by Shaun Barger
The synthetic hound backed down from the trunk, turning and scanning the branches with its trumpet. At the base of the trumpet, atop its head, there was a black blister of plastic raised up from the camo shell. Its eyes.
Nikolai gently eased his dagger from its sheathe, gripping it tightly while his other hand kept him steady on the branch.
The trumpet-face scanned back and forth, passing over him twice. Finally, it paused, settling on the branches of a tree several trunks away from Nikolai. It hadn’t seen him yet—the cloak and the kryo must have been working.
The horn folded into its chest, replaced with an iridescent half sphere that looked like a crystal ball carved from obsidian. In an instant, light coalesced at the front of the sphere, so bright Nikolai had to avert his eyes, as bright as the sun, the real sun—
It jerked its body to point the sphere right at Nikolai. There was a flash of crackling electric light, and suddenly Nikolai was falling. He tumbled through the air, still clinging to the branch that trailed smoke from where the laser had severed it.
Nikolai pushed off awkwardly, upside down in the air over the hound for a moment that seemed frozen in time—dagger pointed right at it.
He released a torrent of flame down at the hound as he spun through the air, but it anticipated the attack and lunged to the side. It turned, impossibly fast, in a fraction of a fraction of a second, light pulsing at the heart of the sphere—a dull glow this time, not the blinding luminescence of its previous shot—and fired again.
Nikolai couldn’t see the laser. It wasn’t like in the movies. There was just that crackle again—quieter than the last one—as a wave of heat dissipated across the front of his uniform, a wave of tiny sparks rolling out from the center of impact as the enchantments blocked the shot.
He expected to have been knocked back by the beam of energy, but there wasn’t any force to it. It was just light, after all. Nikolai twisted through the air and landed in a run—allowing the featherweight weaves to disappear the moment he touched down, so he could sprint.
That last shot hadn’t been as powerful as the first—was it just trying to stun Nikolai?
Baton drawn, he spun it to create a ribbon of akro in the air just in time to block another shot at his face. He twisted around the barrier of air and fired off a pulse of flame—but once again, the hound leapt to the side, too fast—and as it lunged away it fired another shot, this time at Nikolai’s exposed hand holding the blade.
Nikolai screamed at the pain and dropped the blade, stumbling, clumsily swinging the baton to create another ribbon of air, then another, trying desperately to put up a shield before it could fire another shot. He was afraid to look at his wounded hand, the stink of seared meat turning his stomach as it hit his nose.
Changing direction midrun, Nikolai doubled back around the barriers of hardened air to try another tactic.
“Elefry!” he screamed, pointing his baton at the hound. It tensed but hesitated as nothing visible fired from the Focal. Unlike the flames of pyrkagias, Nikolai bet that not even those fancy robot eyes could see the magical weaves of the featherweight spell—or any other spell, for that matter.
Not yet aware that it was suddenly a fraction of its normal weight, it pushed off the ground with its rear legs to lunge, but used too much strength and went spinning absurdly through the air, back over front, limbs flailing as it tried to right itself.
If Nikolai hadn’t been in so much pain he would have laughed at the sight—instead he pivoted to snap out a tentacle of akro to wrap around its body and used its own momentum to swing it around and smash it into a tree trunk.
Camo plating crunched against the tree, black liquid pouring through the cracks. Machine parts groaned and clicked, whirring pitifully as it flailed and fired off another laser pulse. The blast singed the hair on the side of Nikolai’s head as it missed, barely.
“Fuck you!” Nikolai screamed, swinging it around again to slam it into another tree. “FUCK YOU!”
Shattered, body and limbs twisted, it lay on the ground after Nikolai had smashed it to his satisfaction, cracked laser sphere and trumpet face both half out as its sniffing feathers writhed.
Nikolai stalked over to it, snatching up the dagger as he crossed the clearing. The energy burn hadn’t been as bad as the one from the molten metal—though their combined pain on the same hand was almost too much to bear. The laser wound had merely blistered, the intent apparently to disarm and subdue, not to maim.
Like Nikolai gave a shit.
“Pyrkagias,” he hissed, bathing the creature’s broken body with flames. It struggled briefly as he melted it down, but quickly went still. Nikolai watched it die with grim satisfaction, holding his breath as the toxic fumes rolled away in clouds of black smoke.
“Identify yourself,” came a voice from behind.
Nikolai spun around with a shout—baton and dagger held at the ready as he prepared himself for another fight.
At the edge of the clearing, something like a feline shimmered into existence. It had been watching, invisible. Hanging back in the shadows behind it were two more of the hounds, their laser spheres pulsing sluggishly with light, at the ready.
The triumph he’d felt at defeating the first quickly turned to despair.
“Where are you from, child?” the feline said. It spoke with crisp intelligence, its tone oddly melodious. “You wield unfamiliar technology beyond the capabilities of terrestrial humans. Is the treaty broken? Have the colonists decided to interfere?”
Unlike the hounds (which were unmistakably mechanical) the speaking machine looked almost organic. It didn’t have any visible sensors, its “skin” apparently seamless—and though its voice rang clear, Nikolai couldn’t tell where the words were coming from.
Nikolai gasped as it began to transform, shrinking back with horror. The surface of its body rippled and fluttered, seemingly composed of miniscule panels, each the size of a mosquito’s wing, that moved and changed their shape like a billion pieces of metallic origami. The feline unfolded—beautiful and disconcerting, growing into a towering humanoid that had to be at least eight feet tall. Slender, androgynous, rippling with synthetic muscle.
With a moan of terror, Nikolai featherweighted himself and took flight, desperately shooting into the air with a long jet of jellied akro. No point in being stealthy now.
Nikolai trailed a weaving ribbon of akro from the dagger as he propelled himself with the baton, hoping to block any laser pulses they fired after him.
It was dusk above the tree line. The clouds had cleared, the first spattering of stars dotting the gray-blue sky. And there—the settlement! It was close, so close! Exposed or not, Nikolai would be there in moments if he could just—
He glanced back and saw that the humanoid had transformed into something like a gigantic centipede, with dozens of dexterous too-human arms gripping the branches as it scuttled up to the treetop with hideous speed.
The centipede launched itself into the air with enough force to clear half the distance between them despite Nikolai’s head start, and transformed into a billowing, paper-thin shape that caught the wind like a sail. Fully airborne, it unfolded into dozens upon dozens of massive silver wings, flapping and taking flight with incredible synchronization—fluid, but too graceful and perfect to be natural, too mathematical.
“Jesus shit-eating CHRIST!” Nikolai screamed as the immense being cut through the air after him like some sort of angelic beast of Revelations.
Crackles erupted from below as more of the hounds tried to shoot him down, but Nikolai flew with his knees and hands tucked in, his head hunched over—a constant barrage of shots striking harmlessly across his uniform, or lightly singeing his hair and sneakers. Still set to stun—not to kill.
They wanted him. They’d never seen anything like Nikolai, he was sure of it—no other Edge Guard who’d ever been out in the field had ever been stupid or inexperienced enough to be seen. Until now—and now they wanted to take him away, to drag him bac
k to their synthetic hive and vivisect him, experiment on him—
The base was close—the edge of the forest just ahead, the vast fields of torn-up soil surrounding the chain-link fence so close that he could see the little figures sitting in the watch towers, see the fires scattered among the neat city of canvas tents, see the headlights shining from the patrolling trucks!
“COME, HUMAN,” the monster sang over the wind, “THERE’S NO ESCAPE FOR YOU—THE SANCTUARY YOU SEEK IS FALSE—NO OTHERS EXIST WHO CAN KEEP YOU FROM OUR REACH. COME!”
The voice was close, and Nikolai risked glancing back to see that it was RIGHT FUCKING THERE—multitudes of wings slowly closing around him, silver face serene, smiling—long slender arms forming to reach out for him—
With another scream, Nikolai released featherweight enchantments and allowed gravity and momentum to yank him down just as the hands came together. As he fell he fired two columns of akro up at the thing, using the last of his strength to propel himself down, struggling to stay out of the monster’s reach—
At the last possible moment he featherweighted himself once more, twisting midair too late to put any jellied akro between himself and the ground. His uniform released a powerful cushion of air just before impact—a failsafe for Edge Guards knocked unconscious while in flight—but still, even with that he landed hard on the torn-up soil, the wind knocked out of him as he crashed a dozen or so feet away from the edge of the forest.
He wheezed for breath, gasping and coughing. Despite his terror, despite the frantic voice in Nikolai’s head screaming Run! Get up, you stupid bastard, run, run, fucking RUN—he couldn’t move.
Whimpering, he tried to sit up.
“Don’t move,” came the voice—but it was quieter now. Gentle, but urgent. Nikolai snapped open his eyes to find the mercurial being standing at the edge of the forest, once again in its humanoid form. It hadn’t followed him onto the soil.
“Don’t . . . move,” it said again, pointing at Nikolai’s hand with a long, glimmering finger.
Slowly, carefully, Nikolai looked at the indicated spot.
A pressure plate of some sort. A disc of metal, no bigger than his palm.
A landmine.
The area of torn soil—it was a minefield.
He’d come this close to touching it. Slowly, carefully, he pulled his hand away.
Nikolai was enveloped in blinding light. He cringed, squinting.
“There! Do you see him? A boy!” came a distant voice. He could hear thumping air, and some sort of craft began to hover over from beyond the fence—though Nikolai could only make out a blurry outline.
The light was a spotlight from the watchtower. Cautiously sliding the baton and dagger into their sheaths as the humans (oh please, let them be humans, oh please) approached, Nikolai glanced back at the trees to find that the shape-shifting humanoid was gone. It must have retreated into the darkness at the approach of the hovercraft. But why would something like that run from anything? And why hadn’t it come out onto the soil to claim him?
The craft hovered above, wind whipping the soil into clouds. He glanced at the landmine nervously.
“Freeze!” boomed a woman’s voice from above. “Hands on your head!”
She repeated it in Spanish and Nikolai complied, glad that he had already put away the Focals.
“Scanning!” another voice shouted, a man this time. There was a humming flash of light from above—strangely warm, and brighter than the floodlight. “He’s pure human, confirmed! No explosives or tech detected!”
“Run him through the sniffer!” the other woman shouted, and there came a strange hiss and the pull of suction as air sucked up into something above him.
“All clear!” the man said. “No bios or hazmats detected!”
“Are you injured?” the woman called down over the thumping of the aircraft. Nikolai shook his head, and they lowered a segmented ladder. Gingerly he began to climb, dry mud coming off of him in flakes.
A sunburned man with bright orange hair pulled him aboard over the side of the hovercraft—a small, disc-shaped vehicle barely big enough for three people. The pilot, a darkly tanned woman with her head shaved clean, stared at him with disbelief.
The man was shaking a tiny metal canister.
“Sorry about this,” he said, raised the canister to Nikolai’s face, and squeezed out a small puff of mist.
Darkness closed in around Nikolai’s vision, and he collapsed into the man’s arms.
VIII.
TO THE BITTER END
Blue let out an excited shriek and practically tackled Jem with an embrace when they told her that Jem had resigned, and that they’d all be leaving that night for Base Machado.
“But what about your mods?” she asked, calming herself. “What if . . .”
“They wouldn’t fucking dare try to pull that shit with me,” Jem said, forcing herself to smile. “I’m an asset. And we’ll be bringing them the doctor’s cure, so they owe me.” She thought about Eva’s nukes, now broken and buried. “More than they know.”
“What about Eva? Aren’t we going to say goodbye?”
Jem shook her head, feeling as if she was going to vomit. “She’s . . . angry at me. She doesn’t need me anymore. Not really, now that she’s finished with her project. But she didn’t want me to go. Some . . . unpleasant things were said. By both of us.” She raised a hand at Blue’s look of concern, shaking her head. “It’ll be okay. She’ll write us via courier once we get to the base. She’s family, and . . .”
Jem trailed off. Not sure what else to say.
Smart cement controller in hand, Jem led the way when they finally departed, earth disappearing before them in bubbling foam, then slowly sealing behind them as the ceramic reversal charges sent out their pulses on timers.
Alan, the Runner who had first brought Blue and the doctor to Philadelphia, was ecstatic to see them again and relieved to have Jem along for the journey. The more Runners, the better.
The journey was cold, wet, and blessedly uneventful. They moved at an aggressive but cautious pace, hot and sweaty under their thick stealth cloaks despite the brisk autumn chill.
Jem hated the wilderness. She was a city girl through and through. Dry rooms. Air-conditioning. Light and noise and reliable, predicable cement under her feet. Everything was always wet out here—rotting leaves and spongy moss dripping with miserable rain that continued through the entirety of their trek. Good for helping to keep them hidden from patrolling Synth drones. But Jem would’ve killed to sleep in her warm bed back in HQ rather than spend another day in the basement ruins or abandoned cellars where they would rest as they waited for the cover of night.
On their seventh night, they came upon a pristine lake surrounded by lush, red-leafed forests.
“We’ll stop there for the day,” Alan said, pointing to a row of sagging lake houses in various states of disrepair further down the shore. “It’ll be light in a couple hours. Not enough time for us to get to the base. But tomorrow night, we’ll finally arrive.”
He moved to continue through the shadows of the forest along the beach. For the first time since they’d departed, it wasn’t raining. The pitch darkness of night was alleviated by moonlight filtering through patchy clouds.
“Wait,” Dr. Blackwell said, stopping him. “Do you hear that?”
There, closer to the water. A tired, desperate honking. The flapping of wings struggling in vain to pull free.
“Just an animal,” Alan said. “Come on.”
“Hold on,” Dr. Blackwell said, squinting in the dark.
The clouds parted overhead and moonlight shone down to reveal the source of the noise. A swan, caught in a tangle of old barbwire fencing at the edge of the water. The doctor reached into her rucksack and pulled out a pair of cutters.
“We don’t have time for this,” Jem growled, scanning the sky for the telltale glint of aerial surveillance.
“I’ll only be a second,” she said, ignoring Jem and Alan’s pro
tests as she nimbly slid down the embankment. The swan turned its beak to her with a suspicious hiss. White feathers were stained red with blood from where the barbwire dug into its underbelly. “Well, hello there. Aren’t you a pretty little thing?”
She reached out a gentle hand and it snapped at her. She didn’t flinch, and when she reached out again, it allowed her to cut, too weak or too pained to fight back anymore.
“Annnd that should do it!” she said, snapping through the final wire. The swan pulled free, flapping frantically as it took flight right into the doctor’s face. With a muffled cry, Dr. Blackwell fell over, catching her hand and shoulder in the barbwire tangle as the bloody swan fled.
She stifled her scream into a strangled gurgle, face bright purple as she pounded her leg with a clenched fist. Jem swore and scrambled down to rescue her, carefully pulling her free from the rusted barbs.
“Stupid ungrateful piece of shit bird,” the doctor hissed, tears of pain beading at the corners of her eyes as she checked over her wounds. Her hand was shredded—her shoulder sluggishly bleeding from a deep, messy cut that stained her cloak. “No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose.”
Alan took Dr. Blackwell’s rucksack and supplies. But when he reached to take the little steel case of the cure kit hanging from a thick strap across her shoulder, she shook her head. “Jem, I would feel better if you carried this. No offense, Alan.”
The wilderness Runner scratched his beard and smiled. “None taken.”
They made camp for the night in the basement of a dilapidated lake house. The musty air and the stink of mildew made Jem feel claustrophobic. But somehow, Blue didn’t seem to mind.
As Alan treated Dr. Blackwell’s wounds, Blue inundated Jem with one question about the Base after another. Jem tried to match her exuberance, but each night the weight of the lies had grown heavier and heavier upon Jem’s conscience, until finally it was too much to bear.
“What’s wrong, babe?” Blue said, finally seeing past her own excitement to notice Jem’s distress.