To Dream

  J-1 had no idea what was going on. The only thing he could do was what Teague was doing. Watch the exchange.

  Overhead, the swirl of hovering battleliners filled the sky. Norma said to the guard, “Find them someplace secure at command quarters. I’ll have someone there in twenty minutes to pick them up.”

  The guard started toward Niyati and J-1. “Wait,” Teague said. “Norma, this is a trick. She’s either crazy or a spy.”

  J-1 started to say something, but Niyati waved her hand for him to remain silent. She said to Norma, “You know me well enough by now—the bond we share.”

  Norma looked at Teague and then locked eyes with Niyati. J-1 could see the uncertainty in Norma’s bluish-purple eyes, just as he saw the overpowering reassurance in Niyati’s maroon ones. Another blast went off. The courthouse rocked. Norma said to the sentry, “Find her someplace secure.”

  “Twenty minutes,” Niyati said. “And with God’s help we’ll have them on the run.”

  Norma started to race toward the battle sounds.

  “Norma, there’s no need to rush.” Her briefcase, which Teague had been holding, was lying open on the ground. Its contents scattered. Teague was gripping the ceremonial knife that had been inside it.

  She turned to him, “What?”

  “I said there’s no need to hurry because the old woman’s not going anywhere.” He flung the weapon. “I can’t take the chance that whatever she had planned might actually work.”

  J-1 watched the gold blade shoot forward and pierce Niyati’s chest a fraction of time before he realized that it had happened. Niyati collapsed. The plans she was holding drifted to the floor.

  “No,” Norma said. “It can’t be you. It can’t.”

  “I’m truly sorry,” Teague replied, “but the writing was on the wall long before your failed attempt to blow up Ameri-Inc.’s leaders.”

  Frothy blood and a hissing noise seeped from Niyati’s wound. J-1 felt like he was in a dream, but not a dream. He wanted to cradle Niyati and at the same moment rip the flesh from Teague and crush his scalped remains into pulp. But the undream had rendered him motionless—trapped in a sick, depressing, emotional cage.

  “What do you know about that?” Norma’s voice shook.

  “I saw the note you left for Broderich about your plans,” Teague said. “Stupid to have placed it in the den where a nosy visitor could find it.”

  “You…told Ameri-Inc.?”

  “I’m so, so sorry, but I needed leverage, and life on Truatta had become miserable.”

  Norma moaned. It was an agonizing sound so awful that it scattered the crippling haze engulfing J-1. Rage overwhelmed him. He leaped at Teague. Teague sidestepped. J-1 smacked headfirst into the floor. A battleliner lowered near the ground where the wall had been blown away. Teague rushed toward it. J-1 chased after him.

  “Kill him!” Norma yelled to the sentry. She ran to Niyati, removed the knife from her chest and pressed her hands on the injury to prevent further bleeding.

  The guard fired his electro-rod at J-1. It skinned his shoulder. He stumbled, but continued. Teague gained ground.

  “Not him!” Norma screamed. “Teague’s the traitor.”

  The guard fired again. It was too late. Teague had entered a quavering ring of light that emanated from the battleliner. In the circular waviness, he rose and was carried into one of the ship’s portals. The ring of light faded and disappeared.

  J-1 watched the liner ascend. He looked back. All around him living beings raced about like leaves caught in the wind. Gigantic swaths of the protective dome lay limp across apartment complex roofs. The greenhouse was shattered and cracked. Acrid scented smoke wafted about. Dead women, men and children were scattered on the ground like an unfilled-in connect-the-dots illustration. Above him, Ameri-Inc.’s aircraft circled. Truattan troops crouched on the parapet wall lining what was left of Pocketsville were firing at them. On the ground, the heavy thump-thump of WarBots marched about. J-1 was numb. Is this what it’s like to be a living being? He had gilagigs of data inside him relating to the history of war and devastation, but that’s all it ever was—facts to be dissected, analyzed, correlated and reformed into more efficient ways to predict and refine. Nothing in his memory banks had prepared him for this. Nothing. He dry-heaved a coppery, burnt taste.

  “Automaton,” Norma yelled. “Niyati’s calling for you. Hurry.”

  Niyati! He raced back, fell to his knees and brought her chilled hand to his cheek. Norma was still applying pressure to her wound, but blood was seeping between her fingers. Niyati’s charred skin had taken on a pale pink hue. Remarkably, her maroon eyes had returned to their coffee brown. She whispered to J-1, “Forgive me, my boy, but I don’t think I’m going to make it.”

  He wanted to scream, but said, “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “He’s right. We need you.” Norma’s voice trembled. “You have a plan, remember?”

  Niyati’s eyes hazed, as if they visualized more inside them than in front of them. “I was never the key. Right, God? I was only the fingers holding it.”

  “You’re not going to die. That wouldn’t be fair,” J-1 said. “You’ve struggled too long and too hard.”

  “I thought so, too, at first,” Niyati replied. “But I was wrong. God handed me the carrot from the very beginning. Only I didn’t see it.”

  “What carrot?”

  “You, my boy. You were given to me.”

  “Only to keep us apart? What kind of God does that?” J-1 felt sick to his stomach.

  “We were never apart. We will never be apart, just as Jay and I were never apart.” Niyati looked at Norma. “I didn’t see it then. I see it now.”

  Norma felt an immense hole in her slowly fill. Not to the top, never to the top. Enough to bear the grief of losing Rack and Roneel and Broderich. She understood. They were the substance filling the hole. Their smell, their taste, their laughter, their fluttering eyelids. She gasped from the realization.

  “Well, I don’t see it.” J-1’s eyes welled up. “All I see is some holy bully playing cruel tricks.”

  Niyati drew his hand to her cheek. “So much to learn about the human heart. So much to learn.” Her eyes closed.

  “No…” It was more of a moan than a word. J-1 cupped his head in his hands and wept.

  Norma stared at the dead woman. She felt as if she had fallen into a vortex of hopelessness spinning her from side-to-side. Lower and lower and lower.

  There was another explosion. The thump of the WarBots grew louder and closer. “Commander,” the sentry said. “We have to go.”

  Norma continued to stare at Niyati.

  The sentry touched her shoulder. “Commander?”

  Norma turned toward him. Her pulse quickened. Angered. Her vision narrowed into harsh reality. She rose from her knees and shouted to those standing in the courthouse. “All able hands get to your posts!” She grabbed the papers that Niyati had dropped, ripped J-1’s hands away from his face and said, “Can you makes heads of these?”

  “What?” J-1 looked up at her as if he didn’t recognize her.

  “Niyati’s plans. She said you were the key. Can you make heads of her instructions?”

  J-1 was stunned. His maker—his mother—was lying dead on the floor. Murdered by one of the livings and she was asking him this?

  “She was killed because of them. They’re important,” Norma said. “I know it’s rough, automaton, but you’re going to have to hold off your grief until later.”

  Automaton! Even now, in the middle of his sorrow, his loneliness, his confusion she referred to him as little more than a machine. He stood. “From now on, I don’t take orders from you or anyone else.”

  “I saved your ass from being melted,” Norma said. “You owe me.”

  “The only person I owe anything to is dead. The rest of you—Earthlings included—can rot.” He shoved her aside and stepped from the courthouse. The guard aimed his electro-rod at J-1. Norma knocked it away. “Sa
ve your ammo for the WarBots.” Norma ran outside to face Ameri-Inc.’s Armageddon.

  ~~~

  J-1 approached the double doors leading into the tunnels. He glanced around. Half of the apartment buildings were nothing more than mounds of twist and rubble. Little was left of the protective bubble that once covered Pocketsville. Snowflakes intertwined with leather-smelling, oily, dark smoke. WarBots trampled through the greenhouse, tossing plants and Truattans as if they were cornstalks. A band of Truattan soldiers appeared from an alley. They tossed the shuriken-like stormthrowers at one of the WarBots. The machine fell, but two more beamed down from the hovering battleliners. The crack and sizzle of sniper fire rang out from all corners.

  It wasn’t difficult to conclude that the Truattans were going to fall, but J-1 didn’t care who won or lost. Let them all kill themselves, he thought. He returned his attention to the passage door. There were four guards. Three were sprawled on the ground with crushed skulls. The fourth, a woman, was propped against the door, staring at nothing. One of her arms was burnt off at the elbow, and the other was bent sideways midway down the humerus. She saw J-1 and said, “Rudolph, it’s Eloise. Did you find my children?”

  J-1 studied her a second. “No,” he said.

  “When you do, tell them I’ll be home soon.”

  Despite himself, J-1 felt his throat ball up. “I will, Eloise.” He squeezed her shoulder. “Don’t worry.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay…”

  J-1 reached for the gateway door, but stopped. He knew what was behind the door. Darkness. Safety. But it wasn’t those things that he was seeking. It was what was lying beyond it: a carnival on a summer night from two centuries ago; a Ferris wheel lit in brilliant green, yellow and red candescent bulbs; a woman with mocha-colored skin and brown eyes that matched his; a touch, a smile, a stroke of her fingers across the black lock of hair hanging from his left brow. He opened the door and stepped into the tunnel as the carnage behind him raged.

  END OF BOOK I