into their attack lines, preparing to assult Tuki Tuki.
My eyes caught something. Motion. There, rushing across the ground behind the Librarian lines, was a small determined figure with silver hair. Bastille.
There was still hope.
The Mokians noticed her, pointing. Bastille – belligerent Bastille – had ignored safety, choosing to run for that last robot instead of trying to get to Kaz. She charged with sword strapped to her back, Warrior’s Lenses on, dashing with Crystin speed through, around, and sometimes over confused Librarian soldiers.
‘She’s not going to make it,’ Aluki said softly. The robot raised its boulder. ‘It’s too late . . .’
He was right. That robot would throw before Bastille arrived. ‘She needs more time. I need to get down there.’ My heart beating quickly, I moved by instinct, shoving my way through the Mokians and rushing down the steps to the ground. I ran up to the gate out of the city.
‘Open the gate!’ I cried.
The guards looked at me, dumbfounded. I didn’t have time to argue, so I brushed past them and slammed my hands against the gate, sending my Talent into it. The bar holding the gate closed shattered into about a million splinters, the force of the explosion sending the gate swinging open.
I rushed out the door and realized something important. Something life changing. Something amazing.
I needed a battle cry.
‘Rutabaga!’ I screamed.
It’s the first thing that came to mind, I’m afraid. Anyway, I dashed out across the grassy ground, running to the edge of the glass dome. Outside, the robot snapped its massive arms forward, launching the boulder.
I came right up to the glass of the protective shield. Taking a deep breath, I placed my hands against it and sent a surge of power into it.
The dome in front of me let out a wave of light, a ripple of energy. I closed my eyes, holding my hands to the smooth surface, power surging through me like luminescent blood pumping into the glass.
For a moment, I felt like I was the glass dome protecting the city. I strengthened the dome, giving it an extra boost, like I’d done with the Transporter’s Glass months before.
The rock hit.
And it bounced off, the dome unharmed. I opened my eyes to find the entire thing glowing with a brilliant, beautiful light.
Power was flowing through me at an alarming rate. It seemed to be towing bits of me along with it, my strength, my soul even. I could feel the Talent coiled inside, wanting to snap forth and destroy the very thing I was trying to protect. I had to forcibly hold it back.
At no point in my life up to this moment had my dual nature – Oculator and Smedry – been so pointedly manifest to me. In one hand I held the power to save Mokia, and in the other hand the power to destroy it.
I forced myself to release the glass, stumbling backward, exhausted and drained. I felt like I’d just run a marathon while carrying Atlas on my shoulders. And boy, that guy’s gained weight over the years. (Due to all those new stars we’ve discovered in the sky, you see.)
I fell backward to the ground, exhausted, Mokians swarming around me. I waved them away, letting Aluki help me back to my feet. The robot was getting another boulder. Where was Bastille?
She’d been caught by a large group of Librarians. She fought desperately, waving her sword around her, fending off the soldiers. She seemed to glance in our direction, then she turned, pulling a bear from her backpack and snapping it into the air.
The maneuver exposed her back to the Librarians.
‘Bastille . . .’ I said, raising a hand. I tried to send her strength through the Bestower’s Lenses, but I was too weak. A dozen different shots from Librarian guns hit her at once.
Bastille dropped.
The bear soared.
I held my breath as the robot raised its rock. I didn’t have the strength to protect the city again.
And . . . . .
And . . . .
And . . .
And . .
And .
And . .
And . . .
And . . . .
And . . . . .
The bear hit dead-on. A large section of the robot’s leg vaporized and it teetered, then toppled to the side, dropping its rock.
Around me, the Mokians let out relieved breaths. I wasn’t paying attention. I was just looking at Bastille, lying unconscious on the ground. The Librarians were raising their guns in excitement, as if they’d just felled some fearsome beast. Which I guess they had.
The Librarians pulled Bastille’s jac
ket off of her and began shooting it over and over with their guns. That confused me until I realized they must have recognized it as glassweave. These soldiers belonged to the Order of the Shattered Lens, and they hated glass of all types. They took off her Lenses and shot those a few times too.
Of course, their hatred of glass didn’t explain why they felt the need to start kicking Bastille in the stomach as she lay there unconscious. I watched, teeth clenched tightly, seething hatred and anger as they beat on Bastille for a few minutes. I almost ran right out there to go for her, but Aluki caught my arm. We both knew that there was no good in it. I’d just get myself captured too.
The Librarians then picked her up and hauled her away as a prize of war. It was a special victory for them, catching a Knight of Crystallia. They took her to a tent at the back of the battlefield, where they stored all of the important captives they’d put into comas. I felt a coward for having let her go out there without me, and for not going to get her back when she fell.
‘Your Majesty?’ Aluki said to me. The Mokians around me had grown quiet. They seemed to be able to sense my mood. Perhaps it was because I was unconsciously causing the ground around me to crack and break.
I was alone. No Grandpa, no Bastille, no Kaz. Sure, I had Aluki and his soldiers, not to mention Aydee back in the city. But for the first time in a long while, I felt alone, without guidance.
At this point, you’re probably expecting me to say something bitter. Something like, ‘I never should have become so dependent on others. That only set me up to fail.’
Or maybe, ‘Losing Bastille was inevitable, after I was put in charge. I should never have taken the kingship.’
Or maybe you want me to say, ‘Help, there is a snake eating my toes and I forgot to take the jelly out of the oven.’ (If so, I can’t believe you wanted me to say that. You’re a sick, sick person. I mean, what does that even mean? Weirdo.)
Anyway, I will say none of those things here. The fact that you were expecting them means I’ve trained you well enough.
Now excuse me while I fetch my snake repellant.
‘Are you all right, Your Majesty?’ Aluki asked again, timid.
‘We will win this battle,’ I said. I felt a strange sense of determination shoving away my feelings of shame and loss. ‘And we will get the antidote. We no longer have an option in this regard.’ I turned to regard the soldiers. ‘We will find a way to get Bastille out, and then wake her up. I am not going to fail her.’
Solemnly, the soldiers nodded. Oddly, in that moment, I finally felt like a Smedry, maybe even a king, for the first time.
‘The city is protected for the time being,’ I said. ‘Though we still have to worry about the tunnels. I want people back to their posts watching the city for Librarian incursions. We’re going to last. We’re going to win. I vow it.’
‘Your Majesty,’ Aluki said, nodding upward. ‘They knocked a hole in the dome. They’ll find a way to exploit that.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘We’ll deal with that when it happens. Have someone watch to see what the Librarians do next. Ask my advisers if they can think of any way to patch that hole.’
‘Yes, Your Majesty,’ Aluki said. ‘Er . . . what will you be doing?’
I took a deep breath. ‘It’s time to confront my mother.’
NCC-1701
In the year 1288, if you were to pass by an old acquaintance on the way to Ye Olde Chain Mail Shoppe and call him ‘nice,’ you’d actually be calling him an idiot.
If it were the year 1322 instead – and you were on your way to the bookshop to pick up the new wacky comedy by a guy named Dante – when you called someone ‘nice’ you would be saying that they were timid.
In 1380, if you called someone ‘nice,’ you’d be saying they were fussy.
In 1405, you’d be calling them dainty.
In 1500, you’d be calling them careful.
By the 1700s – when you were off to do some crowd surfing at the new Mozart concert – you’d be using the word nice to mean ‘agreeable.’
Sometimes, it’s difficult to understand how much change there is all around us. Even language changes, and the same word can mean different things depending on how, where, and when it was said. The word awful used to mean ‘deserving of awe’ – full of awe. The same as awesome. Once, the word brave meant ‘cowardly.’ The word girl meant a child of either gender.
(So next time you’re with a mixed group of friends, you should call them ‘girls’ instead of ‘guys.’ Assuming you’re not too brave, nice, nice, nice, or nice.)
People change too. In fact, they’re always changing. We like to pretend that the people we know stay the same, but they change moment by moment as they come to new conclusions, experience new things, think new thoughts. Perhaps, as Heraclitus said, you can never step in the same river twice . . . but I think a more powerful metaphor would have been this: You can never meet the same person twice.
The Mokians hadn’t actually put my mother in the university with the other prisoners. I’d told them to put her in a place that was very secure, and they didn’t have a prison. (It may surprise you to learn this. Mokia is exactly the sort of place the Librarians don’t want you to believe in. A paradise where people are learned, where arguments don’t turn into fistfights, but instead debates over warm tea and grapes.)
No, the Mokians didn’t have a prison. But they did have a zoo.
It was actually more of a research farm, a place where exotic animals could be kept and studied in the name of science. My mother, Shasta Smedry, was confined in a large cage with thick bars that looked like it had once been used to house a tiger or other large cat. It had a little pool for water, a tree to climb in, and several large rock formations.
Unfortunately, the Mokians had removed the tiger before locking my mother in. That was probably for the tiger’s safety.
I walked up to the cage, two Mokian guards at my side. Shasta sat inside on a small rock, legs crossed primly, wearing her Librarian business suit with the ankle-length gray skirt and high-necked white blouse. She had on horn-rimmed glasses. They weren’t magical, according to my Oculator’s Lenses. I checked just to be certain.
‘Mother,’ I said flatly, stepping up to the cage.
‘Son,’ she replied.
I should note that this felt very, very odd. I’d once confronted my mother in a situation almost exactly like this, during my very first Library infiltration. Except then, my mother had been the one outside the bars, and I had been the one behind them.
I didn’t feel any safer having it this way.
‘I need to know the formula for the antidote,’ I told her. ‘The one that will overcome the effects of the Librarian coma-guns.’
‘It’s a pity, then,’ she said, ‘that I don’t have it.’
I narrowed my eyes. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Hmm . . . If only there were a way for you to tell if I were speaking lies or not.’
I blushed, then dug out my Truthfinder’s Lens. I looked through it.
She spoke directly at me. ‘I don’t know the antidote.’
The words puffed from her mouth like white clouds. She was telling the truth. I felt a sinking feeling.
‘I’m not from the Order of the Shattered Lens,’ my mother continued. ‘They wouldn’t entrust one such as me with something that important – they wouldn’t let any foot soldier know it. That secret will be very carefully guarded, as will the secret of the antidote to the Mokian stun-spears.’
I looked at my guards. Aluki nodded. ‘Very few know our formula, Your Majesty. One was the queen, and the other is the—’
‘Don’t say it,’ I said, eyeing my mother.
She just rolled her eyes. ‘You think I care about this little dispute, Alcatraz? I haven’t the faintest interest in the outcome of this siege.’
It was the truth.
I gritted my teeth in annoyance. ‘Then why did you sneak in?’
She just smiled at me. An insufferabl
e, knowing smile. She’d been the one to suggest I get out my Truthfinder’s Lens. She wasn’t going to be tricked into saying anything condemning. At least, not unless I shocked her or distracted her.
‘I know what you and Father are doing,’ I said. ‘The Sands of Rashid, the book you both wanted from Nalhalla.’
‘You don’t know anything.’
‘I know that you’re seeking the secret of Smedry Talents,’ I said. ‘You married my father to get access to a Talent, to study them, and perhaps to get close to the whole family. It was always about the Talents. And now you are looking to discover the way that the Incarna people got their Talents in the first place.’
She studied me. Something I’d said actually seemed to make her hesitate, look at me in a new way. ‘You’ve changed, Alcatraz.’
‘Yeah, I put a new pair on this morning.’
She rolled her eyes again, then stood up. ‘Put away that Lens, leave your guards behind, and let’s have a chat.’
‘What? Why would I do that!’
‘Because you should obey your mother.’
‘My mother is a ruthless, malevolent, egocentric Librarian bent on controlling the world!’
‘We all have our faults,’ she said, strolling away from me, following the line of bars to the right. ‘Do as I request, or I’ll remain silent. The choice is yours.’
I ground my teeth, but there didn’t seem to be any other choice. Reluctantly, I put the Truthfinder’s Lens away and waved the guards to remain behind as I hurried after Shasta. I wouldn’t be able to tell if she was lying or not, at least not for certain. But hopefully I could still learn something from her. Why had she joined the group infiltrating Tuki Tuki? Perhaps she knew something, some way to save us.
As I moved to join her, an alarm rang through the city – one of the scouts we’d posted had seen a tunnel opening. Hopefully, the soldiers would be able to deal with it. I walked up to where Shasta stood, far enough from Aluki and the other guard to be out of earshot. I suspected that she wanted me away from the other two so she could manipulate me into letting her go free.
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