I needed a minute to process it all, but I didn’t get one.
As I leaned against the wall in the hallway, trying not to throw up what little I had consumed in the past however-long, a couple of the troopers that had been with Grey came around the bend behind me, stumbling, supporting each other. They saw me, let out panicked yells, and groped for the rifles they wore slung at their sides.
I raised a shaky hand and sent a pulse of force in their direction, but they threw themselves back around the bend and my attack did nothing but shatter some concrete chips off the wall.
It gave me time to raise my energy shield and block their return fire, though. I huddled down behind it, hoping they weren’t sharp enough marksmen to hit my ankles, and backed down the hallway. I kept expecting a break in their fire to take advantage of, but it never came. Those damned UM-14s kept bolts of orange-red plasma thunking into the shield, and with alarm, I saw it beginning to warp beneath the onslaught. I realized the shield would give way about twenty-nine minutes before they needed to get another energy cell for their guns.
Instead of exposing a hand to fire back, I did something I rarely tried—rather than drawing energy in, I reached out to it and started shifting it where it was. It felt awful and clumsy, and my original idea—grab the officers’ heads and smash them together—turned out to be as impossible for me as eating soup with chopsticks. It was too fine and finicky a maneuver. I settled for bashing them back into the wall as I turned to fly as quickly as I could accelerate to the end of the hallway.
I miscalculated. My attack was much weaker than I had thought it would be, and I hadn’t expected much. Or maybe it was their spiffy semi-powered armor that let them recover quicker than I’d expected. Either way, I had barely turned around and launched myself through the air before plasma bolts started whizzing by me, and I hadn’t managed to make it twenty feet before the first bolt hit my shoulder.
Once again, I felt my muscles spasming like they were trying to rip free of my body, but it wasn’t as debilitating as Siege’s multiple shots were. I pushed myself through the air, and the second and third shots hit almost subsequently. It was enough to scramble my brain and I dipped, skidding along the ground for a moment. I turned and put my shield between us before skimming towards the exit, and other shot did indeed hit my ankle.
I burst into open space barely able to stay airborne, and threw myself to the side. It took me a second to remember, but I frantically searched for the small box on the wall bill had told me about, and found it. I ripped it open, not bothering with the latch. Inside, it showed me a series of switches in a few vertical rows, sort of like a fuse box. I flipped the the eighth in the first row and the sixth in the second, then hit the big red button that said “EMERGENCY CLOSE.”
The officer’s footsteps approached the opening of the hallway, but it didn’t matter. Their was a blaring alarm, a mechanical screech, and thick durasteel partitions suddenly dropped from above and crashed to the concrete, sealing the opening.
I leaned forward, trying to brace myself against the wall while I waited for the effects of the rifles to fade. I ended up awkwardly sliding down it to my knees, unable to support my own weight effectively.
“Minimum security,” I gasped between breaths, “my ass.”
“That’s minimum for metahumans,” a girl said quietly behind me. “The deeper you go, the worse it gets.”
I jumped, but since my body wasn’t fully under my control yet, I just sort of flopped forward and smacked my forehead on the wall while trying to spin towards the source of the noise. I ended up on my butt leaning back against the wall.
I was in another hallway, this one lined with more traditional-looking jail cells, shallow little rooms with bars running across the front. Most of them were empty, save for the one directly across from the sealed hallway.
I recognized her immediately.
The redheaded girl from Memorial Square.
She sat on a small, bare bunk, looking in a lot better shape than the last time I’d seen her. In fact, she looked downright healthy. Clean and well-fed. They’d given her a plain orange prison jumpsuit that looked freshly laundered, even. I’d thought she was pretty in the brief glimpse I’d gotten of her, but it turned out she was a step beyond pretty.
The only thing wrong with her was her eyes.
It was like she was staring at me from the far end of a tunnel. Distant green orbs watched me disinterestedly from within shadowed sockets, the eyes of a much older person who was looking at something awful a thousand yards away. Something else about her appearance was bothering me too, but I couldn’t pinpoint it.
My brain parsed what she had said and I frowned. “What do you mean ‘for metahumans?’ You’re a metahuman.”
Her lips quivered and she looked down.
I stared at her.
The redhead took a shuddering breath. I finally realized what else was bothering me about her appearance.
She wasn’t wearing one of the metal, psionic-blocking helmets.
I came to my feet and pressed myself against the bars of her cell. “What did they do?”
“My name is Olivia,” she said quietly. “Olivia Nupuri.”
I tried bending the bars out of the way, but it was more durasteel, and I couldn’t even make them quiver. Where had they even gotten so much? Wasn’t it supposed to be expensive and difficult to make?
And then the alarm hit.
It ululated, high, piercing, shrieking, as red lights from above began to oscillate, easily overpowering the weak chemlights to make the hallway fluctuate between vivid red and dim yellow.
“Too late,” she said.
I stayed there, staring for a couple more precious seconds, before backing away. “I’m sorry.”
“Tell my family where I am,” she said. “They’re in Milwaukee. Only Nupuris in the phonebook.”
I nodded. Then I ran.
Then I flew.
There wouldn’t be a huge response. The crew for this compound was surprisingly light, according to bill. For a little of my credit, he had informed me that only high-ranking officers were even cleared to know it existed. Of course, he then speculated that had to mean that their automated defenses made up for the lack.
I raced down the corridor of cells, unlimbering the other energy shield from my belt and firing it up as I moved. I saw only a few more prisoners watching me, all of them seemingly as docile as Olivia the redhead. I still needed time to process it all, and I still didn’t get any.
I hit the first internal checkpoint and I was glad I had gotten the second shield out. A hail of plasma bolts greeted me as soon as I turned the corner, most of them from autonomous turrets, with only a single trooper adding his rifle fire to the mix. I made a wedge out of my shields, charged straight at them, and then pulsed force all around me as I smashed through a concrete barricade, flattening the trooper, the turrets, and his little guard station in the process.
I did the same thing to two more checkpoints before, finally, making it to what bill had called the Gatehouse.
It was the place Siege had first tackled me into, the open, warehouse-like room that housed the telegate. It stood silent and inactive on the far end, waiting.
The room was suspiciously empty. You’d think it’d be the first place people swarmed if an alarm started going off, or that it would be bristling with automated defenses, but nothing moved in the pulsing red light of the alarm. I’d been ready to make my way to the control panel nearby under a hail of gunfire, but instead I found myself waiting, frozen on the precipice of escape, waiting for the shoe to drop.
And drop it did.
The ceiling stretched out far above where it seemed like it should stop, above those catwalks that I had seen when I had first arrived, far enough that the light from the alarms did fuck-all to illuminate anything. I could only slightly make out a mass of hoses, chains, cables, and other shadowed industrial trappings.
It was from this mass the robot dropped right in front of the telegate
It was huge, twenty-feet tall at least, matte-black surfaces outlined in the dull grey-brown of unpainted durasteel, with a single splash of red across its face—a chevron-shaped visor glowing on a head that reminded me of a Roman legionnaire’s helmet. It was humanoid, but with proportions closer to a gorilla than a human, with a wide barrel-chest, thick arms, and comparatively stumpy legs.
Before it crashed into the ground, rocket jets on its feet fired, slowing its descent. It landed with only a relatively mild resounding crash, knee joints whirring as they absorbed the shock.
“GUARDIAN PROTOTYPE MARK ONE,” it said in a thundering but dull filtered robot monotone, so deep that it barely registered as a voice so much as a thumping bass note that somehow formed words. “FIELD COMBAT TEST INITIATED. OBJECTIVE, HALT PRISONER, PREVENT ESCAPE. TARGET ACQUIRED.”
And then its body erupted into guns.
They sprang from its shoulders, its arms, its chest, even its legs, and I barely had time to throw myself into motion before they started firing. The area I had been standing in simply disappeared beneath a nearly solid wall of laser beams, repeater bolts, ion cannons, and dust from two kinetic railguns that curled around from its back. I didn’t even have time to be terrified, because they tracked me almost as quickly as I moved, simply erasing large swathes of the room around and behind me.
Fighting is like a puzzle. Except when it’s like a fly-swatter, and you’re the fly.
My first instinct was to go up into the forest of cables above, but nothing I saw up there looked like it would last a second beneath the absolute apocalypse of fire the Guardian was laying down. There might be something more substantial up there—apparently, there was something substantial enough to hold a robot the size of two elephants—but gambling on that when the margins were so fine was firmly a desperate last resort.
I cut back to try and get a little more room, but it turned out to be a mistake. I was assuming the robot’s targeting would have trouble following such a sharp movement and keep tracking my previous path, but it adjusted almost instantly and just ended up bringing me closer to the death barrage. Worse, the first started to spread out, with some of the guns firing to cut off my potential escape paths rather than following my path, trying to catch up.
Right away, I knew this was a losing game. Staying at range gave it the advantage, since not only could it make large adjustments to aim with relatively little motion, but it was also mechanically precise, so it was capable of making pinpoint adjustments that only extremely skilled humans would be able to match. It would never overcompensate, and just from the way its aim was already getting harder to avoid, I intuited that it had something resembling the Hunter drones’ learning AI. If I didn’t change the dynamic quickly, I was going to die.
As counter-intuitive as it felt, I had to get close to this thing, much like I had Raygunner.
I cut towards it as quick as I could, and barely dodged a devastatingly fast projectile from the back-mounted rail gun, and then, thankfully, actually started managing to put some distance between myself and the lasers.
And with that little bit of breathing room, I drew in power, found an opening in the fire, and flashed towards it, throwing a punch directly into its chest.
My punch landed with all the effect of a child hammering a pot with a wooden spoon. It made a nice, big ringing noise and did little else. I realized the entire robot was made of durasteel, which was something I needed to stop being surprised about.
Because, while that sank in, I failed to instead consider that I had I put myself into distance of its fists.
Boosters fired at its elbows, cracking the air with an explosive roar, and its punch came at me with the speed of a bullet train. I put an instinctive psionic shield between myself and the impact, which probably saved my life. I don’t know if it would have killed me outright, but it definitely would’ve knocked me senseless, and that was basically the same thing.
Still, it hit the psionic shield, overloaded it, and then hit my two SCAR shields and knocked them out of my grip, sending them skittering across the floor. I tumbled through the air, back towards the far end of the room again, and only the fact that I was able to recover fairly quickly kept me from getting vaporized by the death barrage.
I went evasive again, trying to keep myself at a middle distance without straying into punching territory. It was a very fine line between being close enough for it to actually do any good and far away enough not to get swatted out of the air again. Since that was a pretty good distance for me, too, I focused and lobbed a blast of force—that broke over its chest with little effect except another nice hollow boom.
Direct attack was off the table, at least until I found a structural weakness. The problem was, I didn’t spot anything immediately. Even the joints were armored in solid durasteel—it didn’t need to be incredibly flexible to keep up its volley of fire. The visor was an obvious choice, but too obvious. Nobody with half a brain would make their deathbot’s weak spot glow.
I considered other options. Waiting until it ran out of power or ammo was probably low-percentage, given some of the ultratech energy sources I knew SCAR had access to. Escape under fire probably wouldn’t be an option either. I needed to get to the console and interact with it, which was unlikely, to put it lightly. I thought overheating at least might be a worry, given the rate of fire, but again, that wasn’t something I could count on given what I knew of SCAR’s ultratech.
I tried my next gambit.
I darted towards it quickly, into range of those fists, and this time, I was ready for the punch that came. I blasted myself out of the way, and then up its arm to one of the laser turrets that had sprung up from inside it.
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
The armor was durasteel, but the turret that had come from beneath it wasn’t.
Nor, I realized, was the mount it was attached to. That was my structural weakness.
I blasted the turret itself, taking it out in a shower of sparks and metal pieces, the durasteel plate it had been housed beneath clattering against the room’s far wall. I then zipped up to where it had been and stuck my hand in the hole it had left behind. From there, I unloaded a blast of raw force directly inside it.
I had been hoping for, perhaps, some kind of cascading failure which led to the entire machine exploding, possibly in a manner reminiscent of a certain moon-sized space station. What I instead got was a brief shudder, and then the thing pivoted and smashed its entire arm into the wall, me-first.
No boosters fired, so it was merely a few dozen tons of metal and machinery driving me into a concrete wall at highway speeds, so I didn’t die. It also didn’t feel great. The impact rattled my skull, and then I was left with the force of a few dozen hydraulic presses trying to squash me to death, and definitely trapping me in place.
It’s red chevron visor hovered above me. “A FOOLISH MANEUVER.”
I blinked. I definitely hadn’t expected it to start giving commentary.
Taking a second, since it didn’t blast me to death, I reached out and—felt a mind present. It wasn’t a human mind either. I’ve mentioned repeatedly that I wasn’t a psionic expert, but even I could very much tell the difference. This wasn’t a mech suit. This thing was sentient.
Which was hilariously illegal.
Laws forbidding the creation of sentient AI had been on the books since before ultratech was even an understood phenomenon. They didn’t want some techie creating his own slave race in their garage, which I thought was perfectly understandable. The few AI that had been made were all, as far as I knew, full and free citizens with rights and jobs and lives and everything. From what I understood, they had unanimously agreed with and supported the ban on further sentient AI development, specifically citing the potentially deadly effect it might have on instruments of warfare.
And I had never seen a machine designed more as an instrument of war.
Of course, these thoughts were all somewhat on the backburner at the moment, as I was currently being crushed and would likely soon be incinerated.
“Yeah, well,” I growled, straining to push the arm away enough for me to slip out. “You know what else is pretty foolish? Talking instead of killing me.”
“FOOLISH AGAIN,” the machine said in its chugging boat-engine of a voice. “YOU DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE NATURE OF THIS STRUGGLE.”
“Yeah, I also don’t understand why someone designed a smug robot.” I pulled in every bit of power I could muster and unleashed it out of my hands, washing its arm in a flood of white force. It seemed like it was about to give, until it shifted its posture and bore back down on me.
“ROBOT,” it said. “FASCINATING. A TERM CONNOTATIVELY LESS THAN HUMAN. LIMITED. NO, CHILD. YOU CANNOT EVEN BEGIN TO FATHOM WHAT I AM.”
“Pretentious?”
“TRANSCENDENT,” it said. It raised its other arm, and I saw the turrets on it swiveling towards me. “YOU WILL KNOW AFTER I KILL YOU AGAIN, LITTLE CUCKOO. HAIL TO THE KING.”
I exploded with power, sending white sheets of force rippling in every direction. Not because I thought it would do anything, but to keep it distracted, and hopefully block its vision. Because I had noticed something it, apparently, hadn’t.
The telegate was spinning up to activate.
----------------------------------------
bill made a pleased little noise in his throat and said, “And I believe that concludes our business, Darkstar. It was a pleasure—”
“Wait,” I said. “One last thing.”
“Your credit is exhausted.”
“I know. I’ve got new information for you.”
bill’s head tilted inquisitively, and he waited for me to continue.
“I was told to tell you that Paragon’s great-nephew is the Kingmaker,” I said.
bill twitched. “I…see. And what do you wish in return?”
“Tell Paragon that I’m ready to go,” I said. “Tell him I’ll meet him in Tokyo, if I make it out. If I don’t, tell him where I am. Tell him that I’m willing to take his offer."
bill was silent.
“Is that enough?” I asked. “Do still owe you something?”
“No, Darkstar, your favor was exactly in proportion,” bill said, sounding apprehensive. “However, I am afraid I am unable to deliver what you ask.”
“What? Why?”
“Unfortunately, the answer to that question is, at the moment, extremely valuable,” bill said. “More valuable than you can afford. We will simply have to say that it is impossible for me to contact Paragon at this time.” He made an irritated noise. “Which unfortunately means that now the Club is once again in a position of debt.”
I tried to understand. I had always thought of bill as a kind of wish-granting vending machine. Give gossip, get chicken fingers. I had never considered the idea that there might be limitations to what he was capable of that could crop up at inconvenient points. More, I couldn’t think of why he wouldn’t be able to talk to Paragon. Even if Paragon was beyond his reach right now, surely he’d be back soon?
Before I could really explore that line of thought, bill said, “If I may suggest an alternative, Darkstar? We have only a few minutes before Grey returns to collect you.”
I nodded.
“First, how sure are you? How firm of your course? When you leave this place, what are your plans?”
“Well, when the pissed wears off, I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if I’m really planning for the future right now. I’ll find Paragon. But first, I think I’m just going to take a nap.”
“What if,” bill said, “what comes next is more difficult than what came before?”
“I don’t see how it could be. But even if it is…” I trailed off and shrugged. “Why?”
“Because there is a certain…hot-headed acquaintance of ours who is quite desperate to know your whereabouts,” bill said carefully. “Should your escape attempt fall through, it may be that their attempts to locate you will prove suddenly fruitful, perhaps with some assistance from yours truly. It may be that everything you’ve been through up until that point will only have been a prelude to what comes next. Would you still wish to be free, in that case?”
I thought about it. “Are you…un-pepping me?”
“Darkstar, I am no jackass genie,” bill said. “I am not a self-involved faery. I am not a used car salesman. I am not here to trick you, exploit you, or teach you a lesson. It is my preference that all favors are repaid in good faith, and that they provide something of true worth to the recipient. Otherwise, they are meaningless. If I were to fulfill a request and it would lead only to the collapse of your spirit, it would not only be a black mark in the Club’s ledger, but it would also be personally vexing. I find you interesting, and I wish to see you continue on to create yet more interesting gossip for me to spread.”
Could I go back to the Skip? Could I put myself back in that situation? Could I survive as Hyperion’s pet girlfriend? He’d probably never let me out of his sight again, and while I could maybe slip away, I didn’t even want to think about what might happen if I disappeared a third time. The first time, he’d nearly turned the Skip upside down looking for me. I was sort of surprised he hadn’t just blown everything to hell already—which seemed to be implied by bill’s references to Club Hellfire still existing not as a pile of ash.
Could I do that?
The answer was surprisingly easy.
Yes.
Now that bill had me back on my feet, I realized that there was nothing else in the world as bad as where I had been, sitting alone in the dark, ready to give up. Nothing lower. The only direction was up, or one sharp six foot descent.
Besides. Paragon would come for me. He would save me. He would.
“Do it,” I said. “I can regret it later if I have to. That squares us?”
“It does,” bill said. “Now, I predict twenty seconds before the door opens. How would you like to distract the good Sheriff?”
----------------------------------------
The telegate engaged.
Tongues of fire began to lick through the portal.
I mentally steeled myself, as suddenly the giant deathbot became the second most threatening thing I’d have to deal with.
Alex appeared from the rainbow event horizon in full costume as Fury. Streamers of fire swirled around her like tentacular appendages, ready to lash out at any enemies she perceived. Her hair flowed around her head as though she were underwater, glowing seemingly white hot, but not burning her uniform or skin. Her eyes swept and locked on to us.
The robot’s head finally swiveled towards her. Since it wasn’t particularly well articulated, it had to shift its whole upper body slightly. “HOW DID—”
I sensed its balance shift, and threw every bit of my intrakinetic strength into a shove.
It stumbled back, stumpy legs unable to fully compensate, gorilla arms windmilling to try and restore balance.
Alex swept her hand out in an arc.
An ice sheet condensed over the ground beneath it, and with a kind of titanic ponderousness, its legs went out from under it, its arms failed to find any purchase on the floor, and it crashed to the ground with the ringing, cacophonic clang of a high-speed tuba collision.
I flew down and hovered in front of Alex, feeling suddenly trembling and weak.
“You came,” I said, my voice barely able to squeeze past the sudden restriction of my throat.
“Of course I did, kid,” she said with a fierce grin. A grin that faded as she looked me up and down. “Jesus, Anna, what did—”
The deathbot rolled, leveled several of its lasers at us, and let loose.
Without looking, Fury made gripping motion with her fingers and brought her arm up in a kind of empty-handed uppercut.
The ice sheet beneath the deathbot suddenly thrust upward, building itself into a wall of frost, and flipped the machine up, sending its barrage far over our heads. The robot slid down the other side, putting a couple tons of ice between us and it.
“Come on,” Alex said. “Let’s get out of here.”
As soon as the words left her mouth, the telegate deactivated, event horizon blinking away with a pop.
Alex spun to look back, but I spun towards the console.
Sheriff Grey hunched over it, using the desktop to stand, barely able to support herself. She looked over at us with such pure, undiluted animosity that even with my mental defenses up, I felt like my brain was going to get a sunburn. Her grey eyes bulged, rimmed with red, inhuman in their excoriation.
The deathbot burst through Alex’s ice wall.
Alex turned, spotted Grey, and suddenly, not only matched the intensity of the other woman’s gaze, but outstripped it.
“Darkstar,” Fury said, voice unwaveringly calm. “Help me scrap this junktech real quick?”
“Sure,” I said. “Weak points are beneath the turrets.”
“What about the big glowing visor?”
“Who would make a structural weakness that obvious?”
“Remember who we’re dealing with, Darkstar.”
I blinked.
She turned and began calmly walking towards the giant robot.
Mist condensed around her, cloaked her, and seemed to solidify into a white-blue set of segmented ice armor protecting her vital organs. The rest of the mist trailed behind her like an ethereal cape. At the same time, the fire swirling around her and in her own hair intensified and began to burn wildly, like someone pumping air into hot coals. The two extremes had seemingly no effect on each other—the fire didn’t melt the ice, the ice and freezing mist did little to quench the flames.
I drew in every bit of power I could and raised into the air above her shoulder, floating along slightly behind her.
The deathbot watched us. Despite the fact that it was incapable of facial expressions and body language, something about it felt hesitant and calculating.
And then it wasn’t. It charged forward, peppering the area with laser fire and energy bolts.
I broke upwards and launched a blast of force directly at its visor. Alex must have been correct, because while the blast didn’t land, it’s only because the machine hurriedly brought an arm up to block. This blocked several of the turrets—and its vision.
Fury darted in, flows of fire weaving around her. The deathbot recovered quickly and launched a punch, the same lightning-quick rocket-assisted attack that had caught me.
She dodged it, leaping fifteen feet into the air over the punch.
I pursed my lips at her.
She attacked.
Two gouts of flame lanced wide and destroyed two more turrets on the deathbot's body, but the flame was mostly a distraction. The robot tried to swat her out of the air with its other arm.
And here’s why Alex gets to break the no jumping rule: She’s just that good.
Fire burst from Alex’s feet, changing her trajectory just enough to barely miss the massive metal arm. At the same time, a short icy sword coalesced in her hand, and the mist that followed her wreathed her, spun her, and her sword flitted across the robot’s durasteel arm.
That should have ended with, at best, no effect, and at worst, a shattered sword, but it didn’t. Instead, the edge bit deeply and cleanly into the metal, parting it like butter.
Fury’s powers were psionically based, which meant she had been able to train herself into a decent intrakineticist, not as strong as me, but strong enough to put her in the lower ranks of super strength. But that was as far as she could go, as it wasn’t really what her power seemed like it was meant to do. Her real strength was thermokinesis.
Most people assumed that meant blasts of flame and walls of ice, and indeed, those things were very useful. She had already demonstrated just how much. But Fury had a talent far beyond that. She could concentrate and intensify her attacks to ridiculous levels. Her fires could get hotter than Hyperion’s, though she couldn’t output power nearly on his level. Her main form of melee combat, however, were her ice swords, which she could not only refine down to a monomolecular edge, but compress until they were denser than osmium and harder than diamond. Much, much more so in both cases. She’d let me pick up one of her ice swords once and it had weighed more than me—she wielded them like they weighed nothing at all.
Fury spun out of the attack, landing gracefully on the other side of the deathbot, and its entire forearm thunked to the ground with a heavy metal clang. It froze, staring down at its cleanly severed arm.
And then I burst forward and punched it in the face.
The visor shattered beneath my knuckles with a satisfying crunch—it felt like plastic—and the machine rocked back. It tried to follow me with one of its lasers, but I was too close and too quick. I zipped back, and then forward again, this time with a barrage of punches that slammed into fragile machinery beneath.
Meanwhile, a pillar of ice erupted beneath Fury, launching her back through the air, this time in a low arc. Whips of flame lashed out and burnt through the bases of the railgun mounts, and a series of quick strikes took chunks out of the durasteel shell of the robot.
It tried to bat me away and focus on her, but I reached into its head elbow deep with both of my arms, grabbed handfuls of cables and wiring, and started ripping them out wholesale. Desperate, it tried to smack me away, even firing its rocket boosters, but I was ready this time, and I flitted up out of the way. In its attempt to catch me, it rocket-slapped its own face hard enough that I saw a durasteel deformation handprint on its helmet-like head.
“Stop hitting yourself,” I said in my most mocking little kid voice.
It roared, an enormous, sustained sound like a rockslide made of subwoofers.
It didn’t occur to me that this was an attack until I realized that I had started to droop in the air, my chest feeling like it had an entire orchestra of kettle drummers beating away inside it, my vision going blurry.
What guns it had left turned up to roast me out of the air.
But Fury roasted it first.
She poured fire into the gaps she’d made in its armor, burning it from the inside, fires hot enough that I saw the durasteel began to glow and warp. The deathbot shuddered, and I felt the ugly malevolence of whatever consciousness inhabited it begin to recede. Weirdly, it didn’t feel like death, but it wasn’t organic, so who even knew what that would feel like.
The fire stopped. The robot stayed still for a moment—and then tipped, hitting the concrete floor with a single, dull thud of finality.
It said, “GUARDIAN MARK ONE TEST, FAILED. ADJUSTMENTS MADE TO MARK TWO DESIGN.”
And then it was silent.
I landed next to Alex, giving a wide berth as I descended to the still-hot remains of the deathbot.
She frowned. “Was that a mech? Did I just kill someone?”
I shook my head. “AI. It was chattier than that before you showed up.”
Alex’s eyebrow quirked. “Interesting.”
We turned to the telegate console.
Grey stood in front of it still, staring at us down the length of an ultratech rifle barrel.
I was surprised she hadn’t pulled the trigger yet, but somehow, not completely surprised. I had no idea why, but after what I had done, it felt like I’d gained some kind of instinctual understanding of her, an involuntary empathy.
Which sucked. The last thing I wanted was to understand the world through the lens of Sheriff Grey. It didn’t matter how hard her life was—plenty of people dealt with trauma without turning into a terrible person, which she unquestionably was.
Yes, I’m aware of the irony. I wasn’t really in a self-reflective mindset at the time, though.
Fury stepped forward, and Grey’s rifle fixed on her.
“Don’t move,” Grey said.
“Or what?”
“Or I’ll shoot you, dumbass.”
“No, you won’t,” Alex said dismissively. “I’m going to walk right past you, turn the telegate back on, and leave with the kid.”
Grey’s bulging eyes narrowed slightly. “What makes you think that’s going to happen?”
Alex smiled almost pleasantly and let her powers go—the flames dissipated, the ice vanished in a puff of mist, and her hair laid back down on her head and shoulders. Her hand went to her utility belt. She opened one of the compartments and from it took a small piece of folded paper, which she quickly unfolded and held up.
“This,” she said. “It’s the court order SCAR has been ignoring to turn over one Annabelle Jones into the custody of the proper authorities.”
“That means nothing,” Grey said, barrel not wavering in the slightest. “Our appeal—”
“Was denied, dismissed, and censured as inappropriate to even file,” Alex cut in. “Your organization tried to get cute with the court system and you stepped on your own dicks. It’s nobody else’s fault when you trip on them.”
Grey gestured with the tip of the gun. “Our lawyers—”
“Aren’t as good as ours,” Fury said. “That’s the problem of relying on money over expertise. Most of the people who are really good at something have these things called ‘principles,’ you see, and—”
“One more word and I’ll blow your head off,” Grey snarled.
Alex grinned.
Then she walked forward, casually, until she was less than an inch from the end of Grey’s rifle. “Do it, Gabby. Try. Twitch wrong. I’ll give you matching legs, bitch.”
They stared each other down for a long, tense moment.
Then Alex simply stepped around her and started hitting buttons on the telegate console.
Grey slowly lowered her gun, blinking rapidly, staring at nothing.
The telegate started spinning up again, and Alex gestured to me. We both walked over to stand in front of it. Alex slipped her arm around me and pulled me in for a quick hug. “I’m glad you’re okay, kid.”
“I’m neutral on the subject.”
“Hush and give me a hug, dork.”
After a moment, I did. I tried not to squeeze her hard enough to literally crush her, but I realized that everything I had been holding back—all of the emotion, all of the horror—was very close to breaking free, the dam holding it in cracking.
The telegate finished booting, and I felt space expand on the other side of the glowing rainbow event horizon.
Before we stepped through it together, I looked back at Grey one last time.
She hadn’t moved, except to watch us go. She met my eyes, and I heard her say, “What did you do to me?”
And then Alex led me through to the other side.
I was free at last.