by Jay Allan
Hoodwink grabbed her hand and pulled her onward.
Her father abruptly froze.
"What?" She glanced at him. "What is it? Why are you stopping?"
Behind, the monster closed. A terrible crash shook the chamber.
When the trembling faded, she followed Hoodwink's gaze, and instantly she understood why he'd stopped.
Ahead, another iron monster blocked the corridor.
CHAPTER NINE
The second iron monster bore down on them. It was a lot closer than the one behind, and Ari could see its features in their grim entirety. The head looked similar to a sword hilt with those curved cross-guards and that central, cylindrical haft. Beneath the red light at the top of the hilt, three glass disks reflected the corridor with cold indifference.
As she stared into those disks—the apparent eyes of the monstrosity—Ari decided that her father must live no matter what. He was too important. And she owed him her life for what he did those ten years ago when he climbed the Forever Gate in her place. She'd never been able to forgive herself for that. Never been able to thank him. Never been able to tell him she loved him.
She wouldn't make the same mistake again.
She'd lost her childhood memories of this man, but he was her father, her father. And that meant everything to her.
She dug deep within herself as she'd done at crucial times in the past, seeking bravery where there was hopelessness, and fortitude where there was weakness.
Her body didn't disappoint. She broke ahead, using those motorized leg braces for all they were worth.
She didn't have lightning anymore.
But she had courage.
"Ari no!" Hoodwink's voice barely carried over the pounding of her boots into the floor grill.
The monster paused as she neared.
Her leg braces whirred madly.
Let's see what these babies can do.
She vaulted into the air when she was only a pace out from the monster. Her timing was slightly off, as could be expected from a body that had slept a lifetime. She'd wanted to kick out, and strike the monster in the head with her braces. Instead her entire body crashed sidelong into the thing. She got lucky, and one of the leg braces hit the monstrosity in the head anyway. She heard the glass disks on its head shatter.
She landed sprawling on the floor in front of it. The wind was completely knocked out of her.
Hoodwink was at her side almost immediately, and he dragged her away from the monster.
It didn't pursue.
A thunderous boom shook the corridor.
Hoodwink set the duffel bag down and he helped her up.
The monstrosity still hadn't moved. The small red light on its forehead flashed on and off in counterpoint to the rotating beacon on the ceiling.
"Never do that again," Hoodwink said above the siren, lifting her arm over his neck.
"I can walk!" She forced Hoodwink away and took a step. One of the motors in her right leg whined in protest, and she felt its support give out before she set the foot down, so that her foot stamped. She took another tentative step. Again her right foot gave out at the last moment. The overall effect was to give her a nasty limp. Not to mention that her entire right leg throbbed with pain. She'd just have to manage.
"I don't suppose you have any healing shards in this world?" she said.
Hoodwink remained grave. "Did you hear what I said?"
Above the siren she could hear the rising clicks and whirs of the other monstrosity. "Hoodwink, I don't think we have time for this..."
But he seemed adamant, and crossed his arms. "Never do that again. Say yes. You're too important."
A boom. The corridor quaked.
"Me?" Ari said. "You're the one who's important. What makes me so special?"
"You're my daughter."
"Oh." She looked away. She didn't want him to see the tears that threatened to fall. She pressed her lips together and forced iron into her voice. "Come on dad, let's go." She glanced at the monster she'd smashed. "I think I killed it."
She started forward, but Hoodwink stopped her with a hand and a severe look. He approached the monster alone, and lifted a palm to the ruined disks. He waved two fingers back and forth. The red light continued to blink on and off above the disks, but otherwise the iron monster gave no indication it saw him.
Hoodwink glanced at Ari, put a finger to his lips, and motioned her onward.
She slowly eased herself into the narrow gap between the monster's body and the wall. Up close, she saw that a series of small holes were dug into the barrel of its chest. Numbers were embossed above the holes. There was a kind of a grill in its side, and beyond that she could see the insides of the monster—different colored strings tied together in bundles. Connecting the torso to the treads was a corrugated black bag that reminded her of the material in a smith's bellows. She realized the bag allowed the entire upper torso to turn and bend. The monster could easily crush her if it decided to swivel.
Her gaze was drawn to the three smashed disks on its head, and the blinking light above them. Don't look at me don't look. The subtle whir of her leg clamps seemed all too loud in her ears. She vaguely noted that the booms of attack were coming less frequently now, and that the floor barely rumbled.
When she was halfway past, one of the monster's arms abruptly shot forward.
She froze.
The sound of her beating heart seemed louder to her than the siren. She waited. The roof beacon pulsed over her, bathing her at times in red, at others in gloom. She didn't dare breath. Or blink.
But the monster made no other movement.
Death throes?
She didn't want to take any more chances. She took a wide, tentative step, and then squeezed through to the other side in a hurry. She spun about, expecting the worst.
The monster remained still.
She watched nervously as Hoodwink hoisted the duffel bag over his head and edged past. He moved a little faster than she had, but just as quietly, and in moments he was at her side.
"Have to be careful when the light on their heads is flashing like that," he said. "You think they're done for, but sometimes they still strike. Oh, they strike." He fingered his side as if remembering some injury.
She noticed a corridor leading off from the hallway. Within, the walls and ceiling fell away. The distant roof seemed made of glass, and she saw the nighttime sky, the stars out in full. Flashes of light came in time with the distant booms she heard. The icy landscape beneath that sky looked a little odd, and was pocked with holes.
She took a reflexive step toward the passage, but Hoodwink grabbed her arm. "No Ari. It's this way."
And then she saw it. Within that offshoot corridor, along the walkway that led across the chamber, another iron monster approached.
This one was smaller.
Faster.
And those pincers snapped at the air with deadly certainty.
CHAPTER TEN
"Hood..." Ari said.
"I see it." Hoodwink increased his pace. "Can you still run?"
She nodded. She noted that her father hadn't tried to offer his neck or shoulder as a crutch. Good, he was being trained. Though maybe a crutch wasn't such a bad idea right about now...
She alternately limped, and ran, and limped again at a quick jog. The siren droned on.
Hoodwink stayed by her side, purposely not running ahead. He paused beside a pod that had gone black inside, and he forced his hand into the membrane, breaking it. Black sludge vomited onto the floor. That, and a human body. The withered person—she couldn't tell the age, or the gender—was very much dead. Most of the muck dripped through the grill onto the level below.
"Help me lay the body across the corridor." Hoodwink snatched the dead man's hands.
Ari wrinkled her nose and grabbed the feet. She could barely lift those stiff legs, and ended up dragging them. The flesh felt clammy and spongy, and she kept expecting the skin to slough right off the bone. She sincerely ho
ped that wouldn't happen—she didn't want to throw up in front of Hoodwink.
In seconds the two had positioned the body so that it blocked most of the corridor. Hoodwink scooped up handfuls of black sludge from the pod and tossed it over the corpse. Some of the sludge spilled down the dead man's sides and onto the grill, where it dripped like tar to the level below, but most of it remained on the body, the dark, gelatinous blobs quivering over the flesh.
"That'll slow our friend," Hoodwink said.
The two raced on. Ari kept glancing back, and she saw the smaller iron monster easily roll over the body, snapping bones and splattering the insides.
"I don't think it's working..." Ari began, but then she saw sparks flying from the monster's treads.
"The sludge gets in the wheels of the smaller golems," Hoodwink said. "Fucks them up. Only reason I put the body there was to hold the sludge. Hurry now, we're almost there."
The corridor looked the same, as far as she could tell. There were no further side passages or branches, just endless pods, metal walls, flashing beacons, and that siren. That wailing siren.
Hoodwink abruptly knelt. He jabbed his fingers into the grill, and lifted away a floor segment. Below, a ladder led down along the wall.
"I don't know how the hell you noticed that," she said.
He tapped his temple. "Smarts! And I got a bit of an eagle eye, I do!"
"Sure dad." Ari took the ladder. Her grip was so weak that she had to wrap her elbows around each rung rather than her fingers, and that made for a slow, awkward descent.
Hoodwink came down after her, and he replaced the grill segment halfway down. The join was seamless, as far as she could tell, and she still wondered how he knew to lift the segment in the first place.
"It's just ahead, it is," Hoodwink said.
He led her down a hallway that seemed, for all intents and purposes, exactly the same as the one she just left, the sleepers in the pods just as oblivious to her presence as those on the floor above.
The warning siren abruptly fell silent, and Ari realized she hadn't heard or felt any trembles in a while. The red beacon flicked off, and the white slabs in the ceiling brightened.
"These attacks have been going on since you came here?" Ari said.
Hoodwink nodded.
"Why hasn't this place crumpled into so much snowpack then?" she said.
Hoodwink smiled. "Snowpack. Yes, it should have, by rights. But the ship has special armor, and heals between attacks. That armor can only take so many hits though, and the iron golems struggle to keep it in good shape. They've been falling behind, as you might've guessed."
Hoodwink stopped beside a sealed door set between two of the pods. Finally, something else besides pods and walls and pods again.
"I've formed my own little group of Users here, I have." Hoodwink pressed numbers on a pad by the door. "One or two are people who woke up a tad early, and lived. People I saved from the iron golems. The rest, well, they're unlucky people whose worlds I ripped away. Just like I did yours."
"But at least you gave me warning," Ari said. "A choice."
"I did. Something these poor wretches never had. I've committed many sins while I've been gone, Ari. More than I care to admit to. Abandoning you was one of the biggest, though it wasn't entirely by choice. Either way, one day I'll have to pay for these sins, I expect." The numbers on the pad flashed, and Hoodwink seemingly addressed the door. "Let me in, Tanner."
The door slid open.
What awaited inside was not exactly what she had expected.
Not at all.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Ari entered a control room of sorts. The stars of the night sky peered at her from a broad window, above which green numbers scrolled along from left to right. The main area of the chamber was crowded with small desks covered in dials, buttons, blinking lights, and white pads with words inside them. But it wasn't so much the fancy desks that caught her attention. Rather, it was those who sat in front of them.
Ari lifted an eyebrow, and glanced at Hoodwink. "This is the group you put together?"
Almost all of them were children.
Hoodwink spread his arms. "Ari, say hello to my little geniuses. Geniuses, say hello to my daughter Ari."
"Hello Ari," the children said together, just as if they were in class.
She walked forward. All the children were looking at her. Some seemed expectant in some way. Others, despondent, distant. Every single one of them was dressed in a white gown, and with their pale skin and haunted eyes, they seemed like little ghosts to her, the phantoms of those who had seen the truth, their previous selves burned away when they died in that cold world of ice only to awaken in a cold world of metal.
One little girl slid from her chair and shyly approached. "You're so pretty."
Ari knelt, and touched the child's hand. "I was, once. Maybe. But not anymore. Now I'm just a hollow-cheeked skeleton." Or so she imagined, given what the rest of her body looked like.
"I don't think so." The little girl touched her cheek.
Ari had always thought it one of life's greatest jokes that the face closest to her was the face she hardly saw—her own. And when she did see it, catching a glimpse of her reflection in a mirror, or in the polished bronze of a sword, she rarely liked what peered back. Despite that most people, like the little girl, called her pretty, and sometimes beautiful.
"What's your name, sweetheart?" Ari said.
The little girl looked down. "Caylin..."
Ari smiled. "Caylin. That's a nice name. I like it. I really do. I'm Ari."
Caylin glanced up, beaming. "Are you going to stay with us, nice lady?"
"I—" Ari glanced at Hoodwink. She gently turned the girl around and gave her a shove. "Go back to your friends Caylin. Go on."
Caylin returned to the desk and sat in the oversized chair. She gave Ari a reproachful look.
Ari lowered her voice. "Why would you do this to them?" she told Hoodwink.
Hoodwink stiffened visibly. "What, set them free? I treat them well. Like my own family. I love them. I do. Without them I would've gone mad months ago. And don't you be giving me that self-righteous look. You did the same thing with your New Users."
"Yes, but at least I waited until they were in their teens. And I had a reason. The young survive the ravages of vitra longer."
Hoodwink nodded slowly. A shadow passed across his face. "I have reasons, too. I do. Children, well, they're growing, and they learn faster. Their bodies have a better chance of surviving the pod-birth, and they get used to walking, and everything else, real snappy. Sure, they all needed the iron legs, just like you. But only for one or two days. When your body weighs fifty pounds, your muscles grow quick."
"What about him?" She nodded toward the oldest among them. A young man who couldn't have been more than twenty, maybe twenty-one. Half a head taller than Ari, with short, curly hair. Cute, in his own way. Though he had a conceit about him that stroked her the wrong way. And a darkness. Thinks a lot of himself, that one, she thought. And he's quick to anger. Unlike the children, he wore the same blue uniform as Hoodwink and herself.
Hoodwink looked at the man and grinned. "That's Tanner." He strode up to the man and beckoned Ari near.
She smirked, but obeyed. She was no fool—she knew when someone was trying to pair her off, especially when that someone was her own father.
"He's one of those who woke up too early," Hoodwink said. "Shit from the pod right when I was walking by, can you believe that? Lucky for him I was there, because the iron golems were scouting that section of tunnel real good that day, almost as if they were expecting him to come out."
Tanner reached into his pocket, and offered her a packet of some shiny material. "Hungry?"
She was, actually. Ravenous.
Reading her mind, Tanner tossed her the packet. She caught it, and regarded the thing suspiciously. The texture was smooth, almost slippery, and felt squishy inside. She bit into it, but couldn't tear off a piece.
"You have to open it, first..." Tanner said. He held out a hand, and she reluctantly returned the packet to him. Tanner held the edge with two fingers, and ripped the corner open. He gave it back to her.
She regarded the packet warily. Some kind of gel oozed out.
"It's good..." Tanner said.
"Looks like that stuff from the pods." She smelled it, but the gel was scentless.
"It's actually pretty good," Hoodwink acknowledged.
She licked a small corner tentatively. Tasteless, too. She took a mouthful and swallowed. "You know, for laughs I was going to say it tastes like chicken, but I just can't bring myself to. This is the blandest, most tasteless stuff I've ever had in my life. Worse than piss."
"How do you know what piss tastes like?" Tanner said with a wild grin.
She smiled sardonically. "Funny." She took another mouthful. "You're off to a bad start, mister. First the terrible food, then the joke at my expense. I'd appreciate the same respect I've granted you. Try not to be so full of yourself."
Tanner seemed about to reply, but then he averted his eyes. She thought he reddened a little.
"Easy, Ari, I'm sure he meant nothing by it," Hoodwink said.
She had a way of making men uncomfortable, didn't she? She was judging again, when she hardly knew the man. What right did she have to say that he was full of himself? It was just her political instincts, is what it was. The need to put everyone in their place before they could get the upper hand. First rule of politics: Never let your opponent gain the upper hand.
Her eyes were drawn to the long window beyond the desks. She hadn't really looked out at the landscape yet. She approached the glass, edging between the children. She passed near one boy, and gave him a smile, but the child only stared back with pale, haunted eyes.
She reached the window. What she saw didn't at first seem possible.
She felt faint, and pressed one hand to the glass so she wouldn't fall.
"Could it be true?" she said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Outside, a landscape marred with dark pits and abrasions stretched to the horizon. The pocked, yellow surface reminded her of old bone. Above, a gaseous ball the size of an outstretched fist floated among the stars. In the depths of that ball, a swirl of gases formed an eye of sorts, and she couldn't shake the feeling that it stared at her.