by Shaun Barger
He could hear the thumping of the machine’s blades as it slowly followed him—but he was running, and the tree line was close—so close!
Shadows wrapped around him like a welcome embrace. He stopped, briefly, to catch his breath and see what had struck him. It looked like an iridescent wad of chewing gum, the thin metal slug it had been contained in crumpled up around it. A tracker? It was sticky—Nikolai didn’t want to touch it with his bare fingers.
He could hear the craft drawing near. In a rush, he took a muddy stick poking out of a dirty puddle and used it to flick the gummy wad from his uniform.
There was an intense crackle and a blinding flash of light. Nikolai was knocked to the ground, helplessly writhing from the powerful jolt of electricity. Stupid, so stupid! Moaning, he clung to consciousness, trying to regain control of his body as he lay there, twitching. Smoke rose from the now blackened wad, the burned stick lying beside him.
Unable to move, Nikolai could only watch helplessly as the hovering machine entered the shadows of the forest with predatory slowness. The street was more than wide enough for the contraption to fit with ease, the machine capable of maintaining precise, deliberate altitude.
Metallic segmented tentacles as thick as Nikolai’s wrists reached out from its black pill body and gently wrapped around his arms, legs, and waist. It lifted him into the air, Nikolai hanging loosely beneath it. He whimpered, nearly blind with terror. There was nothing he could do.
The machine backed out of the forest, out into the open, and began to ascend. As the field grew distant below, the wind growing sharp with cold, Nikolai finally slipped into unconsciousness.
* * *
Nikolai awoke in a panic, heart thumping with adrenaline. Lush, red-leafed forests closed in on the ruins of a half-burned town distantly below them.
He resisted the urge to thrash and struggle. The tentacles holding him did so loosely, just firmly enough to keep him from falling. If he started to move too much, they would probably tighten to keep him from escaping or, well, plummeting to his death. A problem a human might have—but not Nikolai. He kept his eyes half lidded, forcing himself to remain limp.
Tiny machines held aloft by tiny rotors buzzed around him like a swarm of insects, their little bodies like ten-sided dice, each surface glinting with bubbles of plastic. Cameras? They moved quickly, jerking from one spot to another, constantly shifting positions as they followed, examining Nikolai from every possible angle.
He realized that he’d dropped the bag. No matter—his Focals remained firmly sheathed in their holsters, and that’s what was really important.
Nikolai gently turned his head, surveying the scene. The sun was still out—and there, back where they came from—he could still see the lake. It was far now, a tiny black puddle in the distance.
They were flying roughly east toward a distant series of structures, like whitewashed cement honeycombs—sterile and alien. Nikolai couldn’t even begin to guess what purpose any of the structures might serve. There were dozens of them, and though they looked small from this distance, he could tell they must be massive.
Glinting crafts circled the sky over the structures like scavenger birds. Clouds of tiny coordinated drones surged in complex formations through the airspace over the honeycombs. The area was bustling, though not with any sort of human activity he could see. The forest was cleared for miles around and twisted with neat service roads.
Nikolai was struck with the mental image of a wasp bringing prey back to its hive. To lay eggs in, or tear it apart, or—hell, whatever awful shit wasps got up to. As they drew closer to the structures, it became increasingly difficult for him to smother the terrified claustrophobic panic threatening to overcome his fragile calm.
But then—there! Wispy columns of smoke coming from the north. Though it was difficult to make out from this distance, it appeared that there was another settlement, much different from the cement hive. Some sort of military base surrounded by chain-link fences, dotted with watchtowers. Runways, hangars—the tarmac scattered with sleek, futuristic jets and lined with sturdy buildings.
West of the runways were what appeared to be a series of squat living complexes. Northwest of the runways, but still within the vast area surrounded by the fence, was some sort of tent city. Beyond that, houses. A town!
The installation was huge—everything was spread out, with vast plots of grass between the runways, the town, and the various other facilities scattered across the base.
The fence surrounding the base was surrounded by an even broader area of exposed soil. Dozens of tanks lined the fence, facing out in all directions—dark green trucks and other, smaller vehicles zooming along, constantly patrolling the parameters.
American flags fluttered in the wind.
Humans.
Nikolai was flooded with relief so intense he almost sobbed. Still hanging limp, he considered his options.
It would have been easy for Nikolai to simply gum up the rotor blades with some jellied akro and then solidify the cloud to completely lock the rotor in place and make the machine crash.
The only problem with that plan was if the tentacles tightened and refused to let Nikolai go, bringing him crashing down with it.
He’d have to be quick about this. There was one tentacle looped around his waist, one around his chest, another around his legs. He stiffened, arms held straight forward, legs and feet pointed straight back. In one quick motion, he pulled himself into a ball, slipping through the loops around his legs and chest so that he was hanging from the one around his waist.
“Akro!” he screamed against the wind as he yanked the baton from its holster, sending out his own invisible tentacle of air to loop around the other tentacles surrounding him, gathering them together into a squirming bundle. The tentacle around his waist tightened, trying to crush him, but the enchantments of his uniform managed to hold up against the force of it.
More tentacles snaked out of the craft’s pill body, so with a grunt, Nikolai forced the tentacles he’d restrained up into the rotors. As the tentacles and his whip of air became tangled in the blades with a horrible screech of twisting steel, the baton Focal was yanked from his grip. The akro weave instantly disappeared as the baton spun away, down to the forest below. Shit!
The body of the craft was torn open—steel and plastic and sophisticated electronics exposed as several of the tentacles were ripped free. The top of the craft burst into flames and a horrible stink of black chemical smoke filled the air.
As they fell, Nikolai was struck by the odd silence of it. Despite the flames trailing the torn body of the machine, there weren’t any emergency alarms or anything—no warning for the benefit of human ears. Just the crackling of electricity, and the shrieking of wind as they plummeted.
The remaining tentacles had frozen in place—including the one wrapped tightly around Nikolai’s waist. He desperately pulled out his blade Focal, featherweighting himself and the machine with a frantic cry of “Elefry!” to slow their fall.
He cast pyrkagias, but focused in the flame to the edge of the knife, burning it hot as he could make it—hotter than he’d ever gone, making the blade itself go orange, then blue, then white with heat—and pressed it desperately against the segmented metal holding him in place.
Liquid steel came off in droplets—one splashing onto the back of his hand. He gritted his teeth, biting back a scream as he kept pressing, keep cutting—
TING!
The tentacle snapped off, and Nikolai kicked away from the plummeting craft.
He was about five seconds from hitting the treetops. He’d never used his blade Focal to guide a fall before, so he awkwardly clung two-handed to the hilt, a length of tentacle still firmly and uncomfortably wrapped around his abdomen, and fired off a jet of jellied akro.
He crashed through the treetops, branches and leaves slapping him in the face hard enough to leave welts.
He hit a thick carpet of moss with a thud and just writhed on the ground f
or a bit, hissing through his teeth as he clutched the burn on his hand. Trembling, he forced himself to stand, dead leaves crunching underfoot. The back of his hand didn’t look good—bloody blisters clustered around the spot where he’d been burned by the molten metal.
The tentacled ’coptor thing—or the wasp, as he’d come to think of it—was smoldering nearby. The hive where it’d been taking him wasn’t far. He was positive that more wasps or drones or other machines he’d yet to come across would soon investigate.
The smaller drones that had been following them burst through the treetops and swarmed around the wreckage. Several of them seemed to notice Nikolai, and soon the entire swarm began to surround him.
Growling, Nikolai released a burst of fire from the tip of his blade, scorching a group of them out of the air. Then another—then two more clusters in quick succession, before the rest of them pulled back to hover up in the treetops, out of harm’s way.
SHIT.
His baton Focal wasn’t far—he could feel it like an insistent tug. Though he wasn’t on any road or path, the underbrush was thin between the tree trunks. Besides the occasional thicket, the ground was mostly covered with moss and dead leaves.
Before he went to chase after his lost Focal, Nikolai superheated his blade again to cut off the tentacle still wrapped around his waist. Ignoring the pain, he went invisible and ran.
Hopefully the drones, unlike the wasp or that other high-altitude craft that must have spotted him before, were limited to the visual spectrum.
No such luck—he ran and ran, ducking under low-hanging branches, twisting through the underbrush, occasionally shooting back quick bursts of fire to take out another cluster of the little drones, though they became increasingly difficult to strike. They were adapting.
Bursting through a thicket, he turned sharply, changing direction in hopes of losing their tail. Though he could still hear their faint humming, like a swarm of oversized insects, he ducked into a tree hollow big enough to crouch down in—hoping that maybe he’d momentarily lost them.
“Apocrypha!” he hissed, summoning a bubble of Veil. Though he hadn’t tried it before, if he could surround himself with Veil and hide away in a pocket dimension until the coast was clear . . .
A sheet of mercurial sky rose around him and his magical pools strained so sharply that he felt as if he’d be torn apart. As quickly as it had appeared, the Veil turned to ashes.
He gaped as the cinders flitted around him, and realized that without a constant flow of energy from a Disc to maintain it, a Veil couldn’t exist. The nearest Disc was in Marblewood. The energy must not have been able to pass through a layer of Veil—Marblewood’s dome preventing Nikolai from being able to cast the spell.
Desperate, he sealed himself into the tree hollow with a quick wall of akro, tweaking it to create the purest form of the spell—hardening a shield of air that was as transparent as the finest crystal instead of frosted and opaque like normal akro.
He quickly chilled the glassy air with kryo, a spell he’d never really used for much more than cooling his drinks. Water condensed and froze around the edges of the hardened air. Nikolai was still invisible, and if the drones were using heat-vision, he hoped that they were just looking for unusual patches of heat—not unusual patches of cold.
The humming increased in volume—it couldn’t have been more than thirty seconds—and a single drone zipped by.
He held his breath.
Others followed, hovering more slowly than the first as they carefully examined the area. Nikolai was sure that he’d left an obvious trail of broken branches and footprints in the leaves. But his trail ended here, and though other drones split off in multiple directions, several circled the little clearing, attempting to track him.
One hovered directly in front of the hollow, seeming to stare right at Nikolai. It moved closer—inches away from the chilled akro barrier. Frost crept across the surface—fucking frost; Nikolai was sure it was going to give him away. Glass in the middle of the forest? Right where he’d disappeared? He could only hope that the drone or whoever was controlling it dismissed it as an oddity, some stray piece of garbage—glass, long ago propped up in the hollow of this tree for whatever reason.
If Nikolai had been visible, he’d have been blue in the face from holding his breath for so long. The drone zipped away and he let out a gasp, sucking in air gratefully.
Nikolai relaxed slightly, though he continued chilling the akro barrier. He could feel his baton a short ways off. It wasn’t moving, so the machines must not have found it yet.
Though he couldn’t hear any more of the drones, Nikolai assumed that some must have remained hidden to keep an eye on the spot at which they’d lost his trail. So, with some discomfort, he used a wordless gia weave to pull water up through the soil beneath him, turning the dirt into watery mud. Stifling a noise of disgust, he completely covered every inch of himself with the mud. He whipped up some air to dry it onto himself, and used kryo again—chilling the layer of dirt to mask the heat of his body. He shivered, feeling absolutely disgusting. He was going to have to constantly reapply and rechill the mud, but hopefully now he would be masked from both the visible and infrared spectrum.
He left the hollow and surveyed the clearing, searching for any lingering drones. He began to trek down an animal trail, following the gentle tug of his missing Focal. He saw another drone on the way and pressed himself between two trees as it passed, holding his breath. There must have been hundreds of the things combing through the forest, searching.
The tug of his Focal brought Nikolai to the base of a large tree. The bark was rough, with deep cracks that made for decent handholds. He featherweighted himself for an easier climb, and soon he was up in branches thick with bright red leaves.
Nikolai felt a thrill as he found his missing Focal—the featureless rod was so black it was hard to focus his eyes on it. It seemed to drink in the dappled sunlight. Nikolai yanked it free from between two branches, relief flooding him as it warmed under his grasp, faintly trailing a rainbow smear of light. Whole again.
He walked for an indeterminate amount of time. The trees were thick overhead, making it difficult to track the passage of the sun. Thirty minutes, an hour, two—he wasn’t sure. His hand throbbed. The icy mud soothed it a little, but Nikolai worried about infection—worried about what kind of bacteria he was smearing into the open wound.
Maintaining the invisibility was exhausting. Back inside the Veil, with the energy of the Disc feeding his weaves, it was complex to cast but easy to maintain. But out here? Most spells required very little energy when focused through a Focal. But invisibility was a class above the rest. It was an active weave, requiring continuous power to continuously manipulate the light around it. Without the Disc, that power came from his body’s natural pools of magic.
He couldn’t risk being seen by the occasional drone, though. So he ignored the pain and continued in what he hoped was the direction of the settlement. How far had the settlement been when he’d seen it from up high? Five miles? Ten? Twenty?
The light began to fade overhead. A primal fear itched at the skin between his shoulder blades—a feeling of being watched—of being hunted like an animal. Quickening his pace, he tried to comfort himself with the knowledge that he was more than capable of reducing an assailant to a smear of bubbling flesh, or plastic, or whatever.
He’d never seen wilds such as these—never seen darkness like the growing shadows between the trees. Even in the forests and swamps of his home, the stars burned ever brightly overhead, and one was never left in complete darkness.
Nikolai froze at the center of a small clearing at the distant crunch of snapping branches. Adrenaline and fear brought him to full attention—discomfort forgotten.
Hissing a breath, he featherweighted himself and leaped high up into the air to press his sneakers against a tree trunk about halfway up, then pushed off—propelling himself to the branches of the tree opposite.
Nik
olai hid in the foliage of a thickly leafed branch. It was probably just an animal—a bear, deer, or maybe another wolf, like the one he’d seen earlier.
He was tempted to launch himself out from the branches into the open air up above and simply fly as he had over the Noir the rest of the way to the settlement. But Nikolai knew that even invisible, even masked with icy mud, the jets of jellied akro would give away his position in an instant.
Just as he was about to climb higher in the branches to peek his head out over the treetops for a better view, a sleek, houndlike machine silently entered the clearing. Nikolai froze and held his breath, fingers digging into the rough bark.
It was painted with camo—brown, green, black—and had the slender body of an oversized greyhound. Instead of a head it had a long horn, like a trumpet. Trumpet-face lowered, delicate, feathered feelers brushed the ground as it went to the center of the clearing. It stopped and raised its trumpet-face—dozens of the hideous little feathers tickling the air.
Sniffing, Nikolai realized with horror. It was tracking his scent.
He tightened his grip on the branch, fighting panic as the machine slowly approached the tree trunk he’d bounced off of to get to his current perch. Hind legs on the ground, it reached its forelegs up the tree like a dog trying to chase after a cat. Its neck extended—straining to reach the spot Nikolai’s shoes had pushed off from the trunk, feathers twitching and waving.
It knew he was there. Its olfactory sensors were sensitive enough to have detected where Nikolai had launched up to his current spot. It was no longer a question of if it would find him, but when.
Nikolai wished that he’d thought to peek above the treetops earlier to gauge his distance from the settlement. Because if it was close, he could just make a run for it—could try to fly the rest of the way.