I breathed a sigh of relief, sagging back against the building we’d come out by.
“Thank … goodness … for that.”
“It’s still crawling around back there,” Heidi murmured. “I need the Instrumentum Aeternitatis.”
“We’ll go back for it,” I said. “I promise.”
“Right,” she said dubiously. Stowing the cutlass, she said, “Let’s move. We’re drawing attention.”
Sure enough, a couple of men were loitering, eyeing us up. Separate to each other, they didn’t leer in a threatening way—they were quite small, really, a pair of unfortunate Japanese stereotypes—skinny, glasses, probably working tech jobs—and even if they were, with Decidian’s Spear in my hand—still full length—and Feruiduin’s Cutlass available to Heidi, I fancied our chances if anyone did try to start anything.
Nevertheless, we had just popped out of a wall. Both of us were soaking wet. Both of us were bleeding too, me more profusely: the cut running up my cheek was still oozing, might even need stitches. (I’d been lucky not to lose my eye, honestly.) All in all, we were lucky to have only drawn a couple of eyes rather than all of Tokyo.
I led us across the street, cutting through a gap in the traffic. “What time is it even here?” I asked.
“No idea,” Heidi murmured. “Early though. Maybe three a.m.? Four?”
“Haven’t they ever heard of sleep?”
“It’s Tokyo,” she said. “Look at all the neon signs. It’s like the city is modeled on a casino. Of course they haven’t heard of sleep.”
I wrinkled my nose. “I thought it was just a load of computer geeks and anime geeks here.”
“Way to stereotype.” Heidi pressed her lips into a line—perhaps wondering what stereotypes I had for her, seeing as she was also of Asian descent. Instead, she asked, “Look, how are you planning on—?”
She got no time to ask anymore.
Behind us, there was a cataclysmic noise. A rumbling roar, it shook the ground beneath us.
I turned, expecting to see the city shaking as some quake rocked it, one we’d been unfortunate to arrive just in time for—
What I saw was much worse.
A massive, roiling red antipode had been opened on the rear of the building we’d arrived by. It warbled, edges indistinct and blurry—
And from it, rising to an even more staggering height than ever—
“MIRA BRAAAAAAAND.”
—came the hawk.
27
The hawk-shaped automaton lumbered out of the gate. There were no other automatons with it now, no smaller units spilling out around the red-tinged edges through which it came. Apparently every last one that had pursued me down the Laknurian skyscraper had merged with it before it cut a hole through to Earth.
Heidi spewed a string of profanities. “How did it follow us?”
“It must have some kind of talisman of its own,” I said, panicked.
“It must be one big talisman,” Heidi said. “That thing is nearly forty feet tall!”
And that was just the height. Its wingspan, comprised of so many different little automatons all clinging and melded together, had to be twice that. Just now, its bulky, uneven wings were folded up, the cables and arms coiling and uncoiling like tiny worms gripped to it, waiting for something else to latch onto.
Crazy to think that, less than—what, thirty minutes ago?—those arms had been massive, with a ridiculous reach. Now they were inconsequential compared to the size of the hawk the automatons had combined to form.
“MIRA BRAAAAND,” it boomed, echoing throughout the city. “CEEEEEAAAAAASE.”
“Cease what?” I asked. “Running from my parents? When they set something like you on me? Doesn’t that seem a bit backward?”
“I don’t think it’s listening,” said Heidi.
No—but it helped to get things off my chest. I needed to let that out somehow—and uncloud my thoughts. Because how in the world were we ever going to deal with this thing now?
The hawk began its awkward, ungainly walk across the road. Traffic flowed around its feet. Drivers laid on horns. Some had stopped, wound their windows down to look out with expressions bordering on wonder and horror—like a movie had come to life here in their city, a robotic kaiju.
A car swerved to avoid the cables trailing down from the hawk’s body—
It crashed into the hawk’s foot. The bonnet crumpled—the windscreen shattered, glass pinging everywhere—
The hawk stopped. It lowered, peering down, so its gargantuan head—easily twice the size of the car—could peer into the driver’s seat.
The driver stared back—
“Move!” I shouted, already putting one foot in front of the other.
The hawk opened its huge beak, revealing the red hellscape inside—
The driver bolted. Throwing his seatbelt off, in one motion, he opened the door in another, and then he stumbled out into the road.
Just in time, too. Automatons began to peel off of the hawk’s legs now. Returning to their singular forms, they dropped down onto the street with heavy thunks, cratering the tarmac. Then they leapt at the car, began to pull it into pieces—
The driver gripped his head. He shouted something—I’d imagine to the effect of, “Stop! That’s my car!”—and then one of the automatons twisted in his direction, its razor-tipped grippers clacking in the air having just cut cleanly through the door, and the driver ran.
“Mira?” Heidi prompted, as the hawk continued to pad toward us. The automatons tearing apart the car left it behind, leaping back up to its legs to recombine with it. “Any ideas? It’s getting closer.”
I could only stare in horror. Where the city was suddenly even more alive than ever, people screaming and running, others pressing their heads out of doors before ducking back in, the flow of traffic weaving madly about the stoppages and the hawk’s slow-moving legs, I was totally frozen.
“CEEEAAAASE.”
The hawk crossed the intersection—
A traffic light strayed into its path. It broke apart, the metal pole it was held on snapping like it was nothing more than a toothpick.
“Mira!” Heidi barked. “Plan, now!”
“I don’t have one!” I cried.
“Well, then I hope you like running.” She grabbed me by the arm. “Come on!” And then she dragged me into motion, pulling me down the neon-lit street, behind others who were running full-pelt, around people who’d stopped to stare, their smartphones out and recording—
“What are you doing?” I yelled. “This is no time to be filming! Get out of here!”
“Forget them!” said Heidi. “How are we getting out of here?”
“I—I don’t know! If it can cut gates, it can just keep following us.”
“So we duck out of here where it can’t see us.”
“And leave it to ravage Tokyo in search of me?”
An almighty CRASH echoed behind us.
I pulled my arm out of Heidi’s grip, turning.
The hawk was moving down this street now. So many neon signs, all over the place: atop storefronts, jutting out from buildings, long vertical things that were held up on metal struts; they were everywhere, so luminous that even on the clearest of nights all the stars would be outshone.
Perhaps not after this night though. The hawk spread its wings—and the neon signs were ripped down as it went. Whole buildings were ripped open, the metal steel/obduridium compound much stronger than brick. Gaping wounds were torn in the facades—and still the hawk showed no signs of slowing.
“No,” I breathed.
“MIRA BRAAAAAND,” it boomed, low, echoing throughout the city.
It wanted me.
I was the only hope we had of stopping this.
But if I gave myself up …
The image of its churning motors flashed in my mind again.
I’d be ground into pulp.
Heidi grabbed for my back pocket.
“What are you—?”
/>
“The Tide of Ages,” she said, wrenching it free. “Can’t you use it? Turn back time, to before it came here?”
“It doesn’t work like that,” I said.
“Try!” She thrust it into my open palms.
I stared at it, pale-faced, terrified. The wave gently swirling within it moved sedately, as though entirely unaware of everything that was happening out here.
“Try!” Heidi ordered again.
I shook the Tide of Ages—
Nothing happened.
She snatched it off of me. Rattling it about in her hands like it was a snow globe, she clenched her teeth. “Why—won’t—you—work?”
“I think it activates only in times of great need,” I said.
“And this isn’t that?”
Another booming crash. The hawk had trampled a car. The driver had just scrambled free—but he lay on the street, hands over his head.
A cable trailed him—he flinched—
But the hawk only lumbered on.
“MIRA BRAAAAAND,” it rumbled. “CEEEEEAAAAASE. SUBMITTT.”
Its wings flexed—another wave of neon lights exploded—the exteriors of the next row of buildings were torn off. Darkness filled most, but there were lights on here and there. In one, a man sat in a bathtub, a loofah on a stick gripped between his shoulders. He gaped, horrified—he’d been only feet from being ripped out of the building, crushed under the brick façade down raining down on the streets.
People were running. A man—one of those walking stereotypes who’d galvanized us into motion—stopped. Hair awry, glasses askew, he said something in quick, panicked Japanese.
I shook my head. “I’m sorry—I don’t speak—”
CRASH!
Another round of lights exploding—
The man shot a terrified look over his shoulder. Then he barged past us, sprinting away.
“We have to stop this,” said Heidi.
“I know,” I snapped.
My heart was right in my throat, thumping madly. I felt sick.
So much adrenaline surging through me.
But what was there to do? Wrap the line launcher around its legs and bring it down, like an AT-AT in an old Star Wars flick Carson had kindly ‘educated me’ on during a well-earned couple of days’ downtime earlier this summer. Then what? Hack through all the automatons that made it up until its massive body was broken down to its constituent pieces and destroyed? There had to be hundreds of them in there!
There wasn’t anything I could do to stop this thing.
Nausea swept me.
I was powerless this time. Powerless to stop this thing from laying the city to waste.
And then—
A thought—a hope.
I was powerless.
But there were others who were not. Others who were watching this right now—who’d manufactured this whole situation in the first place.
The Antecessors.
28
Breaking from Heidi, I stepped forward—
“Mira, what are you—?”
“I KNOW YOU’RE WATCHING ME!” I bellowed into the night. “YOU’VE BEEN WATCHING THIS WHOLE THING, HAVEN’T YOU? JUST LIKE ALWAYS. WELL, I KNOW YOU’RE OUT THERE!”
“Mira—?” Heidi called. “What are you—?”
“YOU BROUGHT ALL THIS ABOUT! NOW YOU NEED TO FIX IT! PEOPLE ARE GOING TO DIE HERE! SO TAKE YOUR STUPID ROBOT AND SEND IT BACK TO WHERE IT CAME FROM!”
The hawk lurched forward. A string of traffic lights crossed the road, gripped on a metal beam running across the lanes. They were all green right now—
Then the robot lurched through it, smashing them apart. The lights winked out at the same moment as they went flying, clattering onto the pavement in smoking heaps.
“DO SOMETHING!” I roared. “FIX THIS MESS!”
Still the hawk came. Slow and heavy and blundering, step after step it followed me—would keep following me.
Most of the cars had been abandoned, their occupants run screaming. At this point, Heidi and I were some of the last left on the street, or at least this part of it. A couple of hangers-on stayed until it was much too close though, smartphones pointed up at it, filming the hulking beast.
Someone in a car slammed the pedal to the metal. It shuddered forward in the traffic, at the hawk, smashing into its foot, crumpling on impact.
The hawk leered down.
Automatons unpeeled, leaping onto the vehicle’s roof. They tugged at the top, ripping the car roof open like it was nothing more than a tin of sardines—
The aggravated occupant, a particularly heavyset elderly woman, sat up in her seat. She spat off a slew of what I could only assume were Japanese obscenities. Her handbag, she swung at the automatons trying to reach it to grab her.
The first reared back as her bag swung into its grabbing arm, knocking it off course. It looked almost surprised at that—but then another leapt in to the car, landing on the passenger seat. It had hooks to grapple with. They tore open the upholstery, spilling foam out.
A pair of thin, wound cables spurted out. They jerked around the handbag’s handle, pulled it hard—
It soared in an arc away from her.
The woman’s affronted look only grew darker. She appeared to be about to bang on the automaton’s hull with her fists—but then the hawk, leering down above her, boomed a roar. She looked up, annoyance turning to slack-jawed horror at the maw and the churning grinders within—
She hopped out of her car via the brand new open top, and hightailed it down the street, clutching one hand to the top of her head like her hair was a wig.
The automatons ripped apart her car as she fled, flinging its doors aside, turning the body work into scrap.
“This is chaos,” Heidi breathed. “Mira, come on. We have to get out of here, now.”
She tried to take me by the arm, to pull me into motion again.
I shrugged her off.
“STOP IGNORING ME!” I screamed into the night. “I KNOW YOU ARE WATCHING! I KNOW YOU WANT ME HERE! YOU PUT MY FACE ON A BLOODY COIN, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD! YOU SENT ME BACK TO LONDON TO GET THE TIDE OF AGES—SO I’M GOING TO ASSUME THAT YOU DIDN’T SEND ME HERE JUST TO GET SQUASHED BY A ROBOT! NOW GET RID OF IT!”
I waited, my breath bated as the hawkbot continued its rampage forward, destroying signs, trampling cars, ripping open ever more buildings with its huge flexing wings. The automatons that had detached to demolish the dumpy woman’s car leapt back onto the hawk’s legs, climbing it to find places where they could once again merge.
I waited and waited, for something to happen—for a building, an empty one, to collapse on the hawkbot and crush it; for a gateway to open and banish it; for it to just explode; hell, for a damned meteor to come rushing out of the sky and to smash it to smithereens.
But nothing happened. The hawk just continued to push forward, to come for me.
The Antecessors were doing nothing.
So it was up to me after all.
“Fine!” I said. “I’ll do it my damned self.”
Stowing Decidian’s Spear, I turned to Heidi.
She stared at me with wild eyes. “I don’t—”
“Understand? No. I’ll explain it to you later. For now—Heidi, I need the cutlass. Please?”
“What are you—?”
“Somewhere on that thing is a talisman—a big one, for cutting a gateway. I need to get up there and cut it off—and for that, I need the cutlass.” She only looked more confused. I sped up, words practically tripping over themselves—we didn’t have a lot of time. “The cutlass blade is a different metal to the spear’s. It cuts easier. I need it. And I need you—” I snapped the compass off my jeans and pressed it into her hand “—to find me a void. Can you do that for me?”
She was frozen—
I was going to have to shake her. She’d switched off completely.
But then she nodded. “Okay. Yeah, I can do that.”
“Thank you.” I took the cutlass from her, not
trading it for Decidian’s Spear—that, in its glamoured form, I stuffed into one of my front pockets, the opposite side to the Tide of Ages to kind of balance me out. I didn’t plan on losing Feruiduin’s Cutlass—but should that happen, I at least wanted to have a back-up weapon to fight my way out of there.
“Now—let’s go.”
I sprinted away from Heidi, back up the street the way we’d come.
Even here, not directly below or beside the hawk, even in range of its huge wings, debris littered the road. Brick and bent poles and the remnants of shattered neon signs lay sprawled all over the pavements. The abandoned traffic was spread across the road like hurdles on a track, ordered where the majority had been left while waiting in a queue for the lights to change. A couple had tried to reverse, but to no avail: they were now parked half on the pavement, half in the road.
Plenty of windows were smashed where debris had gone flying.
I thanked my lucky stars that these people had fled before the projectiles that had done that broke those holes in the glass.
The hawk’s head swiveled to track me.
It opened its beak wide—
“MIRA BRAAAAAND—”
“SHUT UP,” I roared back—and I fired the line launcher.
A perfect straight line of silver shot out on the back of an arrow, the elvish rope streaking through the air. It passed the hawk’s open mouth, embedding itself deep in the vast, hulking amalgam’s shoulder.
I shot up after it, the line withdrawing with me hanging onto the launcher, the cutlass poised in my free hand. The air whipped by me—
The hawk boomed a roar. It flexed its wings. The automatons melded to its frame near where the arrow had sunk in began to detach themselves, the fibrous cords that held them together coming apart—
The hawk swiped an arm for me—
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