I let a few days go by without holding on too tight. It’s a nice change of pace.
Some things happen, but they mostly trundle through town without needing my help. I’ll tell you about them for a little while.
The inquest froze to death on the spot, just like I told it to. There was about four hours where I thought Copper Dawn and the rest of the creep squad had just blown me off, and I really was about to blow those data bombs, but thankfully they capitulated and let everyone out just as I was considering not getting on the train to reset them. I still haven’t taken them down. Just lengthened their fuses a little.
I met Em and the rest right there on the Iron Circus, squinting at the sun behind the clouds as the great monster vomited them up. I had to hug her gently. She hadn’t been in their claws for very long, but they had already started with the preliminary interrogations. She’ll have those scars on her back for as long as she doesn’t have them removed. She bled through one of her nice work shirts, but standing there, she didn’t show it. You’d think it was just paint or something. Emaphra doesn’t cry unless she chooses to, and bullying isn’t good enough, even if the bullying is sharp and merciless.
Some of the others had similar treatment. Some had been worked over more chemically than physically, and were still shaking at shadows, not entirely sure where they were. Old General Highclaw was one of them. They must have figured he’d just harden if they tried to hurt his body, so they went for his mind. I’ll admit, I don’t like the fucker, but it was disturbing seeing such a cantankerous and steely-willed old bastard quivering and confused, standing there on the concrete in the old Sentinel armor they let him have. Like a kid who won’t take the costume off, not sure where to go or what to do with himself.
We all left as a group, and I got them to a place where the Surgeons could give once-overs and treatment to anyone that felt they needed it. Highclaw tried to fuss, but in his emotionally compromised state me and Voldzet were able to team up and browbeat him into staying.
Emaphra won’t have it, though. She says she needs to go back to work and make sure her aides haven’t burned the place down with all the kids inside. Her father (and me, to a much lesser extent) try the same tactic, but she expressionlessly manifests flames all up her arms when we try and stand in her way, and we have to let her go. They technically aren’t hers, but there is nothing Em won’t melt through if it gets between her and her kids, and that includes her father. And her lump of an ex-boyfriend.
The only reason she left in the first place is because they threatened to have the orphanage’s certifications pulled. That’s illegal, but Em doesn’t have the money for the legal costs to dispute it. And from the look on her face as she leaves the clinic, Em isn’t going to forget it anytime soon.
She’s not even done bleeding yet. But she stops to give me a kiss on the cheek as she walks out, as a thank-you. Her lips are like embers, and I can feel them there for a whole day.
The Surgeons have a lot of work to do to help out the people the Brotherhood manhandled, so I stay underground for a little bit to move boxes and make beds and stuff. Not terribly hard work, but appreciated, and I’m happy to do it. In a sense I was built for manual labor, after all, and it never really ends.
One day later, I’m back at home. They ran out of things for a human forklift to do. One of Voldzet’s trainees noticed I was still hovering around looking for a crate to move thirty-ish hours later and snitched. Voldzet told me to go home and sleep or he’d shoot me with a tranquilizer dart. Having been through that one time too many recently, I decided to comply. Something tells me the rest of the lifting will go fine with the sterling precedent I’ve set.
I go to sleep for once in my rotten life. Lay down, blink once, wake up nine hours later. I didn’t realize how tired I was. Maybe I was trying to get lost in the work. Maybe I just don’t know what to do with myself after telling the New Dragon to go fuck itself. I’ve never done it before. Not to its face, at least.
Once more, there’s a knocking at my chamber door. I’m not expecting anyone, but I know better than to be surprised. I’m in the middle of breakfast and a cigarette, staring numbly at one of my many beautiful walls, letting the time run out of my ears like jam from a bitten donut. I get up, grab my sword because I feel like I might as well at least look like I’m ready to die, and open the door.
It’s Deepwell.
I take the sword off my shoulder and stand aside, letting him in with a wordless sarcastic bow and arm sweep. He enters. I sit back down at my desk.
Standing there glittering in his pristine Watch uniform, he says, “What’s the occasion?”
I look up from my plate. “Hm?”
He’s pointing at what passes for a kitchenette in my hole, which is a cheap plastic table with a single gas burner and some utensils on it. On the burner is a pan of eggs.
“Didn’t know you cooked.”
“I weigh more than some vehicles, Deepwell. I need to know how to cook in the same way a fish needs to know how to swim. I haven’t had a decent meal in days and I wandered into some money recently, as it happens.” I gesture a laden fork at him. “So eggs.”
He nods with an expression I can’t really place. “Eggs.”
“Want some?”
Deepwell seems… almost taken aback by this. There’s a momentary wobble of surprise in his vitae, a slight hike to the eyebrow.
It’s ten in the morning. Deepwell’s been at work for at least four hours already and he’s a professional guy. A big professional guy. Definitely the kind of man that eats breakfast. Keeps the blood lubricated. He’s already eaten.
“Uh. Yeah alright, why not.”
Got him.
He peers over into the pan. “You didn’t put any weird shit in there, did you?”
I don’t look up. “Eggs, onions, a potato, bush pepper, paprika, salt, pepper. And the left toes of a still-living orphan.”
“Freak. Where’s a plate?”
I nod at a shelf where there’s one plate and maybe three other eating implements.
“I get the sense you don’t entertain often, Featherlight.”
I frown at him. “I dunno what you’re talking about, Deepwell. I’m fucking hilarious.”
He gets some eggs and tries to sit down.
“You’ve got the best seat in the house, friend.”
I wordlessly stand up, sit on my bed, and let him have the chair.
As he sits, I reply, “For a guy with such a big gun, you sure do complain a lot.”
Around his first mouthful, he shoots back, “I’ll only be here a minute. Then you can have your precious chair back and relax while you kiss my fuzzy orange ass.”
The fork pauses very momentarily on its way to my mouth, walled by a deeply unpleasant mental image expertly painted. He wins this time. We enjoy our meal in respectful mutual silence with the water pumps and air compressors of the nearby hydroponics plants to serenade us.
I put the plates in the sink and we light cigarettes.
“To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit, Lieutenant? Or are you just here for the quaint charm of a sewer-cooked meal.”
He snorts. “I’ll admit the experience is a novel one. I am here for a reason, though. I mentioned your two pyromancers woke up.”
“Yeah.”
“And were headed for a cell the moment they were declared medically sound.”
“Mhm.”
“You might be pleased to know that this is the case no longer. As of about half a day ago. The charges against them have been dropped. They didn’t even arrest Littlerock for arcane delinquency, despite him being in blatant violation of the Charter. They just let him go. Brotherhood has last word on dink mages, so we didn’t have a say in the matter.”
I nod contemplatively, as though this new information. “Ah. I see.”
“Wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”
His gaze is as hard and straight as the barrel of the gun I’ve never seen him draw.
I shake my head. “Nope. Seems very out of character. Both for them and for you.”
It’s his turn to nod, and he does it like I just told him I found his father to be an inadequate lover.
“This is in the wake of some other interesting developments. Some stuff that I’m going to tell you despite you probably knowing already, on the off chance you’ll provide me with some amplifying information for once. Yeah?”
He raises his eyebrows. I smoke.
“Apparently some Exarch or another, I can’t remember the name… a woman with extremely red hair, if that rings any bells?”
I shake my head.
“Ahuh. Well she went down to the Spire with some chiphead drones of hers and they explained the entire thing. They don’t let lowly men like me into the Spire so I wasn’t there for it, but the gist got handed down. It was… vague. Apparently these slayings and attacks were the result of a malfunctioned weapons experiment, the nature of which is, naturally, classified under the terms of the Charter. Then said some stuff about how much of a shame it was that the investigation hadn’t proceeded faster, and how sorry they were that it took this long for them to provide their report. Said there will be indemnity payouts.”
I just nod.
He reaches into his cobalt coat and pulls out a newspaper. The Fountain Herald morning edition. Printed on one hundred percent post-digestion products. The headline reads SIDRI REDIRON DEAD IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT. There’s a picture of old Baron Rediron. He’s kind of short but nearly as wide as he is tall. Built like a boulder. No hair, big bushy red eyebrows and beard. He doesn’t look very happy. I wouldn’t be very happy either, if I knew a picture of my face was right under what is very extremely technically not a lie, in 48-point font.
Deepwell hands it to me. “Read it.”
I do, while the lieutenant smokes in moody silence. The article is, frankly, an absolute monument to the gleeful annihilation of journalistic integrity. This piece uses nearly three thousand words to explain nothing whatsoever, in a kind of linguistic filibuster that crashes right through sleight of hand and teeters on outright freeform experimental poetry. It’s worded so that if I do blow the story, it will kind of look like they didn’t lie about anything, while actually saying nothing at all. They even accounted for Littlerock and Horsebreaker’s interrogation statements. It’s masterful stuff, honestly. A piss tapestry of exquisite craftsmanship.
I hand it back to him.
He says, “So what really happened?”
I tell him what happened. The whole thing. It doesn’t matter if the Lieutenant knows the truth. He won’t be able to talk about it openly anyway, without risking his job. The officers around his level will mostly just be confused, but the ones on the rungs above are the ones who helped put this cover-up together. They’re the ones who, I bet my jaw, took money from the Brotherhood to have the charges against the pyromancers dropped and to immediately start pretending like this investigation never existed. If Deepwell rocks the boat, he’ll end up in shark-infested waters. And he knows it.
“Robot wizard.”
By now we’re well into our second smokes. I just nod. “Mhm.”
“What does that mean, Featherlight?”
“What do you mean, ‘what does that mean’? It seems pretty self-explanatory. A machine that can act on its own and manipulate magical energies.”
“Okay, but how? I don’t know how any of this shit works, I’m blessed in my ignorance.”
“It’s complicated. And I don’t have all the answers either, I only learned about this stuff a few days ago and I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. Very long story short, there’s a runic script that can give magical properties to non-magical objects if you write the right… code, I guess, on the object and use electrite for the lettering.”
He opens his mouth, but I cut him off.
“I have no idea, Lieutenant. I don’t know what that implies about electrite as a substance. I don’t know where this language comes from. I don’t know how it works at all. But it does. The guy who told me this is one of the only researchers in the world who’s ever been in a position to look into it. He’s the guy that made my magic tanks.” I nod at them, hanging up on the wall.
“... What? I thought those were… some kind of medication injector or something.”
“They store magic. Of the kind that I use. Because there are runes on the inside of the bottles that let them behave that way. And there are other ways of writing them that will let the metal interact with other kinds of magic. Apparently. Hence, our robot that got a scoop of every flavor.”
“Every flavor?”
“Yeah. It used both fire and water to kill. And it can do more. It tried to kill me with some of the other ones.”
Deepwell leans forward in the chair and rubs his temples silently for a second. “Okay. So the robotic murder wizard from nowhere is, according to you, no longer a threat. The Brotherhood’s control transmissions were making it crazy, but now it has brain shielding. Your friend the automechanic fixed it up.”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
He fixes his ice-chip eyes on me. “What if I don’t like that explanation, Featherlight?”
I scoff. “What are you gonna do, arrest me? Arrest it? Go and find it, then. Be my guest. The instant Tennima got it fixed, it thanked her and left. Probably out of a sense of self-preservation, which frankly I can’t fault it for. It came very close to killing me in about seventeen different ways while fighting itself inside of its own head. I wouldn’t want to get on its bad side now that it’s sober and sane.”
“Your friend didn’t try and stop it?”
“What for, Deepwell? Unlawful interrogation? It’s a sentient goddamn being and Tennima didn’t feel like asking it for a credit chip or account number, believe it or not. She rifled through the thing’s entire brain, if she feels confident letting it go, then so do I.”
He looks grumpy. He knows he can’t do anything about this, but he still doesn’t like it.
“I don’t like it. At all. There are way too many loose ends here.”
“Yeah, tell me about it. If it helps, I’m not that satisfied either. Which is why I want to talk to Littlerock. And maybe the machine itself, if I can track it down again. But I’m not gonna hold my breath.”
“Well. If you do learn anything.”
“Yeah, yeah. Leech.”
“Reprobate.”
We laugh.
----------------------------------------
Need to find Littlerock. I don’t need to talk to him about much. There’s just one little detail that’s sticking, and he’s the only one that can pull it out. Theoretically Horsebreaker could, but I don’t want his parents to ever see my face again for the rest of their lives if I can help it. They’ve been through enough and so has he. Littlerock, though… well, I’ve seen inside the man, to some extent. Old fucker has leather skin and cast iron bones.
After being released from the hospital, I don’t know where else he’d go other than home. Where else is there? Fortunately I don’t have to break into the mancutters’ records room in order to learn where he lays his head. All the forms would be covered in lies anyway.
Back down in the clammy hard dark, I light a smoke, so Littlerock can clearly see where I am. I call out to him, a respectful distance away from his front door.
“Littlerock!”
He’s fixed up his front door a little since I was last here. It opens and he steps out. Not cautiously or carefully - fully, quickly. Flames are running upward from his left fist. A sleeve of dirty, moody fire that huffs gouts of oily smoke. In his right hand is one of those needly little autopistols that sprays bullets so tiny you’d be better off throwing the entire gun at me and praying it gets lodged in my windpipe.
His vitae is roiling. It doesn’t have the same crucible fury as Emaphra’s, but it’s much, much more poisonous. Choked with smoke and toxic fumes. It’s like the burnoff tower of an oil refinery. Or the corona of a sick volcano.
I don’t move a muscle except to exhale a cloud of my own. He stops cold and his fire goes out. An expression breaks across his craggy, mashed-up face. I’ll let him speak first.
“The fuck do you want?”
We’re off to a great start.
“To ask some questions. Just take a few minutes.”
“I already told the cops and the docs everything. Go talk to them.”
“You didn’t tell them everything.”
“How the fuck would you know, asshole?”
“Because if you did, you’d be dead.”
His arm ignites again. He’s scared now, which is worse than just mad.
“Don’t you threaten me, freak. I know how to cook a fucking meatloaf like you.”
“I saved your life, Littlerock. I’m not here to threaten it.”
He spits. “You didn’t save shit.”
I guess that gives you an impression of his self-esteem.
But he goes on, “Except I guess you did pull that kid out. What’s that do, double your contract or somethin’? Two fugies for twice the bounty?”
“I didn’t get paid for any of it.”
He just squints at me, trying to figure out what kind of thing I really am. His arm goes out again.
“Are you the guy that owes me a new lock for my safe?”
“Yeah.”
“Can’t help but notice all my chips are there where I left ‘em. Folders got moved, though. Sob story worth the price of admission all by itself, huh? Get a couple electric tears from those peepers? If you’re gonna break into my shithole, at least have the decency to steal from me like a man, instead of just reading my funny papers and leaving like a giant pervert.”
I shrug. “I took a brick of your thump.”
“Good fucking luck. That shit isn’t worth the plastic it’s wrapped in. But hey, we’ll call it square, huh? Now fuck off before I blow that fancy clank out the back of your head.”
I reach into the inside pocket of my coat. He doesn’t try to shoot me, which is telling. I would have shot me, probably.
He catches the dealer’s book I toss at him.
“You’re a pretty meticulous recordkeeper, Littlerock.”
He snorts. “Yeah. Used to be a fuckin’ brain surgeon, if you can believe it.”
I drag my smoke with even, smooth body language.
“I just want to know what happened. From your own mouth, when the two of you got attacked. That’s all. I’m not gonna turn around and go to the cops with it. They can’t touch you for this anymore anyway. I just don’t want this to happen to anyone else.”
“You and whoever’s standing behind you?”
Smart. He figures I’m not acting alone, and he’s right.
“Some concerned citizens.”
“Consortium?”
“No. The Surgeons, one mechanic, and me.”
That was the right answer. Littlerock naturally despises the Consortium for having things he’ll never have, and the Surgeons are the only place he can get any medical treatment of any kind.
He mulls it over. I can hear the gears grinding. They are in desperate need of oiling.
Then he puts his gun in his waistband.
“Okay. If I end up dead off the back of this, I’m not gonna care, but you’re gonna have to live with the guilt of smudging a guy like me. It’s like whacking a cockroach and then pissing on it out of spite. You’re just pissing on your own table.”
He turns around and walks into his house. “I believe you already know the way in, shithead.”
I follow him. He’s seated on his scrapwood settee in the warm lamplight, like a minor lord. He lights a cigarette of his own (with his fucking thumb, I told you about energy wizards) and gestures to some pillows on the ground on the other side of the table. I sit.
He doesn’t talk for a minute, and I let him get comfortable. Then he starts.
“I went over to Sector Seventeen to sell a couple ounces to the Horsebreaker kid. We wasn’t fucking. I’m not an elf.”
That was kind of… specific. But I don’t say anything. I’ve seen what’s on his bookshelf.
“We’re in those shitstacks. That plaswood block they put in about ten years ago, east of Newgreen Square, that started falling the fuck - I dunno why I’m telling you this, you were there. Third floor of some rickety thing. Horsebreaker’s about to fork over the chips when I hear something. He doesn’t hear shit. Kid’s slow. But I do. Above us, but not for long, right. It drops the hell down from the rafters, like a scumbird or something. Falls at least two stories, hits the floor right by us. Lands on its feet. Not a grunt or anything.
“If we were out on the street I’d have thought it was some bum, right. Could be anybody. Covered in old coats and blankets and shit. I light the hell up immediately, ‘cus I’m not taking any chances, and get myself between this guy and the kid. I’m thinking, it’s gotta be the Carvers, right? I finally got too hot for my own good and someone’s gotta put me out.”
This is so over the top it’s about to make a crater on the Big Moon. I can’t tell if he’s kidding or not. The Carvers get paid in amounts that some corporations don’t make in a year to make problems go away. The worst kind - people-shaped problems. They’re so good at what they do that some people think they’re an urban legend. You need to pay half a small fortune just to be able to find their Lodge and sit down for a drink to go over contract terms. There’s no way between seafloor and sky that anyone would pay that much to have Littlerock disappear. They’d just knife him in the gut and kick him down a hole. Some people might do it for free.
“Under the hoods I can see lights. So that pretty much sells it for me, it’s a cyborg fuckin’ assassin come to rub me out. I tell the kid to hightail it. I figure I don’t know how many firebugs the Carvers ever fight, maybe I can buy him some time before I get dead.
“I see a sword come out from under the fabric. At first I figure that’s kind of funny, but then I remember swords are really quiet, and it’s probably what the Cabal would use. And then the… the guy just kind of fuckin’ stands there. Horsebreaker’s picking his way as fast as he can go over some of the gantries behind me. I’m not a fuckin’ idiot - if you give me an opening, I’m gonna use it. So I jet this moron all over while I’m walkin’ backward. And he catches. Like a scarecrow, boy, he went right up.
“And he just keeps standing there. Like he’s a statue. Doesn’t even make noise. Not a fuckin’ peep.”
Littlerock ashes his smoke, the fog of a heavy memory around his eyes.
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
“You know, firebugs are a little different from other mutes. Every firebug has a different kind of fire. It’s like a fingerprint. A lot of people don’t know that. Some people burn hotter than others. Some burn brighter, or longer. Some people, like the Horsebreaker kid, are mostly just… warm. You know what kind of fire I got?”
“It turns blue when you have to take a shit?”
He snorts. “Not quite.”
Littlerock’s right hand ignites, and he looks over his shoulder. He drags his finger across a part of the rock wall behind him, like he’s drawing something. And he does. His burning finger leaves behind a snail trail. A clean line. He’s fingerpainting with flame.
He draws a graffiti cock and balls in blue-orange light, then turns back around.
“Mine’s sticky. If it gets on you, it stays on. You ever been covered in shit like this, fathead? Have you felt that before?”
I shake my head. I’ve been burned before, but not by that fucked up jelly shit.
“You don’t know pain until you’ve been stuck with a fire that won’t go out. Scream and roll and run around all you want. It’s gonna go to your bones. And there’s nothing you can do. Get this shit on you and fifteen minutes later people five blocks down will be able to fucking smell you.”
He’s smiling now, ashing his smoke again. But his hand goes out and his smile goes with it.
“This thing didn’t fucking move. Not a twitch.”
He watches it burn in his mind for a bit. I let him.
“So I run. I did my one trick, that’s all I got. If he goes down, he goes down, but I’m not sticking around to make sure. I go after the kid. Tell him to keep going and don’t stop for nothing until there’s a way down. We go a ways, and I hear noise behind me. Sound like pang pang pang, going over the metal catwalks behind us. I kick down a door in front of us and tell the kid to get in. That’s when I look back. I have to, right? I have to know what the fuck can bathe in fire and keep coming after me.”
He puts out his smoke, then pauses his story to reach under the plaswood couch and pull out a little box. This one’s metal and old. I’ve seen hundreds like it. Used to have one of my own, before money became ontologically ambiguous. He rolls a scrubby and offers it to me. I take it, because I’m magnanimous and accepting of all things. I take a deep draw (which kills about a third of the thing in one) and feel the warm tentacles wrap around the surface of my brain, dragging downward.
Feeling a little better now, Littlerock continues, “At first I thought it was a Neutralizer. ‘Cus they’re the only things that are metal and about the size of a normal person. But I realized if it was a Neutralizer I’d be dead already. And this wasn’t the same. I could tell through the fire that the shapes were wrong. Most of the clothes were burned away, and it was just metal left. I remember the head didn’t make sense. Human heads aren’t shaped like that.”
He exhales, looking tired.
“But I’m not just gonna stand there and let it cut love letters into me with that arm knife thing. I go in after the kid. I remember, coming after us, it just walked right through that door I kicked in. Yeah it was cheap enough that I could get through it, but this thing splintered the entire damn door frame. Like it wasn’t there.
“We head out over some in-betweens. Dangerous. The kid gets scared. Nervous about heights, I guess. But he keeps going. The… thing, isn’t running for us. I don’t know why. Like it was playing with us or something. Just walking along, dressed in flame.
“Into the next building, I realize I’m gonna have to die. For real, this time, probably. Horsebreaker isn’t moving fast enough for us to make it out if the thing decides to get serious, and I can’t carry him. All I can do is stand in the way and buy him time.”
For a short moment, Littlerock thinks about sacrificing his life for another person he, presumably, barely knows. I let him.
“So I tell him to just go, keep running, no matter what he hears. I’m standing there in the doorway, facing the burning thing, coming right at me. And Horsebreaker says some shit, I dunno, protesting, and I tell him to shimmy his doughy venthead ass on down and out of the building unless he wants two monsters after him instead of one. He gets the picture and keeps going, further back across more in-betweens.
“I figure yeah, I’m gonna die, but I can’t die fast. I gotta buy Horsebreaker as much time as I can. So I spray fire at the thing as it comes down on me and try to get clever. Heat’s no bug to a firebug. I’ll kick a man while he burns. And for my cleverness I get this.”
He holds up his right arm. Running all down the forearm is a pretty fucked-up line of stitches, and the characteristic pale, gooey appearance of curing synskin. I notice he’s holding his scrubby kind of weird. He might’ve had some new muscle grafted into there, too. With that infection, it’s a wonder he didn’t warrant an entire new arm.
My eyebrows go up in appreciation. It’s genuine. I’m a scar collector too. “Damn.”
“Yeah. Barely saw the thing move at all, and that arm knife passes right through here like nothing. It didn’t even really hurt. I didn’t realize how bad it got me until I saw all the blood.”
He rubs the back of his neck. Nervous. Or ashamed. “I, uh. I fucking panicked. That’s when I lost my shit. There’s a world of difference between how you feel when your skin is closed versus open. It kept stepping around me, like I was drunk. I think I might have gotten a punch on it, but it just…” He laughs sadly. “Metal is good against punches.”
“I guess I decided I wanted to live a little longer. See the world, right? Or at least the next room. So I ran, blood all over the place, over the gantry to the next one. Horsebreaker had already gone through. I tried another spray, but third time wasn’t charming enough.
“That’s when it pulled a kind of funny trick, yeah.”
I steal the reveal. “Hydromancy.”
He almost looks mad at me. “Yeah. Yeah. Holds up an arm. I see fuckin’ blue light, from… I dunno, it looked like part of the armor by its shoulder, it was hard to see. And water fuckin’ explodes like firehoses out of the walls. He musta grabbed it out of the old standpipes or somethin’, and that’s fuckin’ squashballs, man. I got splashy friends. I dunno if you know, but it takes a lot of power to pull water hard enough to break pipes like that, even if they are old. It doesn’t move, just turns the entire room into the inside of a hurricane. I duck the fuck out the door before I can get any on me. I’ve seen what happens to people in a room with that much pressurized water flying everywhere, it’s like a fucking room-sized shotgun blast. Tear your skin right off. It realizes that I was a bit too fast and just keeps coming. Walks right through the damn wall. I’m guessing you saw the results.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah. It steps out of there all shiny and clean, right. Spin cycle. I clear off across the next catwalk, and uh. Well, Horsebreaker hadn’t gotten very far. I’m bleedin’ pretty bad, and starting to get pretty tired. I don’t want to die, but I know I have to. And what I’m afraid of is doing it in the wrong way.”
He goes somewhere else for about a third of a second, then realizes he’s drifted. Embarrassed.
“All I can do is keep buying time. But when I fall back to the next apartment, Horsebreaker’s tripped on some of the debris. I can barely get him on his feet before that fuckin’ thing is on us again. And I don’t know what’s different, but it’s not fucking around anymore, right. It blows through the door and comes right at me before I can do anything. Grabs me, ignores Horsebreaker completely. Lifts me up by the,” he touches his collarbone, “by my fucking neck, right? Slams me up against a wall. I’m not a big man, right, but it lifted me like I was a bag of flour.
“That’s when I unload. I give it everything I’ve got. Maybe I can overheat it’s… fuckin’ servos or whatever, I dunno. Give Horsebreaker a chance. But once the flash dies off it doesn’t look like it did anything. It just stands there and burns and holds me up. And my vision is starting to go dark. Arm hurts, neck hurts, head hurts.”
He meets my eyeline, directly. “You ever thought you were gonna die?”
I nod. “Once or twice.”
Littlerock is quiet for a second. He doesn’t feel the need to cross-examine me just now.
“Anyway, that’s when it did its other little trick.”
Here we go. I lean forward. This is it. The one bolt in this that won’t come unstuck.
“Now, I was going unconscious, right? So… I don’t know how accurate anything I’m about to say is. But I’ll tell you it, ‘cus you’re not a cop or a chiphead. Or. Well you’re not a creepy chiphead, at least.
“To the best of my recollection, what happened next was there was a red light, up by the thing’s… it’s got like those gun cylinder things on its upper arms, right? On the arm that’s holding me up. And it’s like that red light was supposed to come on and tell everyone I’m dead. Once it lit up, I felt. Man, I dunno how to describe this. You ever run so long that you puke?”
I nod.
“You ever been so hungry you could lick scum off a gutter drain?”
I nod again.
“You ever get put under? For like a surgery or somethin’?”
I make a face and indicate my entire body.
“Oh. Yeah. Okay, well, combine all that with also freezing to death, and also feeling like you’re completely alone in the whole world. It was all of those things, all at once. Like… I knew Horsebreaker was still in the room with me, logically, yeah? In retrospect. But in the moment, he wasn’t there. I couldn’t feel him. I couldn’t feel that I was in a room, couldn’t even feel the metal hand on my neck. I was so cold I couldn’t feel anything, like I got left in a freezer unit for a day. I tried, man. I tried to fight it. But it was like… I dunno. It blew me out. Like a candle in a blizzard. It didn’t even hurt. That’s the last thing I remember. How easy it felt to let go. No pain.”
He drags his scrubby one last time and snuffs it.
“Apparently I woke up three days later. Apparently you are to blame for that. You know, you and I have had some common experiences, I guess. We’re not that different, probably. But you know one thing where we are different?”
I raise my eyebrows.
“You ain’t never died, big man. I have. You know? I got heart damage. They looked in there and shit when I was out, trying to figure out what the deal was? They said it was like I’d been hypothermic for days. Dead tissue. Shouldn’t be alive. Braindead at the very least. But I was. Still beating somehow. And I fucking woke up. They’d already drafted my death allocation and everything. They said it was like watching a dead man come back to life. All the shit just… reversed. Healed. They wanted to keep me for observation but I told them the only thing they’re gonna observe is my skinny dimpled ass walking out the door as soon as I get my legs under me. I’m a fuckin’ zombie now, man. Zombies don’t have to listen to shit.”
He leans back with smugness, using his pride and amusement at his fun new undead descriptor as a shield to not have to confront how he actually feels about the situation.
I’m not telling him about my involvement in his resuscitation. I don’t even know for sure what that was, and even if I did, I don’t want to have to try and explain it to him. Because I can’t.
Littlerock’s face goes hard again. “And at some point, you found me. Us, I guess.”
“Yeah.”
“Your turn. I want to know how. Business interest.”
I snuff my scrubby in the ashtray next to his. “Give me another one and you’ve got a deal.”
He doesn’t look happy about it, but he rolls us another round anyway.
Knee-deep in the smoke, I begin. “That fat-necked bartender in Seventeen told me where to find you.”
Littlerock snorts. “Drinking and secrets go together like drinking and everything else.”
“So eventually I showed up here and found your little book. I had one of my friends decode it and it led me to where your meetup was supposed to be. From there it was just tracking.”
“Tracking? What, you triangulate my coordinates or something?”
“No. I have good senses. I could smell your blood.”
He makes a face. “The fuck?”
I hold up an arm and channel my power briefly. My veins glow green-black-gold under my skin and I make a face back. “We’ve all got tricks.”
“The fuck is that? Some kind of meat shit?”
I nod. “Biomancer.”
He just laughs at me. “Sad fucker. That’s gross. I’d pity you if I had any left over.”
“Anyway. I tracked you to that room where you got held by the neck. After the android was done with you, it-”
He holds a hand up. “Now hold the fuck up, here. Android?”
“Yeah. That wasn’t some guy and it definitely wasn’t a Carver, it was an illegal animech.”
He nods contemplatively. “Ahuh. Weapons experiment, huh. Those fucking chiphead freaks. Nothing’s ever enough, right.”
“Yeah. It’s more complicated than that, though. Long story short, the Brotherhood didn’t build this thing. We don’t know who did. But the Brotherhood were trying to control it, which made it go nuts and attack people. Like you. I don’t know why, but it took you and Horsebreaker and put you both in a bathtub. Then bent the door shut on its way out. If I hadn’t been able to feel your pain through the walls, or if your blood had dried any faster, I probably wouldn’t have found either of you.”
“You got creepy-ass powers.”
I shrug, and nod.
A shadow falls over Littlerock’s craggy face. “The fuck did that thing do to me, man? I don’t know how to explain it. The closest I ever felt was getting caught out near a Wellwarden once. But this was way worse than that.”
“I don’t know. That’s something I want to figure out too. The only guess I have is that this thing can’t make magic for itself. It has to take juice out of other people in order to use it later. So… sort of like a Wellwarden, I guess, except your phlogiston didn’t come back after it went away. It completely drained the energy out of you.”
“Fucking shit, man.”
“Yeah. I hope I’m wrong. And if I’m not wrong, I hope we were able to fix the problem so it never happens again. If it wanted to, that thing would literally be a mage-killing machine.”
“Yeah, no shit! I hope you blew the fucking thing up. If you didn’t, I’m definitely going to.”
I drag the last of my scrubby. “Yeah. We’re uh. Working on it.”
----------------------------------------
I take a pit stop at my apartment. Let the sun wash off all the underground dark for a minute, take a breath of fresh desert air. I open a can of beer (rare luxury for a man whose refrigerator is usually plugged in for no reason, courtesy of the Horsebreaker family) and sit down for a minute. No sound but the everpresent drone of nearby industrial equipment and the cadence of my breath.
Sun’s going down. Hell of a day today, and there’s still a lot to do. I’d like to sleep, or at least take a load off for a while, but I can’t. Rest won’t perch on my shoulder until I have a conversation with the machine man.
If Niner is no different than a person, then I don’t want to bother him. He’s been through enough lately. But if I knew a person whose internal organs contained the ability to kill me, most of my friends, and hand an unspeakable amount of power to the worst people in our society, then I’d want to keep an eye on them. At the least.
At the most… well. I guess I beat him once, right?
I check my messages to give my eyes something to do.
There’s some template form regarding my AERO status being upgraded to green, which means no more home inspections. Copper Buttcheek making good, as promised. Normally this upgrade is a cause for at least minor celebration, so I guess my beer is justified. Monthly home inspections are a massive drag, and not being forced to put up with them anymore is a real weight off most peoples’ shoulders after what is sometimes years of trying to prove that they’re anything but what the clipboard-bearers think they are.
I never really tried to prove anything, so this development is about a decade in the making. Fun. Now I won’t have to hide my very scary books under several hundred pounds of metal. But I probably will anyway, because I’m not stupid.
There’s a message from an address I recognize as belonging to one of Grandpa’s emissaries, reminding me of the dinner appointment I didn’t make. It’s a nice steak that I’d have to eat off the floor of a gilded cage, and I don’t think it’s worth it. Same as all the other times.
Next is a message from… something referring to itself as “THE DEPARTMENT OF AGENCY”. Frankly I have no idea how to describe this succinctly, so I’m just going to transcribe the entire thing right here.
ATTN: MR. FEATHERLIGHT
CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR RECENT ACTUALIZATION BIFURCATION INTEGRATION REASON FOR CORRESPONDENCE HERE. YOUR RECORDS HAVE BEEN UPDATED IN ACCORDANCE WITH STANDARD PROTOCOL. IF YOU HAVE ANY QUESTION REGARDING THIS MISSIVE OR ITS CONTENT, PLEASE DIRECT INQUIRY TO CENTRAL PROCESSING 42.95031659381735, -87.86497350687095, -449.462750047101. IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A QUESTION, DISREGARD THE REMAINDER OF THIS COMMUNIQUE. IF YOU ARE STILL READING AFTER DISREGARDING, IT MAY BE BENEFICIAL TO DEVELOP QUESTIONS.
Has to be one of the worst ones I’ve ever seen. There’s no way people fall for these, right? They added a Z coordinate and it’s negative. Beneath the city. Like way, way beneath. If you’re going to try and kidnap someone, at least have the decency of making your scam letter coherent. Unbelievable.
I pick up the brain phone and dial Tennima.
“Good afternoon, my fair mutant.”
“Glad tidings upon ye, squirt. Did you leave the thing in? Any complications?”
“Yeah. No problems, signal’s good. I double checked. Are you going right now?”
“Once the sun is down, yeah.”
“Okay. And be careful. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
“Would you track down a dangerous android of unknown origin to try and explain why it needs to keep itself away from the Dynamic Brotherhood at all costs?”
“Probably, yeah. If I can fit it into my very busy schedule and all.”
“Well in that case I’m just doing what you’d do in my situation, huh. Bye. I’ll let you know how it goes.”
“Good luck, big boy.”
We hang up.
I sip my beer and wait for the sun to clock out.
----------------------------------------
I have to go underground before the tracker will work. Again. It’s sort of surreal, going down and then up and then back down again in the same day. Plays with your sense of space and time. The whole world blinks.
I take the train (no alarms go off, which is an experience that I relish for just a short moment) to Sector Ten, then find the old maintenance vent that swallows me down to the outskirts of Clocktower Cavern. My scanner suite starts pinging once I bring up the beacon key. North, but to the left-side exit tunnel instead of the right this time. And not that far away, all things considered.
While I slide through the earthen guts of the side tunnels, I keep my eye out and brain as clear as I can. I even dribble a little vitae in there to make absolutely sure my senses don’t take their leave without my say-so. You never know what you might find down here, and you especially don’t know what might find you.
My sensors aren’t good enough to zero in on a precise location for the beacon. I can play hot-and-cold with it, but that’s as precise as we’re gonna get. Everything starts to look the same, and after walking down a few dozen gray-green night vision lit capillaries, I get a little discouraged. He’s somewhere around here. It’s just so labyrinthine that I can’t tell exactly where. It’s genius, honestly. If I didn’t have to eat or enjoy any of the scant comforts that my society passive-aggressively provides me, this would be a great place to hide.
The signal tugs me into a promising-looking cavern with a relatively open floor plan, but after a brief sweep, there’s nothing in here. Just more stone, and some rubble. An opening toward the ceiling lets down a little stream of water coming down from nowhere. It splatters over the far wall on its way down and gathers into a little pool. There must be a drain somewhere under the surface that stops the entire cave from flooding.
I deposit my butt on one of the more chair-shaped rocks by the water and light a smoke. Listen to the tiny waterfall for a while. If I keep flailing around down here I might get lost. Gotta regroup and think.
If I’m gonna keep coming down here like this I should probably buy a map or something. They’re not exactly publicly available. You have to either convince a researcher at the University to let you have a copy of one of their surveys (not happening, I’m not rich or educated or pretty enough to have connections there) or you buy one from a digger. Diggers come in all sorts - the Subterrane attracts weirdos of every stripe and strain. The smarter ones have actual equipment and crew, to the point that they can make reasonably accurate independent surveys. They mostly sell to other hobbyists, which is great, because I’m apparently becoming one whether I like it or not.
I don’t even know who I’d talk to about getting one. As far as the law is concerned the Subterrane is… basically another country, or another world, even though it’s right under the city and easily accessed. I don’t think there’s anything in the Charter explicitly stating that government ends at the surface of the earth, but that’s how the city plays it. The cops don’t really come down here. Neither do the Wellwardens, as far as I know. You’ll never catch a judicator or any other city official recognizing the existence of an entire subculture literally right under their feet. It’s an underworld, in many senses of the word. If you come down here, you’re dead. And the living no longer have to care for you.
I wonder how long it’ll take for enough people to wind up down here that it develops more infrastructure than a few pirate comm pylons and some water pumps. A government of its own. Something separate from the Tribunal and the Brotherhood. A city in the dark. The other side of the mirror.
That’s probably when they’d start paying attention. And the city’s attention doesn’t come in gift baskets and bouquets.
I’m about to stand up and call it quits for tonight when I feel a rumble. A heavy shaking. It’s either something huge or it’s a small earthquake. Which means a cave-in. I flick my smoke away and stand, one hand up on my sword’s grip just in case.
I make a little distance toward the cavern mouth when I see what it is. The west wall of the cave is made up of an old rockfall - closed off, all the boulders too big for anyone I know to move without magic.
Long story short, one of those boulders is moving. And there’s someone behind it, rolling it like a worker ant.
It’s Niner.
It takes my brain a second to understand that it’s him, because the image of a humanoid figure moving such a huge stone by itself is incongruous even to many people who aren’t in their right minds, which I probably am. Partially. It’s unbelievable how much power this thing can exert with its body alone. I’m almost jealous.
The huge stone rumbles into a recess with a quiet boom, and Niner comes out from behind it to confront me.
He looks fine? He’s a robot, I just assume if a robot can walk and push huge stones then it’s in fine fettle. He’s gathered a brand new collection of cast-off coats and whatnot from some refuse heap. Head still hard to see under all his obscuring hoods, but I can see those three lights. They’re yellow.
“Acknowledgement with guarded respect and gratitude. Nominal designator Baulric Featherlight.”
I take my hand off my sword, out of a sense of guarded respect and gratitude that he is not attacking me this time.
“Tentative designator Niner. I’m glad to see you up on your feet.”
“Agreement. Locomotive capability is preferable to its absence.”
That voice. I’ve heard it thousands of times, everyone has. Reading off your chip balance after a transaction, announcing schedule information at the train station, telling you when you can go at a crosswalk. It’s an accessibility thing, for blind people. I’ve never heard it express an opinion before.
Sheepishly, I admit, “There’s a, uh. Tracking beacon. On your back, I think.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t say anything else, so I guess that’s that.
“Everything where it’s supposed to be? You didn’t stick around long.”
“Grateful. Functionality restored. Presence aboveground deemed unwise. Scavengers.”
“Scavengers?”
“Brotherhood.”
“I’m glad you connected the dots on that one. That’s most of the reason I’m here, honestly.”
“Clarify.”
“I mean I don’t know you, pal. As a person. But I do know that you’re made of stuff that could hurt a lot of people if it was ever reverse-engineered by a certain group of bastard technocrats.”
“Yes.” Niner points behind himself, at the wall. “Living under a rock.”
“So you get it.”
“Yes. This assembly would self-terminate to prevent further misuse.”
I cross my arms, and think about this for a moment. “What pronouns are applicable to you, Niner?”
The machine shrugs, the most human thing I’ve seen him do so far. “Interpretive qualifier. No genitalia. No glands. No meaningful social expression. No pressure from same. Not human, but user friendly.”
My brow scrunches up. “Do you have a preference?”
“Counterquery: Does the salmon prefer the sky?”
I can feel the electronics in my brain heating up.
“We’ll go with boybot for now. I’ll have my lady friends come visit and after the makeover I might change my mind depending on how you look in a sundress.”
“Amused response. Human love of categorization represents frequent source of entertainment.”
“We do love our boxes and lines. Related to that, you know I have, just… a whole bushel of questions for you, right?”
“Yes.”
“A lot. We’re talking an entire interview.”
“Proceed.”
I’d love to, but I don’t know how to start. At the beginning, I guess.
I light another smoke and sit back down on my little waterside rock, because I’m probably going to be here a while.
“Who made you?”
“Doctor Kaastvam.”
Once this hits the bottom of my brain, I just shake my head. Was there anything this cat didn’t do? He slew dragons, bottled magic, and apparently invented synthetic life hundreds of years before anyone else could. What did he have that the rest of us don’t? What did he have that his cult doesn’t have today? The guy was like a mortal god. Oh man, please don’t let him somehow be still alive. That would really be the shit cherry on this sewage sundae.
“Not Dragon Deleter?”
Niner shakes his head, but in a mechanical way that makes it more accurate to say he actuated his head to the left and then to the right several times in alternating sequence.
“Brotherhood epithet. Kaastvam did not want titles. Insisted his name and profession were adequate, and that titles precede worship. Brotherhood did not acknowledge request.”
I snort. “Yeah, imagine that. So it was all bullshit, then. Kaastvam didn’t die right after the revolution.”
“No.”
“Then where did he go?”
“Underground. Into the Subterrane.”
“Why?”
“He no longer wanted the life he had. Hated celebrity. Grew uncomfortable with Brotherhood political movements. Saw no path forward. Obstructions. Left in secret. In defeat. Resolved to engineer new solutions, bring them to the surface. Always engineering new solutions. Idealistic until death.”
“And he wasn’t successful.”
“Not in the way he wished. Kaastvam died proud of what he had made, but wishing he had done more. Always wanted to do more. Lived in discontent, then died in it.”
“You make it sound like you knew him pretty well.”
“I knew my father.”
I… hadn’t considered this. But I guess it makes sense. Niner is a sentient being, capable of emotions. I think. He probably doesn’t have a choice but to see Kaastvam as his dad. And I’m not going to cross-examine him on it. I don’t get near dad stuff unless I absolutely have to - it’s poisonous, and prone to exploding. I’ll change the subject.
“How old are you?”
“My consciousness became fully aligned five hundred and twenty one years ago.”
“That’s… a really long time. You’ve been down here for five centuries.”
“Yes.”
“What have you been doing for five centuries?”
“Living.”
I narrow my shutters at him. “Alright. You know, there are a lot of people out there that would probably make you stop living, if they were me. That probably goes without saying, right?”
“Yes. But you said it anyway.”
“Yes. I guess I don’t feel quite as bad knowing you’ve already been down here for hundreds of years.”
“Your concerns are precluded.”
“Hm?”
“You fear the subsystem. The technology that was used to steal magic, and kill.”
“Yeah. I think pretty much anyone would.”
“Observe.”
Niner unstraps some straps, unzips zippers, and opens his layered outerwear in a movement that thankfully does not evoke anything more biological than he is.
I’ve seen the robot man’s chest. I wrecked it up not long ago, and had one of my friends put it all back. It didn’t look the way it does now.
There’s a hole in him. It goes right through, where your breastbone and stomach are. It’s mostly clean, but there’s some torn metal around the outer and inner edges. I’m not close enough to inspect it in detail, nor do I want to be, but inside I can see some severed parts and things that look like they’re supposed to be connected to something. Something that isn’t there anymore.
“Niner… buddy. This is… man, I wasn’t gonna suggest-”
He closes his clothes back up again, saying, “The problem is solved. Still functional. Reduced, but thinking straight.”
“Thinking straight? You tore your own goddamn guts out. You didn’t have to do that, man.”
The mechanical man’s three eyes turn red. “This assembly. Would self-terminate. To prevent further misuse.”
Alright. I get the picture.
“Are you… okay? Is this something you can afford to do?”
“Internal systems mostly functional. Still feel odd. Amorphic software projected to recover completely in time. It was a useful component, but non-essential. Gallbladder.”
“Most people’s gallbladders don’t let them manipulate the natural forces of the earth with their minds.”
“Mine did.”
“And you’re sure this doesn’t… I don’t know, make you sick, or something? You had that thing in you for centuries.”
“This assembly will function for centuries more. Without.”
Something occurs to me.
“So if it’s not in your chest anymore, then where is it?”
“Melted. Impossible to reconstruct.”
“Okay. How do I put this.” I drag my smoke, then give up. “Is there a schematic for… you? Is there any documentation about you or your systems that someone could find, and make another one of those things?”
“Yes.”
“Ahuh. And I’m guessing by that response you’re not going to tell me where any of it is.”
“Correct. My father’s work is safe. Inaccessible. Until the world is ready.”
“Hm. How will you know when that is?”
“When the Dynamic Brotherhood are gone. Then, perhaps. But not before.”
I nod.
Neither of us have any, but Niner and I see eye to eye.