My jaw dropped. “You.”
—were my parents.
23
Mum looked positively livid. A good foot shorter than my dad, she more than made up for their height difference by the sheer rage dancing over her face.
“Mrs. Brand?” Borrick said, voice rising in a faint squeak.
“Shut it,” she snapped. Eyes bulging, she looked like she wanted to answer him much more profanely—and likely give him a more final order, like perhaps requesting he pitch himself over the edge of the skyscraper headfirst. “I’ll have words for you when I’m done with her, believe me, Mr. Borrick.”
“Her?” I asked, stepping forward. “I have a name, you know.”
“Be quiet,” Mum hissed. “I have had quite enough of you for today, young lady.”
“And you think I haven’t had enough of you?” I countered.
“Mira,” Heidi warned quietly. She clutched my wrist, tugging me about.
I spun, barely keeping myself back from letting fly at her too—I very much wanted to tear my mother apart right now; didn’t Heidi know that she was keeping me from doing so?
Automatons were coming for us. They’d climbed up after us, on the rail or runner or whatever had lifted us to such lofty heights. Now their arms reached up from out of sight, trying to grip the edge of our platform and to heave themselves up—
They could not though. Something seemed to keep them back. Every time one came close, there was a faint flash of blue light, as though the automaton’s arm had connected with an invisible force field and been repelled.
“It’s all right,” said my father, in a stronger voice than I’d heard from him today. “The repulsion field will keep them back.”
“Repulsion field?” I asked, turning around slowly.
He looked at me through the rain, on the other side of the railing atop the Laknurian skyscraper. Not a bit the broken man who had been sat unhappily in his study this morning, only held up because his bones were rigid rather than his muscles possessed any strength, now he stood straight and sure. His expression was unyielding.
In his hand he gripped a metal contraption, like the remote control of a toy car, with a series of dials, and a gem inset at the top. The gem pulsed frantically, on and off with such speed it outpaced even my hammering heart’s beats.
“Hello, Mira,” said Dad. “I’m very sorry that we had to do this.”
“Do this?” I echoed—and then again, angrier, as the full extent of what had happened here came crashing down over my head like the fat, swollen raindrops unloading from the clouds. “This? You're trying to kill me?”
“I am not,” he said calmly.
“Those robots—you’re controlling them, aren’t you? With that thing.” I jabbed at it, not with my finger but Decidian’s Spear. Fortunately there was plenty of gap between us, some twenty feet, so I couldn’t give it, or him, the good, sharp poking he deserved.
“You dare threaten your father,” Mum choked, stepping in front of him.
“It’s fine, Ileara,” said Dad, waving her aside. “Yes, Mira, I’ve been controlling them.”
“You nearly killed us,” I breathed. “You nearly killed me.”
“I did not,” Dad said again, still with perfect calm. “I gave them very specific instructions not to harm any of you. You were to be returned in one piece.”
“Not to harm us?” I asked. “Excuse me?” I grabbed Borrick by the jacket—it was so ridiculously wet now—and shoved him forward. He half-stumbled but kept his footing. “I’m pretty sure you broke Alain’s arm. How is that you keeping us from harm?”
Dad’s expression faltered. He glanced momentarily at the remote control in his hands.
Regaining his composure, he said, “I was very careful with my instructions. The automatons were not to harm any of you. Now, if by some accident one of you did get hurt …”
“By accident?” I asked. “One of your robots nearly crushed my head!”
Dad again lost his composure. His glance at the remote control was longer now, as though unconvinced that he had set the right instructions on it.
Mum stepped forward again. “You will not talk to your father like that, Mira.”
I stuck my fingers up at her. “Choke on that, why don’t you.”
She gasped. For a second—a single, glorious moment in time—she was so utterly flabbergasted that she couldn’t bring herself to say a word.
Then she exploded. Hurling herself across the way at me, she cried, “You have always been so obstinate! Eighteen years, you have tested me—eighteen bloody years!”
“Ileara!” Dad cried, grabbing for her arms.
“And eighteen years I was beaten down by you,” I shot back, marching forward to meet her—
“Mira, nooo—!” Borrick cried, grabbing for me too. Heidi, on the other side, snagged my other arm and held me back. “Think about what you’re doing! That’s your mother!”
“Some mother,” I growled. The gap between us had shrunk to little more than five or six feet now.
It would be so easy to vault over the rail and launch myself at her.
“And some daughter,” Mum snarled back, her accent thick. She shook in my dad’s arms, soaked through, her hair plastered to her head and neck like a tight-fitting cowl. “Your entire childhood, you defied your father and me. Well, I have had enough of it, Mira, you hear me? I have had ENOUGH!”
Her last bellow echoed into the night, silencing us.
Rain pattered down.
Automatons skulked below. Their bodies clanged and dinged. Arms reached up, more of them, grappling to heave themselves up onto our platform. Flashes of blue light kept them back. Nevertheless, their insistence continued to grow.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “How did you find us here?”
Mum’s eyes glinted. “You must know your father was a tracker.”
“You can track a person through the Entanglement?” Borrick asked. He was not as horrified as I was; rather, he sounded almost awed, his next question likely to be, “How does it work?”
“No,” said Mum. “Your forest. Got yourselves caught in a little trap, didn’t you? We barely missed you.” Eyes flashing, she growled at Heidi and Borrick, “It’s a shame the mother bird didn’t get back quick enough to feed the two of you manipulators to its chicks.”
“Manipulators?” Heidi retorted hotly. “We didn’t manipulate Mira; she chose to help us. And no wonder, looking at your method of parenting! Someone failed to read Dr. Spock.”
Mum’s eyes bulged. “You cocky little—” She bit off the equally rude insult I was certain was about to come from her. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you to respect your elders?”
“Respect is earned,” said Heidi. “You have done nothing to acquire mine.”
“How’d you get to the forest?” I demanded.
“Money talks,” said Mum.
I gritted my teeth. Damned service station clerk—or someone else, perhaps one of the higher-ups running the thing—had sold us out to them. And why not? The name Brand commanded a great deal in the Seeker world. Just flaunt it about, and a bit of my parents’ own vast stash of coup, and my parents could’ve bought my location easily.
“You’ve surprised me, Mira,” said Dad carefully. He was looking at me in the same way as Borrick had this morning, like I was a puzzle for him to work out.
“By running away from you yet again? Get used to it, because if somehow you drag me back home, I guarantee it’s going to happen again and again after this.”
He frowned. “Of course I’m not talking about that. Rather, I mean the Entanglement. What did you do to it?”
It was my turn to frown. “Sorry?”
“You … manipulated it somehow, from inside. Didn’t you? The technician said that your destination was set to Laknuria … but somehow you went to Ko’Nok, where we followed you, and then came straight here.” His confusion grew. “How? And why?”
I bit my bottom lip. Ko’Nok—that was a cont
inent here on the same world, if I remembered the million-world clock’s readout correctly, but one several thousand kilometers to the west, sprawled out upon the equator. But why had the Antecessors sent me there, of all places, before allowing us through to Laknuria itself?
It hit me almost as soon as I’d conceived the thought: why else but entertainment itself? They were watching at all times. They’d know my parents were fighting to come after me, that they’d succeed. Why pit them directly against me here in Laknuria when they could draw this out, at a little bit of extra peril, by forcing the three of us along a pointless detour where we could be ensnared by vines and almost eaten by birds—and, I realized now, narrowly dodge my parents.
“It was you,” I said, “moving in the forest underneath us.”
Dad nodded. “That’s where my tracking skills actually got put to work. Not that following you was difficult, the damage you left behind you.” He went on, “We just missed you. Fortunately, the connection you manipulated from Ko’Nok to Laknuria was still in place.” He marveled at me. “How did you do it, Mira?”
“Do I detect a hint of awe in your voice?” I asked. “Have my parents realized that I’m actually capable, and not in need of their endless mollycoddling?”
Dad opened his mouth to answer me—
Mum got in first. “The Seeker world is dangerous,” she said.
“This world certainly is,” I said, “if only because you set murderbots after me.” I nodded at the controller in Dad’s hands, at the same moment as a particularly violent automaton smashed hard on the invisible force field keeping them out. The sound was like a fist against a very thick pane of glass, a violent THUNK! The blue-white flash that came with it was like a pulse of lightning.
The automaton reared up. It loosed a screaming mechanical whine.
Borrick eyed the edge of the platform nervously. “Mira …”
“We came here to stop you,” Mum said, “to bring you home, and to put an end to this—”
“Madness?” I finished for her. “Funny how Seeking is madness when I want to do it, but you supported Dad all his life, including him apparently becoming some sort of king to this wet place—” Again, I indicated the remote control in his white-knuckled, soaking wet grip. “And you supported Manny too—guided him into it, probably from before he was even old enough to make the conscious decision to become a Seeker.”
“And look what happened to him,” Mum said, her bottom lip curling. “He was successful. He was good. He was safe. Then he went with you.”
“Manny’s decisions were his own,” I snapped, biting back from the fresh wave of hurt roiling through me. “I didn’t make them, he did. If I could have stopped him, I would have. And if the only way to have done that was to take his place? I’d have done that too.”
“Liar,” Mum snarled. “You didn’t even like your brother.”
“Because when I was a kid, he was just like you. But guess what? He grew up. He pulled his head out of his backside, wiped the smarmy grin off his face, dialed back the smug attitude, and saw me for what I am, instead of what you’ve tried to make me.”
Another smashing sound as the automatons rattled at the force field keeping them out. Dad’s head jerked round at the noise. His mouth dropped—and then he leaned forward, over his remote control, and began to frantically press at the buttons.
The gem at the top began to pulse even quicker, moving from a lightshow representation of my own heartbeat to something resembling a hummingbird’s.
“We never tried to make you anything,” Mum said. “We just wanted to keep you safe.”
“So you set a horde of killer robots on me.”
“To get you and bring you home!”
“They tried to kill us.”
“You’re intentionally misunderstanding—”
There was an almighty THWACK!
I turned, as my eardrums seemed to burst a second time—
A vast collection of automatons had melded into Frankenstein monsters. Now easily as large as a single-decker bus, they hammered away on the force field with their contorting amalgam of arms, like some Lovecraftian horror made metal.
The largest of them was almost birdlike. Perched on the very edge of our platform, it had easily two dozen monstrous arms, spanning more than twenty feet. It was these arms that had come down on the force field now—
Bright blue light flashed, turned white—
And then there was a sound like a chandelier breaking, after being hurled down a mountain—and the force field broke.
24
The automatons had made things while we were arguing it out. The metal carapaces were a great boon, of course. But they’d no emotions, no thought processes other than their orders – and not a care for me fussing at my parents and them fussing right back.
So when the force field ripped apart, with the noise of a thousand glass teardrops shattering on a ballroom floor, the automatons were not frozen with the momentary shock that glued me to where I stood.
They surged in through the gap. Now that a breach had been torn, the entire force field was visible: a blueish-white, translucent sheet that formed a dome about our platform, and the tops of the skyscrapers where my parents were. That hole smoked, a bitter scent that warred with the pungent gasoline reek of Laknuria—
“Move it,” Borrick breathed, gripping me by the arm and pulling me into motion. “Now.”
I obeyed, legs moving before I could think about giving them the order. I staggered backward, away from the edge of the platform. The backs of my legs slammed the fence—
I managed to turn the backward trip into a stride, carrying me over rather than bowling me flat—
The automaton forced itself through the maw of the broken force field. The wound in it widened, more of those glassy smashing sounds filling the air as it shoved its body through the growing chasm. Blue-white light flashed where its body drove inward, the last vestiges of the force field fighting to keep it back as it brought its full frame into view, looking like a huge hawk whose wings were made of flexing cables and tubes, all turning like a monster from HP Lovecraft’s Necronomicon leering over us—
“What are you doing?” I roared at Dad as the five of us scrabbled backward. “Turn that thing off!”
“I’m trying!” he shouted back. “I can’t make it listen to me!”
“Oh, so it's like Mira, then,” my mother muttered, almost lost in the breaking madness.
“You’re not controlling it?” I cried.
“No! It’s overridden my control! I can’t make it stop!”
The automaton was stuck, the large, blocky bulk of its unusually constructed body, made of so many different shapes all contorted together, found itself in too narrow a space to pass.
This version of the automaton, the nightmare amalgam it had configured itself into out of dozens and dozens of smaller component robots, had a distinct head of sorts. It swung around. A collection of bodies that formed an actual mouth opened, revealing a dark, steely chasm into a core alive with red, pulsing lights and churning, twisting motors—
“SUBMIT,” it boomed in an electrifying screech—
And it pushed—
The force field finally broke entirely apart. With a noise like an explosion of glass, the force field shattered. Its blue-white glow vanished—and the birdlike automaton rushed in on clawed legs, shrieking a battle cry.
“Get back!” I shouted, my fear giving way to survival instincts.
Blocking the way between my parents and the automatons, I brought Decidian’s Spear to bear—
Automatons spilled in under the hawk like robot’s legs. They’d also combined into larger amalgams while they were blocked from reaching us—from reaching me—because it was quite clear, by the high-pitched mechanical whines of “MIRA BRAND” that, although my dad no longer had control over these things, they were still operating on the instruction he’d given them: to stop me.
An automaton leapt at us, hooked claws extended
. It screeched, its motors whining, “AAAAAHH!” as it soared over my head.
I ducked—
Too late. A white-hot burst of pain lit my face on fire.
I clapped a hand to it. Feet frozen, my escape paused, I sucked in a desperate breath. Had it ripped half my face off?
It was still there, of course.
But when I brought my hand away from my face, it was thick with blood.
Dad and Mum stared in horror. Heidi too, Feruiduin’s Cutlass drawn, and Borrick.
“Mira,” Mum croaked.
I resisted the urge to shout at her—to bellow, “You did this,” as I waved my bloody hand.
Instead, I said, “Alain—take my parents, and get them out of here.”
He hesitated. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Heidi: “We fighting then?”
“No choice.” I ran a hand down my cheek, smearing the fresh river of blood away. Gritting my teeth, I lifted Decidian’s Spear, moving back to back with Heidi. “Cover my six?”
“SUBMIIIIT!” screamed the hawkbot lumbering across the rooftops at us, a growing army of smaller automatons scuttling between its feet to come for us.
The clawed amalgam that had cut my face a moment ago was coming back around.
I planted my feet.
The rain poured.
Automatons closed—
“MIRA BRAAAAAAND!”
They leapt—
And I swung.
25
You know how when you watch an action movie, the choreography is most obvious at times where the hero gets mobbed for multiple assailants at once? The hero somehow makes it through, not because they’ve necessarily got the skills to outdo their adversaries in a six-on-one, but because, when you really look at what their enemies are doing, there’s this subtle turn-taking going on. One fighter sweeps in, exchanges blows; they’re parried, knocked back, and others come in to fill their place. Repeat this several times, to high octane music, dialing up the tension as the bad guys find an opening, until the hero either finds their edge, if it’s the final act of the movie, or, if there’s still some forty minutes to go, have them suffer a false defeat.
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