by Sara King
“Quad, goddamn it!” his mother shouted from downstairs. “You better not be building another robot in there!” He had, of course, been banned from tinkering with robots after Mordy had blown the top off Whittlepeak Mountain.
“I’m not, Mom!” Quad called back, carefully dialing back his strength so as not to hurt her again, however much she deserved it.
Twelve feet away, against the wall, Anna was slowly getting to her feet, her dark eyes spitting fire. “You wanna play rough, floater?” She wiped her arm across her face and it came back crimson, which horrified him. Spyder Knight always took a few minutes each time he let people capture him on camera to talk about honesty, fairness, justice, and responsibility to those weaker than yourself. And Quad had not only hit a girl, but he’d hit Anna, the greatest girl in the entire universe. And he’d made her bleed. Spyder Knight killed people for things like that that.
Anna snarled at him, crimson dribbling down her face to stain the floor. “Then let’s play.”
“I’m sorry!” Quad gulped. “I didn’t mean to hit you so hard!” Immediately, he was inundated with visions of his mom marching up the stairs and punching his head off in swift, Karmic justice. Kestrel had done it once when she caught him snooping in her lab and it sucked. Quad swallowed hard.
Then Anna hobbled over to his closet and started grabbing holobooks from where Quad had carefully cataloged each and every one, throwing bloody fistfuls to the ground in total disarray, and Quad’s fleeting guilt dissipated in a flood of indignant horror. “What are you doing?” he demanded. She was smearing blood on the covers. He’d have to clean and reorganize them all…
Anna yanked out another fistful of priceless plastic-covered holobooks, utterly ignoring his careful cataloging scheme, and threw them on the floor with the others. Then, scowling at him, she started stomping on them.
The sound of splintering polymers evoked something unexpectedly violent within Quad. Before he even really realized what he was doing, he hurled himself at her with a scream, sending them both across the room to crash into the opposite wall.
“Those were originals!” he howled. “It took me months to find them all!”
“Serves you right,” Anna laughed, obviously enjoying it.
Served him…right? More furious than he’d ever been before in his entire life, Quad suddenly wanted to destroy something of hers. Remembering how many hours he’d watched as she sat there in total focus, concentrating on her r-player as she hacked this ultranet or calculated that trajectory or checked on that experiment, all that rage found a focus.
Howling, he yanked the r-player from her chest pocket and, siphoning Dobie’s turquoise cloud of memories from it, he smashed it on the ground beside her head with his full strength again and again, pounding it into the floor until it was nothing but glass and metal dust. He threw what remained across the room to clatter into the priceless Kelthari vortex-modulator, which fell off its stand and created a small sonic boom on the floor as its payload went shooting through the opposite wall to its original point of origin, probably several galaxies away.
Slapped back to reality by the very real fact that he could have just killed people, Quad flinched. Aside from the obvious damage it would do getting back to its origins, it had taken him days to convince his mom to let him bring that piece of machinery into the house, and—
“Quad!” his mom shouted. “Was that the Kelthari modulator?!”
“No, Mom!” Quad cried, suddenly panicking at the idea of his mom seeing his mess.
On the floor, crouched around the dust specs that used to be her r-player, Anna’s mouth was open. “That was my r-player! You…you…shit! I had everything on there! My plans. My experiments!”
“Probably weren’t very interesting—oh, I’m sorry, advanced—anyway,” he said. “Judging by what I’ve seen.” He got up to walk away.
“Dieeeee!” Anna screamed, launching herself at him with arms outstretched to grab a leg.
This time, they hit the edge of a nightstand and knocked over a stabilized Ra’u cold fusion reactor. Immediately, the machine began to bubble and glow a menacing blue-white, but Anna either wasn’t paying attention or didn’t care. She rolled them over the device, kicking and clawing the whole time, until they slammed into the closet and priceless collectible holobooks began raining down on them from above.
“Quad, are you playing one of those ultrasim games again?!” his mom shouted. “You know you’re grounded!”
“It’s not a game, Mom!” Quad shouted, prying at Anna’s face as she tried to bite his fingers off. He finally shoved her far enough away from him that he was able to stand—just in time for her to start grabbing artifacts from his carefully-catalogued section on top-secret Triton tech and hurling them across the room.
“Stop it!” Quad snapped, yanking the latest piece from her hand. “Those are important.”
Anna responded by kicking him in the shin and using his startled pause to throw more of the artifacts to the floor, then stomped on them like she had the holobooks.
Seeing the wholesale destruction of such elegant tech, Quad’s initial response was horror. His secondary response was deep, total fury. He lost what little control he’d had, grabbed her by the hair, and threw her away from his collections. The two of them began a series vicious of grunts and growls as they kicked, punched, rolled, and batted at each other. Quad eventually got hold of Anna’s head and started bashing it into the floor.
“Quad. Egret. Ross, what is that sound?!” his mother shouted from somewhere below.
It was enough to numbly drag Quad out of his rage. Both the Ra’u cold fusion reactor and the Kelthari vortex-modulator had started to make alarming sounds as they lay, abandoned, on the carpet. “Oh crap,” Quad said, recognizing the possibility of a major explosion with either of them. The idea of both of them going off was… Well, considering he was carrying eight of TimeMagus’s backskip marbles and the room had enough ancient tech to power a city, it wouldn’t be good. “I’ve gotta take care of these before they blow.” He released Anna’s hair hurriedly and rolled away to go work on the Kelthari machine.
He’d gotten maybe six feet before something heavy and hard hit him in the back of the head. He grunted and fell forward, finding himself staring at a piece of Aashaanti multi-mural that Anna had broken off his wall with her foot.
Immediately, Anna fell on top of him and started beating at his head and shoulders with her fists, and, in his attempt to evade her, they once again started thrashing on the floor back and forth, knocking over his robotics arrays and tables of sensitive electronics—all of which had taken him months to align and calibrate.
Seeing his personal haven fall to ruin around him, Quad lost it. He ripped a priceless—but unfortunately very light—Saoman grow-rod from his closest experiment and started bashing it into Anna’s stupid skull. “You’re going—” bash “—to get—” bash “—us killed!” bash, bash, bash. Unfortunately, it didn’t have enough weight to splatter her brains across the room, and really only seemed to make her mad.
“Quad, goddamn it!” his mom screamed from somewhere else in the family mansion. “If you’re tinkering with another Gryphon, you can kiss your holobooks goodbye!”
Quad would have responded, but Anna had gotten hold of his throat. She was squeezing her fingers, a snarl of rage on her face.
“Quad!” his mom shouted.
Quad got his fingers in Anna’s eye sockets and started pushing. She let out a howl of rage and rolled away, clawing at her face.
“Quad!” This time, it sounded like she was serious enough to come after him.
“I’m okay, Mom!” Quad called, circling Anna slowly.
“I didn’t ask if you were okay!” his mom snapped. “I asked if you had another goddamn robot in your room!”
“No, Mom!” Quad cried, ducking a Tebbe oxygenator that clattered to the wall behind him.
“Then what’s that sound?!” she demanded.
“I’m—” Quad
grunted as a Gobragi warrior’s battle-helmet slammed into his stomach, “—cleaning!” he called, picking it up and hurling it back at Anna. Anna took the helmet to the side of the head and went down in a sprawl.
“Sounds like you’re trashing your room!” his mom called back.
“I’m not, Mom!” Quad replied, as Anna crawled over to his case of Kelthari war-tips. “I swear!”
Anna gave him an evil smile and grabbed his bookcase and yanked on it. Then, frowning, she turned to the bookcase and yanked harder.
Realizing she meant to tip it and all of its priceless Aashaanti artifacts onto the floor, where they would likely explode and take half of Trinoi with them, Quad rushed her, slamming into her side like a linebacker in a metasim, and they went down in a tumble.
“What are you doing up there, Quad?” his mom shouted. “Did you get Mordy back up and running?”
“No, Mother,” Quad shouted, as the ceramic alarm-clock duck his mom got him for his fifth birthday sailed past to shatter against the wall. “It’s not—” he grunted as Anna hit him with an Aashaanti nexus-warp. “—Mordy!”
Anna threw a bottle of grape soda at him, spraying the contents everywhere as the carbonation fell out of solution.
From much closer in the mansion, his mother’s voice said, “Then what is in there with you?”
Oh crap. Quad straightened and backed away from Anna, making cutting motions to try to get her to stop. She didn’t. “Uh,” Quad managed, dodging another projectile. “A friend.”
His door opened. “Oh goddamn it, Quad,” his mom said. “I told you you couldn’t have any more robots inside the hou—” Her words cut off cold when she came face-to-face with Anna.
Immediately, Anna burst into tears. “He kidnapped me,” she whimpered. “He showed up and grabbed me and suddenly I’m in his room like he thinks I’m his pet!”
Quad frowned at her. “I did no—”
“Please!” Anna cried, facing his mother directly. “I’ve been here for days. I think he’s got this weird crush on me—he was keeping me in the closet! Please help me get home before he catches me again!”
“Quad,” Cheyenne interrupted very evenly. “What’s she doing here?”
“I don’t know how I got here,” Anna whimpered. “Please. I think your son’s a little nuts. He keeps talking about comic books like they’re real! Please, I just wanna go home.”
Quad’s jaw had fallen open at the lies spewing forth from her split and puffy lips.
“And just where is your home, little girl?” his mom said evenly. There was a darkness to Cheyenne’s words that Quad didn’t understand.
“The Core,” Anna said. “Aladia. I’m one of the lab technician’s daughters.”
Quad could only stare at her. “No you’re—”
“Quad,” Cheyenne said, “leave the room.”
“But Mom, she’s—”
“I know she’s lying,” Cheyenne said. Then he saw the way his mother’s skin was darkening, the way her eyes were going gold, and he realized she planned to kill Anna.
“Wait, Mom!” he cried. “That’s Anna Landborn!”
“And she was rejected for the program,” Cheyenne said. “Sociopathic. Violent. I told you not to bring her home. I told you not to tell her anything, yet here she is, calculating who we are, where we live, and how to find us again.”
Anna, for her part, had stopped talking and was backed up against the wall, staring at Cheyenne like she might have stared at a ghost.
“Mom, I’ll just take her back,” Quad pleaded.
“No,” Cheyenne snapped. “You finally have to learn that your actions have consequences, Quad. She was rejected for the program. You were to have cut off communication weeks ago.” She walked over and grabbed Anna by the throat and lifted her off the ground, until Anna’s booted feet were kicking at the air half a meter above the floor.
She was going to do it, Quad realized. Cheyenne was going to kill Anna. “Mom, please!” he cried.
Looking over her shoulder at Quad, Cheyenne’s glowing gold eyes were cold stones. “It’s time you learned that the brotherhood supersedes all of your worldly desires—especially that of friendship. Your only friends are your brothers. The rest will just someday try to kill you.” Then, like something out of one of Quad’s nightmares, Cheyenne slammed Anna’s head against his workbench, caving in her skull. Like cracking the neck of a turkey, Cheyenne twisted her wrist suddenly and snapped Anna’s neck, then threw the tiny corpse aside. As Anna’s body started to twitch, Cheyenne turned to Quad and said, “If you ever bring another live one home again without permission, Quad, I’ll make you do it.” Then she turned and walked out, leaving Quad standing in an empty room with Anna’s twitching corpse.
He had stared at it brokenly for a whole three minutes before he realized he had a bag of TimeMagus’s backskip marbles. He reached into his pouch, pulled one out with shaking fingers, and threw it at the floor.
The Ra’u cold fusion reactor chose that moment to explode, and the world vanished in a flash of light and pain.
CHAPTER 39: Prophets with Eidetic Memories
????????
The Wide
Infinite Dimensions, Infinite Timelines,
Infinite Possibilities
Anna sat up, blinking.
“Oh no!” a little girl cried, from right beside her. “Dobie!” She was pawing at a downed robot beside her. “Oh no, what did I do?! Dobie, talk to me!”
Anna frowned. What a pathetic little dweeb, begging for help like that. Somebody needed to put her out of her misery—she was obviously faking. And why did that particular act seem so familiar? Almost like…
Anna squinted at the girl’s tear-streaked cheeks. “Okay,” she growled. “Who’s put my face on the local Ferris and set it to Damsel in Distress mode?” When nobody answered her—and the robot-with-her-face didn’t even look in her direction—Anna walked up and shoved her clone.
…except nothing happened. Her hands went straight through her clone’s body and the girl just kept up her fake crying.
“Dobie, what the hell is going on?!” Anna demanded. She turned to look at Dobie, who was collapsed on the floor where she had put him. Earlier. In fact, the whole scene looked like something that had happened earlier, right down to the way Quad was popping out of hiding to drop to his knees beside Dobie.
Anna swallowed, hard. She remembered that big ogre of a woman coming into the room, picking her up, and—
“Oh shit,” Anna whispered. “I’m dead?”
But she wasn’t supposed to be dead. She was supposed to be winning Fortune’s war for it. She was supposed to be obliterating the Coalition. That was her sole reason for her existence. To make all those bastards pay for thinking they could get away with their horseshit on Fortune because it was far away from their pretty skyscrapers and environment-controlled orbitals. She was supposed to bring the war to them.
“I am not dead,” Anna told the little bitch that looked like her. She squatted down, got really close, and screamed, “I’m. Not. Dead!”
Her doppelganger continued to ignore her, face poised in calculation as she watched Quad run diagnostics and make repairs without ever touching Dobie’s mechanics.
“Listen, you little bitch!” Anna screamed. “I’m alive!”
Her doppelganger continued to analyze an oblivious Quad, plotting how to kill him just as soon as he gave her the tech and answers she wanted.
Anna got up, furious, looking for something to grab and use as a club.
She froze when she realized Wideman Joe was in the room with her, watching her. The greasy little runt was just as tiny and withered and white-haired as usual, but his eyes were no longer open with the Wide.
Anna frowned, immediately feeling the familiar violation of the irritating little dweeb somehow getting into her room without her permission. He’d always left mangled carrots or zucchini on her pillow while she slept, for her to discover when she woke.
“Listen, y
ou sick little floater,” Anna snarled. “You are not allowed in my room. You do it again, and I’m gonna peel the skin off your face and feed it to you, okay?!”
Wideman Joe just looked at her, his greasy white hair wild.
“You know what?” Anna snapped. “Fine. I’ll get Dobie to tear off fingers.” She turned to Dobie, only to find him still on the floor, going through reboot sequences. “Damn,” she muttered. She took a deep breath. She was dead. That…sucked. Really sucked. How was she going to utterly annihilate the Coalition if she was dead?
Movement out of the corner of her eye made Anna turn. Wideman Joe was moving across the room towards her at a fast walk.
“Hey!” Anna snarled, jumping to her feet. “You stay away from me, you midget nutcase! Patrick told you to stay away from me!”
Wideman Joe never slowed. Anna stumbled backwards until she hit the far wall with her spine. Wideman Joe stopped, peering at her as he would a troubling enigma. Then, as Anna started to frown and open her mouth to say something more caustic, he pulled back an age-withered arm and backhanded her.
The explosion of mind-searing brilliance and agony that followed made Anna scream as it ripped her apart.
“Dragonfly’s gonna make it?” a man demanded.
“Looks like it,” a familiar voice replied. There was a contemplative tsk. “Who would’ve thought tripping would set it off?”
“You had no way of knowing—this hasn’t been done before.” There was relief in his voice. “What about my little Candycorn?” Anna couldn’t see anything or feel anything, but she could hear two men moving around the room. Their movements were muffled, though, almost like her head was covered in something…
“She hasn’t triggered the process yet, and she’s not as violent as her sister. She may never trigger it.”
“Could we trigger it for her?”
“It takes physical trauma, sir. And she’s an infant.”
