by Lori Bond
Shutting my eyes hadn’t shut out the battle. Bullets hitting cars, concrete, and metal knights make a lot of noise, and every few seconds there would be another explosion as each side blew stuff up. There was a louder explosion from somewhere off to the right. The car rocked again, and I squeezed myself into a tighter ball with my arms up over my head and around my ears. The smell of rubber burning and something like burnt bacon filled my nose, and I gagged. There were no pigs at my school. The only meat within miles of this parking lot was human.
I couldn’t focus with robot knights and SWAT teams doing their best to kill each other. I told myself over and over to think, to focus on getting away. Unfortunately, I had nothing. Much to my surprise, I was not all that great under pressure when that pressure threatened my life. Apparently, high stakes academic testing had not prepared me for this kind of situation. Neither had reading two or three biographies of superheroes or the passages in history textbooks describing famous battles between good and evil. Now, when despite all odds I somehow found myself in the middle of the kind of epic battle that the networks would broadcast about for weeks, all I wanted was to crawl away using the cars as shields. It was a fine, if cowardly, plan—except for the part where not a single voluntary muscle in my body moved. For the first time, I understood what people meant when they talked about being paralyzed by fear.
“Elaine!” a voice called again. It hit me that someone had been screaming my name over the din of battle for some time. I cracked one eye open a micrometer. The cute guy in the suit had crawled under the car with me. His impeccable clothes were covered in dirt, and the guy’s dark curls were disheveled in a manner I would have found irresistible had I not been about to die.
“Are you okay? Are you hurt?” the guy asked me.
I shook my head although I wasn’t sure which question I answered. Maybe I wasn’t hurt yet, but I was not even sort of okay.
“I need backup now!” the guy yelled into thin air. “Ten minutes isn’t good enough. We’re pinned under an attack with a firefight all around us.”
I didn’t know who the guy was trying to talk to, but even with my half-paralyzed brain, I assumed he was some kind of agent. He looked kind of young for FBI, but most of what I knew about them came from streaming old X-Files episodes.
“We have to get her out of here,” the guy yelled.
I hoped he meant me, but I didn’t get a chance to ask. The huge pickup above us seemed to lift into the air. The knight with the cape held it for just a moment before tossing it at an armored vehicle trying to pull into our row of the parking lot. The vehicle didn’t explode, but it swerved and plowed into six or seven cars before knocking over a light pole.
“I’ll be seeing to her safety,” said the knight. He reached down and picked me up as if I was a rag doll.
“No!” cute guy yelled, but the knight ignored him. “Sir Kai, protect,” he said, and then the knight tossed me up into the air.
For the first time since the guy in the gray suit had pulled out his gun, I started to scream, long and loud. The knight had tossed me higher than I would have thought a metal robot could throw an average-sized girl. I seemed to soar above the battle with the entire scene spread out before me. The battle was concentrated on our section of the parking lot, but smaller battles raged all over campus. Even the ducks were not spared when a knight tossed a SWAT guy into their pond.
I reached the apex of the throw and hurtled back down to Earth. I had not appreciated just how high the thing had thrown me until I started plummeting to the ground. In any other situation, one that didn’t end with me splatting like a cracked egg on the pavement, I would have swooned at the panoramic view. The artist in me loved how at this height the details seemed to fill in as I fell. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like I was going to live long enough to ever draw again.
I had just enough time to find it ironic that I was going to die from falling onto the top of a burning SUV and not from the firefight raging below me when bits of metal flew at me from every angle encasing my entire body in a thick metal covering. Once again I’d been wrong. Being wrapped in a thick pitch-dark coffin while plummeting to the ground was the thing that really scared me. For a second I wondered if I had passed out, the darkness and fear were so complete.
Even though I couldn’t see a thing, I felt myself falling. I tried to ball my fists up and bang on the walls, but I wasn’t in a box like I had thought. Instead, I’d been encased in a metal suit with individual arms, legs, even fingers. None of my muscles worked.
Before I disintegrated into a ball of hopeless panic, a digitized voice said into the void, “Initializing.” Screens appeared around my head, covered in readouts that, although in English, meant nothing to me. Somehow, I had gotten encased in one of the suits of armor. An image appeared like a window in the armor’s helmet. I could see and, when the audio came online, hear the chaos. I watched the ground race toward my face at an alarming rate.
“Ground proximity warning,” said the electronic voice. “Initializing flight now.”
Rockets I hadn’t realized were on my back ignited. The suit banked and avoided slamming me face first into the concrete parking lot. We took off to the left until my suit and I landed next to the knight with the cape.
“Percival,” popped a new voice into my helmet. It was clearer than the rest of the other noises, so I guessed that it was being broadcast direct to my helmet and not being filtered in from outside. “You and Kai get her out of here,” said the new voice. It was vaguely familiar but not someone I could place. “I’m sending Red Knight and G1 and G2 as escorts.”
“Yes, my lord,” said the electronic voice, Percival. With no action on my part, my right arm popped up to the side and shot a laser beam at a SWAT guy, slicing his gun in half. This didn’t bother the guy, but it freaked me out. The guy reached into a holster, pulled out a pistol, and shot bullets at my armor I didn’t feel.
“Right away, my lord,” continued Percival. The rockets on my back ignited again, and I shot into the air. Three other knights flew off in a tight circle around me. As things exploded in the air beside us, the three knights dropped back to use their various weapons against the people shooting at us. My suit, though, shot straight up until the battle raging below was nothing more than a distant pinprick. Even my school looked like a small square on a suburban checkerboard.
I had thought we would stop once we were clear, but my suit banked and zoomed away from the battle, my school, my neighborhood, my parents, and my home.
“Uh, Percival, right?” I asked the suit.
“Yes, miss.”
“Um, where are we going?”
“Home,” said Percival.
After all that had happened, I didn’t quite have the courage to ask whose home.
3
WHERE I’M KIDNAPPED FOR MY “OWN GOOD”
A FLIGHT THAT WOULD HAVE TAKEN FOUR TO SIX HOURS ON A COMMERCIAL jet only took forty-five minutes when strapped into a knight-shaped tin can. Forty-five minutes, though, is a long time when you’re freaked out and your mind is working overtime. It turned out I didn’t have the chatty kind of semi-autonomous flying battle armor. Percival ignored me and my questions for the entire flight.
Once the threat of imminent death disappeared, my brain rebooted, and I had a pretty good idea whose medieval armor I was wearing and where we might be headed. There was only one guy weird, rich, and brilliant enough to have built himself a battalion of medieval robot knights.
As we flew over Manhattan and our destination loomed into sight, I realized I had guessed right. Although technically named Keep Tower, the tabloids and most people called it the Rook since it looked like an eighty-five story chess piece. Built by bazillionaire Arthur Keep, it was rumored to be the base of his superhero alter ego, Pendragon, and his army of knights.
Percival flew me down toward a giant parapet that ran around the building about fifteen stories from the top. Unlike a normal skyscraper with its never-ending panes of glass,
the Rook had been faced with stone rumored to be two feet thick. Last year some magazine had named Keep Tower number one on its list of the “7 Wonders of the Modern World.” I’d never seen the building in person before, but it was living up to the hype.
We landed on the parapet, which was decked out like the ultimate roof-top garden. A swimming pool that resembled a moat ran along the inner wall, and I had to wait for a drawbridge, an actual drawbridge, to lower. I tried to hang back, to make my armor turn around and fly me back home, but I had no more effect here on the knight than I had back at school. Like some sort of puppet, the Percival armor marched me over the drawbridge, under a portcullis I assumed was for show, and into a medieval great hall.
My armor stopped in the center and stuck my arms out to my side. The armor once again disintegrated and reformed in front of me. Without a word, a wave, or any kind of acknowledgment, it marched off through a door to the left. It actually marched.
“Thanks, Percival,” I called out just as it passed through the Gothic arch. I wanted to sound sarcastic since Percival had ignored my begging pleas to take me home, but the armor had saved my life. I sounded grateful. Tired and on the border of hysterics, but grateful. “Thanks, Percival,” I said again in a quieter voice, more for me than for the knight that had already left the room.
“Kai,” said a voice from my right.
I jumped and whirled around. A lovely woman in an evening gown stood in another Gothic doorway I hadn’t even noticed. My hand grabbed at my heart, but it wasn’t like I could reach in my chest to slow it down. “What?” was all I got out.
“Kai,” said the woman. “That particular knight was Sir Kai.”
“But, someone—Pendragon?—he talked to a Percival, and Percival talked back.”
The woman nodded and walked over. “Percival is my baby, my holy grail. I built him from scratch when Arthur first got the idea for his knights, but Percival is only the AI that controls all the knights. You were riding in Sir Kai.”
“Okay,” I said, not sure how to respond.
“I’m Ginny,” said the woman. She moved as if to hug me, but then in the middle of the hug seemed to change her mind. She extended her hand.
I took it and shook. Ginny looked unimpressed with my weak grip, but I had just escaped a firefight, flown halfway across the country, and now stood in front of one of the three smartest people in the world. I felt I’d earned the right to be overwhelmed. “Ginny,” I repeated. “You’re Ginny, the model turned tech mogul, CEO of Keep Consolidated, Arthur Keep’s …” Here I trailed off. There were so many different accounts online on what Ginny was. My mind jumped around trying to figure out how to finish the sentence.
“Wife,” Ginny said for me. “But most people don’t realize we’re married.” She gave me an odd look though, like I should have been one of those few.
My eyes shot open, but I managed to keep my jaw from dropping on the floor. None of the rumors ever had them married. Clearly, they were in some kind of relationship since they lived together, but they were so private, no one had suspected they’d gotten married at some point. “Do you have any idea why I’m here?” I asked instead of commenting on what had to be the biggest gossip of the decade.
“No, Pendragon dashed out of here with no explanation, but I’m sure Arthur will tell us when he gets back.” She waved her hand, and a screen appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the air. A little dot flew over midtown headed straight toward the big circle labeled “Rook.”
“Can I call my parents then?” Or a news crew or the police, I added in my head.
“I’m not sure that’s a good idea, all things considered,” Ginny began, but I interrupted her.
“Have I been kidnapped or something?” I asked. “Because it’s not like my parents can pay any kind of ransom.”
Ginny turned to me, confusion etched in every line of her face.
“Not kidnapped,” said a voice behind us. “Rescued.”
I whirled around in time to catch Pendragon’s landing. It was the one he always did for the TV cameras where he slammed into the ground his giant sword brandished as if he was about to slay a dragon. Behind him two more knights landed just as hard holding spears and shields like some sort of royal honor guard.
“Arthur!” shrieked Ginny from behind me. “How many times do I have to tell you not to ruin the floor?”
The Pendragon armor slunk off Arthur Keep in a myriad of different large chunks, the chain mail dragging on the floor, and I got my first real look at my rescuer. Pendragon didn’t have a secret identity like a lot of superheroes like the Red Ranger and the Defender. Everyone knew Arthur Keep controlled the armored knight even if most people weren’t sure if he physically rode in him or not. It was kind of hard to miss the knights flying out of his various homes. Arthur Keep, though, was almost as much of a recluse as the people who hid behind masks. He did go to some Society and charity events with Ginny, and he sometimes showed his face at his family company, Keep Consolidated, where he had some sort of position besides owning most of it.
But nearly every picture I’d ever seen of the man was of him on the red carpet standing in the background while the paparazzi took pictures of Ginny and asked her questions about her clothes. Ginny might have built and sold Face-to-Face, the pivotal software that brought video conferencing to the twenty-first century, and she might have been headhunted from Face-to-Face to now run Keep Consolidated, a huge multi-national, but at those events she was still the supermodel so famous that even now that she was a big executive, people called her by a single name. I had no idea what her last name even was.
Whenever I had looked at those pictures online, I’d been too busy drooling over Ginny’s designer fashions to pay much attention to her bored bland-looking husband in the understated suit holding her purse in the background. Now Arthur seemed to fill the room with a presence he didn’t possess in public. It wasn’t kingly exactly, but there was something noble about him despite his clothes. I had expected Arthur Keep to be well-dressed. I didn’t think he’d wear a suit while flying around in armor, but I had at least expected him to be stylish, not look like a beach tourist had wandered from the pool and somehow gotten lost in a Manhattan medieval castle.
Arthur was a head taller than Ginny even though she was model statuesque, and that meant his Hawaiian shirt seemed to go on for acres. Turtles twining around pineapples are never a good look, but they did nothing for his cargo pants with the half-closed pockets and tools sticking out every opening. Arthur didn’t even wear normal cargo pants, which I might have been able to get over, but the kind that had zippers at the knees so the pants could be turned into shorts. Arthur was one of the richest men in the world, but apparently, he couldn’t afford separate pants and shorts.
I was disappointed despite the way Arthur’s smile at me seemed to brighten the room. Superheroes were supposed to be larger than life, not real people with gray hairs and some wrinkles—and not just in his clothes—and eyes exactly the same boring color as mine. Maybe it was from having watched too many unrealistic TV shows, but I felt like the hero that had saved me from a firefight at my school shouldn’t have been squinting at me like he might need glasses.
A piece of armor knocked against the floor, drawing my attention away from staring at Arthur Keep’s face. The armor flew itself out the door Sir Kai had marched through. I wouldn’t have thought it possible for flying disassembled robotic pieces of armor to appear abashed, but somehow this group did as if it could feel the glare Ginny directed at it. The honor guard stayed behind in the hall, turning as if guarding the front door we’d all flown in through.
“I apologize for the rough landing, my lady,” said Percival from speakers that had to be hidden in the walls. Other than the floating computer screens, nothing in the great hall would have looked out of place in a British stronghold during the ninth century. “We took the final banking turn too steep.”
“Oh, I’m aware this isn’t your fault,” Ginny said. She mar
ched right past me and stuck a finger into Arthur’s sheepish face. “You were showing off for Elaine.”
Arthur kissed her finger and then dodged around her accusing hand to kiss her cheek. Pulling her arm into his, he steered her away from the fractured marble floor now crisscrossed with a virtual spider web of fissures. “It’s barely cracked,” said Arthur. He grabbed my arm and pulled me with them. “Has Ginny given you the tour yet?” he asked me. He bounced on his toes, his clear enthusiasm almost catching. If I hadn’t still been shell-shocked from being flown half-way across the country, I might have started getting excited too.
When I shook my head, he said, “Well, come along.” He propelled me through the door, but I stopped in shock at the threshold. The room had huge cathedral ceilings at least three stories high and a giant illuminated stained glass rose window on what I was sure was an interior wall. The furnishings were modern and comfortable and yet somehow matched the medieval architecture.
Ahead of me, Arthur interrupted Ginny’s continued scolding to ask why she was so dressed up.
“My cousin’s wedding reception,” said Ginny. “We need to leave in an hour.”
“Didn’t we go to her wedding last year? In India?”
“Yes, of course, but tonight is the New York reception for all their friends in town. Remember they decided to have one after all?” Ginny’s eyes narrowed. “Do not tell me you forgot. I have it marked on every calendar, and Percival has been reminding you every day for the past week.”
“Oh, sweets,” said Arthur in a miserable tone that did not match the ecstatic expression on his face. “I can’t go anymore.” He waved his hand and more of the mid-air screens appeared in front of him. “I have to stay home and try to figure out why the Dreki and LANCE are so interested in Elaine. Such a shame. You know how much I love going out.”