Oathbound

by S W Clarke

  At the end of the block, the car braked. And started reversing.

  “Go!” Justin said as the four of us made for the back of the garden, where a high fence separated us from the next yard.

  A memory came back to me as we approached the fence. One of the World Army scientists in our lab at McGill had been a specialist in nanobots—minuscule robots designed to circulate through the bloodstream. Many days I had glimpsed him at his workstation, injecting mice with them.

  I was starting to think like Serena would. “They planted the dummy tracer in my shoulder to throw us off. The real tracer was one of those nanobots. It was the dart,” I muttered, certain now I understood. “The bot was in the dart.”

  No one noticed I had spoken. Cupid sailed over the fence, his face and arms reappearing. “Come on. I’ll pull you up.”

  I had just climbed over and dropped to the grass on the other side when Justin’s face appeared. Then the rest of him appeared as he flew over the fence and somersaulted next to me with a grunt.

  “What the hell was that?” Cupid said. “Oh, Herc threw you, didn’t he?”

  Justin climbed slowly to his feet. “It was supposed to be a boost.”

  “Come on, Herc!” Cupid whispered, peering over the fence.

  “This construction is too flimsy,” Hercules said. “I can’t possibly climb over it.”

  “Then do what you need to do.” Cupid waved an urgent hand. “Oh … oh shit. Hey guys, move back. Move waa-ay back.”

  Hercules did what he needed to do. We moved backward, and the demigod blasted right through the fence, a whole section of it slamming into the grass before he ran right over it and past us.

  We followed him, passing through the next yard and through another gate. We emerged onto the street the next block over.

  “What do you mean,” Justin said, “it was the dart?”

  Apparently he had noticed me mumbling to myself. “There’s a nanobot in my bloodstream,” I said. “That’s how they keep finding us. I know it.”

  “And how do we get it out of you?”

  “I don’t—”

  I was drowned beneath an engine’s roar. Headlights flashed over the nearby trees, and the SUV that had been following us came around the corner.

  We booked it into another yard, continuing our foray through the backyards of Brooklyn’s most affluent. As we ran, I tried to think of solutions to my nanobot issue, but all I could process was the sound of that SUV chasing us and the heavy footfalls I now heard on the street a block behind us.

  “We’ve got boots on the ground,” Justin said.

  “Noticed that, buddy,” Cupid shot back from his cloud.

  As we mounted another fence and dropped onto the grass, Justin doubled for a moment to breathe. When he straightened, he said, “Breaking Bad.”

  A section of fence fell next to us, and Hercules patted his hands together. “How do you break an intangible concept?”

  We started moving again.

  “You know,” Justin said, “that scene in Breaking Bad with the magnets. ‘Science, bitch!’ and all that.”

  We all remained silent.

  “So none of you watch TV?”

  “I prefer telenovelas,” Cupid said.

  “What is a TV?” Hercules asked.

  “Just tell us what you have in mind,” I said.

  “Cupid, are there any junkyards in New York that would be open right now? We need magnets. Major magnets.”

  Cupid paced in his cloud—by which I mean he floated six feet to the left and six feet to the right with his head down—before he snapped his fingers. “I know a guy.” He pointed. “In the Bronx. A place called Max Junk.”

  “The Bronx?” Justin said. “Isn’t that kind of …”

  “Dangerous?” Cupid made a face. “First of all, you’re watching too much TV. Not every neighborhood in New York is dangerous. Second, dude, come on. You’re being chased by an army.”

  “Good point,” Justin said.

  “Come on.” Cupid veered his cloud around and started us toward the street. “He’s a guy I knew back during my gearhead days. Liked to do experiments with his junk. Probably our best bet.”

  “Hercules,” Justin said. The demigod strode up to his side. Unlike Justin and me, who had been jogging this whole time, he was so large he only had to walk to keep up. “Will you distract them?”

  “Do you mean with my club,”—his hand trailed to the wooden club at his waist—“or my club?” And then his fingers traveled … elsewhere.

  Cupid snickered.

  “Uh,” Justin said. “Whichever one works best.”

  Hercules flashed his dimples. “You’re welcome to find out.”

  The thing about Hercules was this: he didn’t limit himself to 50% of the population. And as an encantado, I respected that. We, too, were known not to discriminate.

  But my boyfriend was old school, or rather, modern day, strictly monogamous school.

  I could swear I saw Justin’s neck flush, even though he ignored Hercules’s comment. “We need them off our backs for an hour.”

  “I’ll go with him.” Cupid patted his quiver of arrows as we came onto the street. “I’m the best distracter here.”

  “Good,” Justin said. “Cupid, you lead Hercules to Penn Station afterward. We’ll meet there, and we’ll all get on the train together.”

  We were coming to a busy thoroughfare. Ahead, I could hear the 24-hour-a-day honking that punctuated the city’s arteries.

  I stopped. “Cupid, Hercules—you don’t have to.”

  Hercules came around to stand in front of me. Those green eyes regarded me with more warmth and humor than it was possible I’d felt in my entire life. For a moment, I felt incandescent with his attention. Such was Hercules’s effect.

  “We choose to,” he said in a low voice. His fingers reached out and touched my shoulder. “And Isabella?”

  Heat rushed up my neck. “Yes?”

  “If we don’t arrive in time, you have to go without us.”

  “No,” I said. “No way.”

  “Yes way,” Hercules intoned, imitating my use of modern slang. Those words had never sounded so charming.

  “Remember: Max Junk,” Cupid said to us. “Tell him Cupid of Eros sent you.”

  And with that, the two of them changed directions, and Justin and I were left alone on the busy street. I stared after the two demigods, my vision blurring with emotion. “Do you think they’ll be all right?”

  Justin stared with me. “It’s Hercules and Cupid. I think they’ve got a better chance than we do.”

  I nodded. It was hard to swallow past the lump in my throat.

  Justin pointed at a yellow taxi. “Work your magic.”

  Beside us, those taxis flowed by like carp in a river. “Well, one kind of magic, at least.” I tried to keep the bitterness out of my voice. Since I’d been hit with the World Army’s dart, I couldn’t change illusions, couldn’t look or sound like anyone else. The heart of my power had been taken away from me. And I didn’t know how to get it back. I needed time to think, a lab and—probably—a miracle.

  So right now, my magic was limited to my charm. I stepped to the edge of the sidewalk, raised my hand, and like a law of nature, a nearby taxi pulled to the curb.

  “Max Junk in the Bronx,” I said as we climbed into the back seat. “Stat.”

  ↔

  On the ride over, Justin filled me in on his plan.

  “Magnets,” I repeated. “You want to suck the nanobot out of me with magnets.”

  “More like one extremely high-powered magnet. And you won’t get close enough for it to get sucked out … just disabled.”

  The cab bumped over a pothole. “But it’s made of metal.”

  “Right.”

  “So in theory, they could be sucked out of me.”

  “Well …” Justin began.

  In the front seat, our driver’s eyes had shifted to the rearview window. Time to use another of my minor enc
antado powers: playing a role.

  “So”—I turned to Justin with a wide-eyed expression—“in this novel, how does the super soldier find a magnet big enough at a junkyard to disable the nanobot inside his girlfriend?”

  Justin understood at once. “He drops Cupid’s name, and bribes the guy on duty to help the super soldier and his girlfriend out.”

  “And this whole ‘sucking out’ part. If she gets too close, that sounds like it’ll be pretty painful for the girlfriend. Maybe even dangerous.”

  Justin’s hand slid over mine. I could see in his eyes what he didn’t want to say. He only stroked my cheek with his other hand.

  I nodded in understanding. “What if she gets too close, and it’s circulating through a delicate part of her body? They’re sharp and small, which could mean a lot of piercing and ripping.” Even just talking about “piercing and ripping,” a shiver traveled up my spine.

  “It’s a risk,” Justin said.

  I lowered my voice to a whisper. “And you think this is our best option? This thing you saw on a TV show.”

  “Can you think of a better one?”

  I exhaled audibly through my mouth. “No.”

  “Don’t worry.” His arm encircled my shoulders. “I’ll take care of you, Isa.” His warmth bled right through my clothes, seeping into my skin.

  I pressed my head into the crook of his arm. “Don’t forget: I’m taking care of you, too.”

  “Sure,” he said. “Just let me have my moment, OK?”

  A small smile touched my lips. before he’d enlisted in the World Army back in Montreal, allowed them to mess with his genetics, he’d become obsessed with independence, self-reliance, strength. That obsession had gotten him into trouble more than once—trouble he’d sometimes gotten himself out of, and that I’d sometimes had to rescue him from—and by now I had learned an important lesson:

  When a person you love asks for their moment, you give it to them.

  “I know.” Because I did. “I know you’ll take care of me through this. And that you always will.”

  But I also knew that I had to take care of myself, too.

  That was more and more the reality of my life.

  When we arrived at Max Junk, a single light shone on in the junkyard’s office behind the chain-link fence. Justin and I came through the door and found no one around.

  “Hello?” I called.

  A clang sounded in a back room. Then, “Shit.” Half a minute later, a sleepy-eyed old man emerged with a towel, wiping coffee from his pants. He looked up at the two of us. “It’s the middle of the night. What do you want?”

  “Cupid of Eros said you could help us,” I said.

  Justin stepped forward, set his palm on the counter. “We need magnets. Lots of them.”

  The man glanced down at Justin’s hand and his eyes traveled up the length of his arm to his face. Then to mine. His expression was unreadable. “You said Cupid of Eros?”

  “Did I say Cupid of Eros?” Justin said with raised palms. “I meant …”

  “He brought me my wife,” the man interrupted, his face brightening. “Not a day passes I’m not thankful for that arrow in the back.”

  Justin and I met eyes and said nothing.

  “I told the little bugger I would help him out any time he needed.” He eyed the two of us. “What is it he needs?”

  Justin pulled $200 out of his backpack, slapped it on the counter. “Have you seen Breaking Bad?”

  The man stared at the cash. “Sure I have.”

  “We need a major magnet—one strong enough to disable a micro-computer inside a human body. And we need it now.”

  He touched the bills on the counter, lifting them close to his face for examination. “What is this?”

  “It’s Canadian dollars,” I said.

  “You’re Canadian?”

  “And we need you to not ask questions.” I removed another $100 from my own backpack. “Can you help us?”

  He set his coffee-stained towel on the counter. “You’ve come to the only guy in the Big Apple who can help you.”

  Half an hour later, we stood inside a two-stall garage where cars sat in various states of disarray. Before us lay one of those enormous circular magnets junkyards used to grab cars and lift them.

  This looked seven shades of dangerous. And completely unscientific.

  The mechanic held a box with a cord wired up to it from the back of the magnet, which he passed to Justin. “There you go. Make sure you get rid of any metal on you before you turn this thing on.”

  We tossed our backpacks aside, and Justin yanked off his belt. I hadn’t worn jewelry since we’d left Montreal, but I patted my body anyway. My hands felt sweaty against my jeans.

  Justin turned to me. “Stand far away, out in the yard. When I turn this on, you approach one slow step at a time.”

  “How the hell will you know when the thing works?” the mechanic asked.

  Justin ignored him. “Once you get to within thirty feet, stop.” He tracked from the yard to a spot between me and the magnet, ran his foot in a line through the dirt. “That should be enough.”

  I went out to the spot in the yard where Justin had indicated and let out a long exhale. “Turn it on,” I called.

  Justin flipped the switch, and a humming began. The magnet was definitely on, but I didn’t feel it pulling me.

  I took one step forward, then another, my eyes on Justin’s line in the dirt.

  Nothing happened. Nothing continued to happen as I came forward, each step more tentative than the one before it.

  I came to within a foot of the line, and still nothing happened. I didn’t feel any pull.

  “I have two theories.” I raised my fingers in the air. “There’s no bot, or it’s already disabled. Either way”—I took the last step forward to the line—”We’re in the …”

  All at once, I felt it. The pull was small at first, but as I took another step, it felt like an invisible hand had wrapped around my right leg and was dragging it with more and more force toward the garage.

  “You OK?” Justin called, his hand poised over the switch to the box.

  “I think so,” I managed to say. I struggled to keep slow and steady, but my shoes were practically sliding through the dirt. And I felt a simultaneous ache in my right leg, a pain that grew sharper and sharper the closer I got. GoneGods that was a strong magnet.

  “Forget that,” I said as the pain grew more intense. “Shut it off. Shut it off!”

  Before Justin could react, I lost my balance. In the same moment, it felt like I was being pierced with an ice pick right in the quadricep. A tiny spurt of my blood shot out of my leg toward the garage, hit the ground in a trail of droplets.

  I hit the ground hard as a red spot bloomed on the thigh of my jeans.

  The magnet had sucked the nanobot right out of me. It had also pierced an artery.

  The humming stopped, and I heard a clatter as Justin dropped the box and ran over to me. He dropped to his knees. “Are you—”

  I squeezed both hands over the spot on my thigh, but the bright blood kept coming. “It got an artery. A big one.”

  “Tripping billies,” the junkyard owner said. “She’s bleeding pink.”

  “Throw me your belt!” Justin called out to him. When he did, Justin wrapped it around my thigh above the wound. “You’re bleeding bad.”

  “I need to use my magic,” I breathed as he yanked the belt tight, cutting off the blood. “But … but I can’t. The dart.”

  “Lay back,” he instructed. “I’ll take care of you.”

  “There’s no time,” I said, though I simultaneously did as he instructed. “It was too deep.”

  “Just relax,” he said as he pressed my head to the ground. “Breathe, Isa. You’ll be OK.”

  But I couldn’t do as he asked. I lifted my face as his hands slid over my thigh below the tourniquet, and I watched as his hands began to glow white. As they did, a warmth cut through the pain.


  “Nossa Senhora,” I said. “How are you doing that?”

  “Remember what happened in Central Park?” he said, not taking his eyes off my leg. “When I grew two dragon heads?”

  Of course I remembered. He had appeared out of nowhere, stepping out from behind the tree that the hundred-headed dragon Ladon was still wrapped around. And he had saved all of us. “You took on some of his power,” I whispered. Just like Justin was doing with me—he was taking on some of my magic to heal me.

  “You may not be able to access your magic,” Justin said, “but that doesn’t mean it isn’t in you.”

  “You are brilliant.” I lowered my head to the dirt as the warmth spread through my leg.

  “Just genetically modified by brilliant people.” After a minute, the warmth dissipated, and his face appeared over mine. “All done.”

  I blinked. “No more bleeding?”

  “No more bleeding.”

  “And no more nanobot.”

  Justin smirked as he helped me up. “Magnets. Told you they would work.”

  “Magnets and magic,” I added as I rose. Magnets and magic—that could be the anthem of this GoneGod World.

  Chapter 3

  Predawn light gilded the city as we left Max Junk and took a taxi to Penn Station. I lay my head back as we bumped over potholes to the wordless melody of honking.

  Justin touched the bandage over my thigh. “Does it hurt?”

  I winced. “It hurts when you do that.” Though it was a comfort to feel Justin’s fingers on me—not just because he was my boyfriend. Also because that meant Hercules was alive, unhurt.

  Back in Montreal, Justin and I had done battle with a flock of ancient birds released by the World Army into the city. It was Justin who had slain them, and as we later found out, in doing so had completed one of Hercules’s “twelve labors.” I hadn’t heard of these labors before last week, but any Greek mythology buff would have.

  Twelve labors were given to Hercules to atone for his crimes: the murder of his wife and six children. And as it turned out, slaying the stymphalian birds was one of those labors. It had been undone when the World Army released the stymphalian birds over Montreal, and had brought Hercules back into the world.