by Cam Baity
Rhom’s riddle was devious.
Only your father can show you the way.
The courtyard of the Housing was far less grim with the bodies gone and laid to rest. To Phoebe, it seemed as if there was now even a spark of hope in the eyes of the Broken, but that might have just been the warmth of morning.
With Tik’s blessing and a sack of gray kernels, Phoebe and Micah released the gold-and-red ring bird, then set out after it. Their guide led them up the peninsula and toward the mainland. In the distance, the sky was strangled with low, pitch-black clouds that poxed the landscape like ravenous fungus.
Toxic remnants of CHAR were everywhere.
The blights were crowded so closely together that Phoebe wondered whether their mehkan guide could safely enter the corrosive region. Beyond the bleak miasma, they saw the shadows of the looming mountain range. Cutting across it was the Shroud, stretching as far as the eye could see. Everywhere the kids looked, they saw a hellish vista.
And yet onward they went—bound for Emberhome.
The scraggly ghosts of needle trees thinned out, the last bastion of life clinging to this ravaged land. With nothing left to perch on, the ring bird was forced to either hover in midair or land on the ground while it waited for them to catch up. The faceted ore beneath their feet was white from the cold and broken into angled slabs. As the kids ascended the foothills, finding traction on the uneven planes became more difficult.
Ahead, something was sticking out of the ground. It was hard to tell what it was at first—a curled lip here, a folded ripple there. But soon they could see that dark gray sheets of metal had burst up through the ore. As the kids continued, the protrusions grew in size, haphazardly piled like messy heaps of fabric. The crumpled metal waves rose, extending far and wide into a natural formation that blocked their path.
“Wild guess,” Micah said, scanning his naval map. “But I’m gonna say these are the Coiling Furrows.”
“We’re getting close,” muttered Phoebe. “I can feel it.”
The ring bird landed atop a narrow slit at the base of the maze—an entrance. The kids looked at each other for a moment, neither wanting to go first. At last, Micah steeled his jaw and went in. Phoebe followed close behind.
The Furrows were cold and shady, with sunlight coming down in odd streaks. The walls bent and bulged in unnerving ways with occasional gaps opening to expose the sky. The path dipped and twisted, and within minutes they were completely disoriented. If it weren’t for the ring bird, they would be hopelessly lost.
For uneasy hours, they navigated the metal slot canyons. Occasionally, the kids could spy the rim of a black CHAR cloud through a cleft in the sheet metal walls. The blights were all around them now.
As the suns began to fuse, their progress slowed substantially. Phoebe found herself dragging her feet.
“Can we take a break?” she said at last, shuffling to a stop.
Micah blew out a breath. “Thought you’d never ask.”
They collapsed against the coarse, curved wall of the Furrow. Micah opened his hard-shell pack and dug out the SCM case. While he chugged from the water bottle, Phoebe scattered some kernels for their guide. The ring bird twirled down, deflated, and pecked at the morsels.
The kids dug in to their rations.
“Only five meals left,” Micah noted, examining the case.
Phoebe didn’t want to think about the prospect of running out of food. She only wanted to think about finding the Occulyth.
“I guess the best thing to do is…” Micah sneezed, then wiped his nose with a sleeve. “You got a tissue or somethin’?”
She reached into her pocket to look, and her fingers grazed a folded piece of paper. At first, Phoebe thought it was trash, but when she pulled it out, she wasn’t so sure. It was the inner paper lining of a Wackers bar, creased and folded deliberately, as if someone had tried to sculpt it into…something. Though what it was meant to be, she hadn’t the faintest clue.
“Gotcha!” Micah said with a grin.
Now Phoebe was confused, but she smiled at him anyway, inspecting the wrapper and turning it around in her hands.
“What is it?” she asked at last.
He snatched the wrapper, smoothed the wrinkles, fixed some angles, then gave it back. Phoebe still didn’t get it.
“It’s a loon,” Micah said at last, a little annoyed.
She looked at it again. Now she could sort of make out a neck and wings, patterned with the flashy Wackers logo.
“Like the bird?” she wondered.
“Yeah, like a loon! Cause you’re, you know…nuts.”
“Oh…” Phoebe sort of smiled. “Thanks?”
With an irritable whistle and a whisper of feathers, the ring bird zipped out of sight.
“Tough crowd,” Micah grumbled, looking between Phoebe and their departing guide. “Back home, I was gonna steal a coupla live ones from the zoo and let ’em loose in your room. But since that ain’t happenin’, this was the best I could do gift-wise.”
“What do you mean, gift-wise?”
Now it was Micah’s turn to be confused.
“Duh. It’s your birthday, dummy.”
The word could not have been more befuddling if it had been in Rattletrap. But counting backward, thinking over the time they had been in Mehk, she realized he was right. They had been away from Albright City for almost ten days. Which meant today was the twenty-second—her birthday.
“Seriously?” he asked, continuing to eat. “You totally forgot?”
She nodded absently.
“Well, I guess you’ve kinda had some other stuff on your mind,” he said with a shrug. “That’s whatcha got me for, right? Not like it’s a big deal or anything. I mean, you’re only thirteen.”
Another whammy. Her mouth fell open, which caused Micah to snort with laughter. She hadn’t forgotten her age, but hearing the number spoken aloud made it sound ludicrous. How many times had she longed for the day when she would finally be a teenager? Now, for the life of her, she couldn’t recall what “thirteen” was supposed to mean. Becoming a woman or something? More freedom? It meant…
It meant nothing.
That’s not what she was supposed to be thinking. Girls back home were wearing makeup and staying out late. But here Phoebe was, putting her life on the line. Her classmates were thinking about how to act around boys, not how to act around zealous warriors who treated them like a saint.
“HELL-O-O-O?” Micah was waving in her face.
“Sorry,” she mumbled. “I was just thinking.”
“I’ll say,” he considered. “You all right?”
She nodded and caressed the paper loon in her hands. “Thank you,” Phoebe said. “This means a lot to me.”
“Yeah, right,” he snorted and ate some more.
“It does,” she said. “You remembered.”
Their eyes got tangled, his hazel snared by her golden brown.
“I…You’re welcome,” he managed.
For a moment, he was barely able to swallow his food.
The ring bird released a harsh trill.
Phoebe and Micah kept staring at each other in silence.
Again, their guide screeched, this time more urgently.
“Give it a rest, would ya?” Micah snapped.
But it didn’t stop. The mehkan bird’s cries were insistent. Phoebe stood up and pocketed the Wackers loon.
A golden blur whizzed past overhead, then a black one. The two shapes clashed, a ring and an X.
Phoebe and Micah recognized it at once.
She ran. He shouldered his pack and rifle, and bolted after her, leaving their rations behind.
A Foundry drone had spotted them.
Dollop was trying his best to keep up with Overguard Treth.
After a long haul, their salathyl had arrived at an underground Covenant bunker, a hidden staging area dug beneath the ore. The air rang with barked orders and clanging metal as mehkans readied their weapons and assembled to
be blessed by axials. Armored salathyls sat in trenches, their tentacles primed to drill. Heaving siege-engine beasts were idling on a series of ramps that led up to the ceiling.
Hundreds of warriors were assembled into battalions—burly gohrs for the front lines, lightning fast aios for stealth, and hunchbacked freylani with their explosive cyndrl. It looked as if all the Covenant camps throughout Mehk had joined forces.
But there should have been more. Word had trickled in from Ahm’ral and Sen Ta’rine telling of terrible slaughter. No one knew how many brave Covenant warriors had gone to rust there.
Overguard Treth worked his way through the troops and climbed a ladder to a high platform. It was peppered with sunlight that streaked in through lookout holes punched in the ceiling. Dollop scrambled after him.
“Two-point-seven clicks late,” came a familiar flutter.
“Good to see you too,” chuckled Treth.
“Or-Orei!” Dollop cried. He ran up and tried to hug the Overguard from behind, but she detected his approach with her shifting apparatus and held him at bay. Dollop remembered his place and held a fist over his dynamo. “So-sorry, Overguard! I—I never thought I’d see you ag-again, is all.”
“You have failed,” she said flatly. “Loaii lost.”
Dollop gave a somber nod. He realized that there were others on the platform with Orei, a stern group bearing the gold mantle of Covenant Command on their shoulders. He bowed, but they paid him no mind, focusing their attention on the lookout holes.
“Again the Everseer has spared you,” Orei said to Dollop. “I do not know why. But it is time to redeem yourself.”
“I—I will, Overguard…Bu-but how?”
“You fight.”
Dollop’s bulbous eyes went wide.
“It comes!” declared Overguard Treth.
The announcement rippled through the ranks until their murmurs and clanging came to a halt. Orei joined Treth and the Covenant Command at the lookout holes. Dollop reassembled himself to be taller so he could see out as well.
Squinting through the daylight, he observed a craggy red plain with slanted mesas on the horizon and the imposing walls of the Foundry Depot rising in the distance. Something glinted as it approached the fortress. A train was just arriving.
The purple coils went dark as the outer gates opened.
“Power is down!” Treth announced to the Covenant.
Orei held a hand up—a timer in her palm started to tick.
“Ready!” Treth boomed.
The Covenant crouched in their positions, bodies tense, waiting for the command to attack. Dollop heard a soft rattle and realized that his loose parts were shaking. Was it from fear or fervor? It did not matter. He was whole. Makina was with him, and he was a warrior of the Covenant.
If this was to be the end of his span, then so be it.
“Mother,” Orei spoke. “Some of Your most beloved Children are about to return. They give themselves willingly, sacrifice their embers to gain us the advantage—so we may crush those who stand against You.” She held a fist over her dynamo, and the rest of the Covenant did the same. “Welcome home your martyrs.”
The dial on her hand stopped ticking.
A blast of blue-white light. A deafening boom. The train, halfway into the Depot, exploded in a nova of flame.
“Blaze the Way!” Treth roared.
The Covenant repeated the words, a rousing war cry.
Dollop was overcome.
“Blaze the Way!” he screamed.
Salathyls bored into ore. Mehkans marched. Ferocious siege engines charged up the ramps. Overguards Treth and Orei leapt onto one of the mehkan beast contraptions as it tore past. Dollop pounced after them and barely hung on.
They erupted through the ore. Dust and sunlight blanketed them. All around, war machines and salathyls exploded into view. Sirens wailed in the Depot. The Foundry’s cannons opened fire, but their magnetic defenses were down.
The Covenant charged to meet their glory.
Dollop closed his eyes in exultation.
Goodwin sat on the edge of his seat in the luxury Gyrojet, face illuminated by console lights. His removable silver earpiece—and the Board’s words—sat ignored on the armrest. He could barely suppress his smile, but it was too soon to celebrate.
Not until the Plumm girl was in custody.
Engineer Flores had reported that the children were headed for “the blights at the foot of the Shroud.” That could only mean the restricted CHAR zone in the eastern sector. So in the middle of the night, Goodwin had assembled a search team and set out with them to ensure success. After landing in the Ephrian Mountains, he had deployed his team and waited.
And waited.
For hours, Goodwin had tried to focus on other urgent matters. There was the fallout from Saltern’s speech to deal with. And there was the battle in the mehkan city of Ahm’ral, which had required more resources than anticipated. Still, the Foundry had successfully routed the Covenant’s forces.
The suns had risen, and still no sign of the children. But Goodwin was a patient man, and though the day was long, his moment had arrived at last. A Shadowskimmer drone had just detected the targets.
Now the Gyrojet was in pursuit. Below him, the Coiling Furrows extended in all directions like the convolutions of a titanic gray brain. The children were down there somewhere, running through labyrinthine paths full of dead ends and baffling contortions. The Foundry had lost many assets attempting to map it over the years without success. It was nearly as uncharted as the poisonous Shroud, which caused their instruments to malfunction whenever they attempted to study it.
The children wouldn’t last long out here on their own.
The Gyrojet ascended higher. The reason for the pilot’s caution was plain—CHAR clouds were everywhere, and flying too close was suicide. Four centuries ago, the Foundry’s entire payload of the insidious chemical had been detonated here, when Creighton Albright had devastated the leadership of Mehk.
According to Flores, the children were helping the Covenant retrieve something from the Furrows, attempting to find the resting place of their old ruler, the fabled Ona. But it made no sense. The Foundry had scoured these blights long ago and found nothing. It was a wasteland—a tragic result of Albright’s ignorance of the permanence and profundity of CHAR’s effects.
What could the Plumm girl possibly expect to find?
The ring bird whipped left. Right. Right again.
Rippled gray walls folded over Phoebe and Micah. There were no landmarks, no indication of a route. The contorted walls bent close, forcing the kids to squeeze through a narrow gap. The ring bird hovered for a second to let them catch up, then blurred away around another curve.
They ran blindly after their guide.
Drones twirled past overhead, searching for a clear view. Aero-copters thrummed. The pounding steps of pursuing Watchmen closed in. And then came the blaring sirens of V-Stalkers, the Foundry’s mechanical bloodhounds.
Micah whipped his rifle around. Phoebe ducked. He fired a flurry of rounds that ricocheted through the Furrows with a sound like rapid drumbeats.
Her muscles burned. Eyes watered, blurred. She lost sight of the ring bird, panicked. Pushed herself harder.
A pop. A sizzle. Then a horrible, gasping wheeze.
Micah collapsed to the ground.
She skidded to a stop.
He was grunting and twitching, a Watchman’s shock prong buried between his shoulder blades. She saw the wires spiraling back to the extended hand of one of the mechanical soldiers.
She couldn’t help him.
She wouldn’t leave him.
The ring bird circled, squealing.
Watchmen reached for Phoebe.
Then the air came alive. Something whisked past her.
A figure. As soon as she made out the contour of a body, it vanished in a swirl of shade, dissolving into the Furrows.
There was a hiss. A streak of copper red.
A lash ma
terialized out of midair. It lunged at a Watchman like a viper, impaling his chest. Then it retracted and coiled, a living thing poised, seeking a new angle to strike from.
The head of the lash whirred, a deadly drill burning white hot. Watchmen shot at it with their rifles, and Phoebe threw herself over Micah’s body to protect him.
The drill viper darted. Soldiers weaved. One of them struggled, caught on something. A bundle of frayed cables—no, an arm—was wrapped around the automaton’s neck.
Behind the Watchman stood a mehkan draped in a cloak that liquidly changed to mimic the surroundings. The camouflage was more than color—even its texture seemed to swim in and out of existence. The folds parted, and Phoebe saw the figure within. He was like the Mercanteer’s bodyguards, woven from metal bands and peppered with black eyes.
The mehkan held the Watchman fast. His drill lash struck, slashing clean through the automaton’s neck. The weapon then slithered out of sight beneath the mehkan’s camouflaged cloak.
The remaining Watchmen were on alert, wildly training their weapons, seeking their invisible attacker.
One of the mechanical soldiers went for Phoebe.
A swirl of copper red shot out, an S-shaped blade whistling through the air. It sheared through the Watchman’s head as if it were fog. The curved blade parted, fluttered, and returned like a pair of boomerang falcons. A mehkan of rings and scythes materialized to catch the weapon—a kailiak like Orei.
A flurry of violence erupted.
The boomerangs flew out again, only to be snared in midair and redirected by the lash. The blades carved through their enemies. The fibrous mehkan materialized and flung his weapon through the face shield of a Watchman attacking from behind. Another warrior appeared, a crane-claw mehkan flinging a cloud of copper buckshot that swarmed their foes like red hornets.
Micah sat up, woozy from the electric stun. He and Phoebe watched the interplay of mehkans and their copper-red weapons, blinking in and out of sight to level the Foundry forces with savage grace.