by Jay Kristoff
The kid drummed his fingers on his rifle. Utterly unmanned.
“. . . You move slow,” he finally said. “Real slow.”
Preacher reached into his black coat.
Held up his Daedalus warrant with a red right hand.
“Now,” he said. “Hand me my goddamn flamethrower.”
1.24
GLASS
His ma had named him Quincey, but everyone called him the Velocipator.
He was a wizard. He didn’t wear robes or have a beard or a broomstick, but he conjured magic, true cert. In a world where nothing really worked anymore, the powerful needed a mechanic just as much as they needed armies and guns. And so while the Velocipator wasn’t one of the brightest peeps in Armada, he was still one of the most important. He kept the grid pumping juice. He kept the subway in working order. But most important, he kept the Admiral’s wheels spinning.
At the moment, he was working on her pride and joy: the Thundersaurus. The car was a beast—an old Mustang coupé cropped onto a monster truck chassis, its rear suspension jacked ten feet off the ground. The Admiral had a thing for ships, so the Velocipator had customed the ’Stang’s snout into a point, like the prow of an old speedboat. It was layered with rust, intake rising out of the hood like a tiny mountain of chrome. But it moved like its name, shaking the earth as it came.
The Velocipator pulled his screwdriver from between his teeth, hollered over the deep dub spilling through the old tune spinner.
“Oi, Slimm, you wanna grab me those filters Pando brung us? Might see if they fit.”
The Velocipator heard a series of wet thuds. A soft spang.
He swore he could smell burning hair.
“. . . Slimm?”
Armada’s chief mechanic crawled out from under Thundersaurus, cursing beneath his breath. “Bloody slackers, if youse are on the smoke again, I’ll . . .”
The man’s voice trailed off as he focused on the belt buckle in front of him. It was steel, slightly tarnished, attached to a pair of filthy cargo pants, which were in turn wrapped around a skinny girl with an impressive blond fauxhawk. She had a top-line optical implant and a Memdrive on one side of her skull. Welding goggles on her brow. A baseball bat rigged with some kind of shock generator in both hands.
“Hi,” she said.
The mechanic blinked. “You lost, sweetheart?”
“You don’t have any radiation suits around here, do you?”
“. . . Yeah, what for?”
“We’re going on a picnic.” She smiled.
The Velocipator frowned. There was no way this slice should be in here—the Wheelhouse was guarded by at least half a dozen Freebooters at any one time, sometimes more, and none of them had sent him word. And looking around, he saw no sign of Slimm, Jobs, Rolly or Snuffs, so there was no way she was here at their invite.
“Fizzy wheels.” She nodded to the beast behind him.
“Yeah, Thundersaurus, she’s a beaut.”
“Could I borrow the keys?”
“. . . What for?”
“Well, it’s gonna be easier to steal with the keys.”
The Velocipator’s frown was deepening. He saw a prettyboy with an old MfH-VI prosthetic arm cruise out from behind the fuel drums, rubbing his knuckles. He was carrying an automatic rifle that looked an awful lot like Rolly’s. The sawed-off shotgun stuffed into his jeans definitely belonged to Slimm—Velocipator could see his initials on the grip.
Prettyboy was followed by a tiny freckled girl with a jagged, cherry-red bob and what might’ve been an old 12-series-Cerberus blitzhund that had been stripped back to the combat chassis. The dog growled right at him, low and electric.
The Velocipator looked the blonde up and down. Realizing at last that she meant business—that she actually intended to steal the Thundersaurus.
“Sweetheart, do you know who this car belongs to?”
“Yeah.”
She held out her hand expectantly.
“Me.”
Turns out Zeke could drive.
As they roared out of the Wheelhouse, Ana was genuinely worried about getting out of the city alive. They’d stomped the Freebooters in the garage without too much drama—talking true, she doubted many folks in Armada would be stupid enough to try to poach the bosslady’s wheels, and the guards hadn’t really been expecting any capital T. But by the time they’d loaded Thundersaurus with spare tanks of juice and whatever supplies they could scrounge, the alarm had gone up.
As they tore out through the Wheelhouse door, at least half a dozen Freebooters opened fire from perches atop nearby ships. It was only Ezekiel’s skill at the wheel that stopped their jaunt to Babel from turning into the shortest road trip in history.
Bullets spannnged off the panels, shattered a side mirror, tap-tap-tapping against the extended rimguards as the bruisers tried to shoot out the tires. The Thundersaurus roared down a loading ramp, screeched around a sharp corner. They crashed snout-first through a series of spare-parts stalls, Lemon shouting “Sorreeeeeee!” out the window at the scattering merchants as they roared away. Bullets fell like rain, but finally, with a thunderous crash, they hit the bottom of another ramp and made it to ground level.
Thundersaurus’s engine howled in protest as they burst out through a heavy iron gate and hit the cracked concrete of the old city. Street folks scattered, hurling abuse, dust whipped up in the truck’s wake as the bullets petered out and died. Ezekiel stomped the accelerator, the truck roaring as Ana was pushed back into her seat. Kaiser stuck his head out the open window, heat-sink tongue lolling as they tore through the ruins of the Armada undercity, past the rusted hulks and subway signs and finally out onto the open road.
“Slow down!” Cricket shrieked.
“Go faster!” Lemon howled.
Grit and dirt blew in through the open window, and Ana dragged down her goggles. The engine was thunder and earthquakes, shaking her whole body, the city and their pursuers left in Thundersaurus’s dust. She looked through the rear window, saw Armada’s bizarre skyline disappearing in the haze of the setting sun. No sign of pursuit. Nothing but empty in the mirror. She whooped, hammering on the roof with her open palm and grinning.
Ezekiel turned onto a shattered freeway headed north, out toward the wastelands of the Glass. The road was pitted and potholed, but Thundersaurus’s tires were almost as big as Ana, handling all but the widest fissures with barely a bump. She turned around to check the backseat, still grinning.
“Everybody in one piece?”
“Barely.” Cricket scowled. “Slow down, you lunatic—we’re clear!”
Lemon gave her the thumbs-up as Ezekiel eased off the throttle a little. Kaiser still had his head out the window, his tail thump-thump-thumping against the seat. As the kilometers were chewed up under their wheels, Ana settled in to take stock of their gear.
They’d scrounged two assault rifles and a double-barreled sawed-off from the Freebooters they’d stomped, along with the grenade she’d rigged out of Kaiser’s thermex. Ana claimed the shotgun, strapped it to her leg. She wasn’t a great shot, and her lingering fear of guns wouldn’t help her shoot better in a crisis, so any weapon forgiving of a bad aim was a bonus. She didn’t know how well any of this gear would work against the Preacher anyway. But still, it was better than walking around with nothing but a grin on her face.
They’d snaffled an extra two barrels of juice for the engines, plus some almost clean water. Food might be a problem, but it was one that could wait. Best of all, they’d grabbed two rad-suits from the Wheelhouse supply lockers—turned out the Armada crews did regular salvage runs through the Glass and had the gear to protect themselves. The wasteland was still radioactive from the blasts that melted it in the first place, and anyone running it without proper protection was buying a one-way ticket to Cancer Town.
Ana popped out through the sunroof, hair whipping around her goggles. She squinted at the fuel barrels in the open trunk, saw a bullet hole through the one on the left.
>
“One of our tanks got hit during the escape,” she reported, ducking back inside and slamming the sunroof closed. “We’ve lost about a quarter of our juice.”
“This is a terrible plan,” Cricket said. “We should have our heads read.”
“Your protests are duly noted, Mister Cricket.”
“Evie, I—”
“I told you, Crick. My name is Ana.”
“Ana, then.” Cricket waved his hands as if beating away flies, still obviously upset about their argument in the workshop. “This is crazy. If what Hope told you is true, Babel has been guarded by a Daedalus Technologies garrison for almost two years. So even if we make it all the way there without this bucket breaking down—”
“Bucket?” Ana stroked the car’s seat. “Hush, you’ll hurt my baby’s feelings.”
“How are we gonna get past an army of siege-class badbots piloted by the best Daedalus has to offer?” Cricket demanded. “We already performed unauthorized surgery on a BioMaas kraken. Do we really want to be getting on the bad side of Daedalus, too?”
“The warrant on Ana’s head was put out by Daedalus,” Ezekiel said. “The Preacher said so when he hit the ministry. So she’s already on their bad side.”
“We knew it was someone with deep pockets after you, Riotgrrl,” Lemon muttered. “But not that deep. What the hells you do to get Daedalus Technologies on your back?”
“Think about it,” Ezekiel said. “Ana dropped a Goliath just by yelling at it. She can fry blitzhunds with a word. All Daedalus Technology gear runs on electrical current. Their machina. Their vehicles. And BioMaas and Daedalus have been circling each other ever since Gnosis collapsed. Sooner or later, one of them is going to try for the throne. Now, what do you think a BioMaas army could do with a weapon capable of frying any Daedalus tech with a wave of her hand?”
Ana looked down at her open palm.
“They could win a war,” she muttered.
“But she doesn’t even really know how to control it . . . ,” Lemon objected.
“Apparently, Daedalus doesn’t care.” Ezekiel shrugged. “They want Ana caught or killed before BioMaas figures out a way to use her to their advantage.”
“Maybe that’s it, then,” Ana said.
“. . . That’s what?” Cricket asked.
“The way in.” Ana closed the fingers on her hand. Held up her fist. “If I can drop Daedalus tech just by thinking on it, we head for their machina garrison outside Babel and use me to punch straight through it.”
“Evie—”
“I told you, it’s Ana, Cricket.”
“Whatever name you slap on it, this is pants-on-head stupid.”
Ana ignored the bot’s fretting, settled into her seat. The hum of the engine was almost hypnotic, the world outside the window flying by too quick to scope. The tunes spilling out the sound sys were solid, the company, bankable. She looked at Ezekiel in the driver’s seat, his olive skin turned golden by the sinking sun. Those too-blue eyes fixed on the road ahead. Had it really been just a couple of days since she’d found him in the Scrap? It felt like she’d lived two lifetimes since then. . . .
They roared on through the wasteland outside Armada, the built-up houses of a desiccated suburbia slowly giving way to wide and open roads, rocky badlands and endless deserts. The country was almost beautiful in its barrenness, just a few tiny specks of civilization humming amid all this nothing. The minutes melted to hours, the meters to miles. Nothing but the dub and her own thoughts for company. Every moment, they were drawing closer to Babel. Every moment was bringing her nearer to the things who’d killed her family, destroyed her entire world. Faith. Gabriel. Their siblings.
What would she say to them?
Where would she even begin?
Lemon was in the backseat, drumming her fingers on the cracked faux leather. Thumping her feet off-time to the music. Something was eating her, Ana could tell. It had been chewing her for days now, backing up behind her teeth like an old 20C traffic jam.
“You okay, Lem?” she asked.
“Fizzy. Max fizzy.”
“You seem kinda jumpy.”
Lemon chewed her lip hard. Foot tapping. All adrenaline and nerves.
“Look, I know Crick is programmed to fret, Riotgrrl,” she finally said, “but maybe he’s onto something.”
“A human talking sense?” Cricket growled. “Someone pinch me, I’m dreaming.”
Lemon clapped a hand over the little logika’s voxbox to muffle his voice. “You’ve taken out a Goliath and a couple of Spartans before, true cert,” she said to Ana. “But how you gonna fight off a whole garrison of them? They’ll blow us off the road before we get anywhere near Babel.”
“Ezekiel drives a mean stick. And I’m getting better at it, Lem. It didn’t take me half as long to fry that blitzhund as it did those Spartans. Maybe I’m figuring it out.”
“Maybe you were just lucky? Maybe it’s easier to fritz smaller things?”
“Maybe we won’t know until I try? I mean, unless you’ve got a better plan?”
“This is crazy, Riotgrrl. I’m glad you wanna get Mister C back, but—”
“Crap,” Ana said.
“Um.” Lemon blinked. “That’s a little rude, but okay. . . .”
“No.” Ana pointed past Lemon’s head, out the rear window. “Crap.”
The day had been ground away beneath their wheels, and the sun was almost set into the west. The sky bled through from sullen gray to a furious red, the edge of the world consumed in flame. Ana could see the tiny Armada skyline to the south, silhouetted against the glow. But through the dust in their wake, she could see a smaller cloud: a tiny dark speck closing in on their tails. She engaged her telescopics, narrowing focus until she found a single figure, bent over the handlebars of a low-slung motorcycle. Black coat whipping behind him in the dirty wind. Blue eyes fixed directly on her.
Lemon scrounged up a pair of binocs from underneath the seat, peered through the filthy glass. Cricket climbed up beside her, both speaking simultaneously.
“Craaaap.”
“Preacher,” Ana breathed.
Ezekiel glanced into the rearview mirror, squinting against the sunset.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s him.” Ana nodded. “Definitely.”
Ezekiel’s face went pale, his hand gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles turned white. The metal groaned in his grip. His eyes were just a little too bright.
“Hope . . . ,” he whispered.
Ana didn’t know quite how to feel. Hope had betrayed her father. Helped murder her family. Forgiveness was never going to be an option. But the lifelike had been trying to make some kind of amends in that ministry. Atone as best she could. She’d given them sanctuary. Helped them when the whole world seemed arrayed against them.
Did she deserve to die?
Murdered by some psychopath in a fight that wasn’t even hers?
Ana had no time to fret over the question. Squinting through the dust, she realized even worse news was riding hot on the Preacher’s tail. Not just one motorcycle, but dozens. Flanked by heavier trucks, tricked-out dirt racers, juiced-up 4x4s. Skull- and-crossbones flags fluttering from their aerials, daubed across their hoods. A posse of Freebooters from Armada by the look, hell bent on getting back their bosslady’s stolen wheels.
Didn’t think she’d take it that personally . . .
Ezekiel pointed through the windshield.
“Ana . . .”
She looked to where Zeke was motioning. The sunset to the west was spectacular, but the sight in front of them almost stole her breath away. Through her telescopics, Ana could see black clouds on the northern horizon, a looming wall of darkness that stretched from the earth far up into the heavens. Lightning streaked across the sky, crackling a strange, luminous orange. The rolling wall was still kilometers away, but looked to be right in their path. Her belly turned cold with dread.
“You frightened of a little thunder, Stump
y?” Cricket growled.
“That’s no rain cloud,” Ezekiel said.
“It’s a glasstorm,” Ana breathed.
Lemon blinked in confusion. “They make those in glass now?”
“I remember them from when I was little,” Ana explained. “They’d sometimes blow in all the way to Babel. The Glass is basically just a big section of desert melted by the bombs back in the war, yeah? So when the winds pick up hard enough, sometimes the glass gets whipped up along with all the sand and dust. Glasstorms can be hundreds of kilometers across. They can last days. Sometimes weeks.”
“Well, that sounds like a whole bunch of zero fun,” Lemon said.
“Depends if you consider being torn to pieces by shards of radioactive silicon fun.”
“Point of order,” Cricket said, rapping his knuckles on the seat. “I can’t help but notice we’re driving directly toward this whole bunch of zero fun about as fast as we can. Shouldn’t we be headed right the hell away from it?”
Ana glanced at Ezekiel. “My learned colleague raises a good point, Zeke.”
“It’s over a thousand kilometers between here and Babel, even cutting direct across the Glass,” he replied. “Nearly twice that if we go around the storm. If we lost a quarter of our fuel in that stray shot to the tanks, I’m not sure we have the juice to make a detour that big. This truck runs fast, but she’s thirsty.”
“Wait,” Cricket said. “So you want to take us into it? If you’re that keen on murdering us, there’s less obvious ways to get it done, Stumpy.”
“Take a look behind us,” Ezekiel said. “That’s a whole bunch of murder on our tails already. We head into the Glass, any of those Freebooters who didn’t bring rad-suits will have to turn back or risk dying of radiation poisoning.”
“We stole rad-gear from the Wheelhouse,” Cricket pointed out. “They’ll know where we’re headed. They’d have come equipped, for sure.”
“Even if they did, half of them are riding bikes. They follow us into the glasstorm, they’ll risk being ripped to ribbons. Halving the number of angry people with guns chasing us would be a good way to stay unmurdered, wouldn’t you say?”
