by Cam Baity
“Dollop!” Phoebe shouted.
She twisted around, desperate for his aid.
Dollop stood rigid, bathed in the light of the Great Engineer. For a brief moment, his eyes met Phoebe’s. Then he dropped his gaze and turned his back on her as well.
Phoebe watched Dollop melt into the crowd before she could call out to him again.
The Ona spoke in booming Rattletrap to the assembled mehkans. Their roared response gave Phoebe the chills—an unmistakable war cry. As the Ona began to ascend on her heavenly podium, Micah made his move.
He whipped his hand cannon out and aimed at the prophet.
A glinting scythe flashed—the gun fell to pieces. Orei stood before them, her apparatus of rings slicing the air with the rhythmic precision of a doomsday clock. The two Covenant guards, a mantis-like mehkan with chainsaw forelimbs and a fibrous one whose body was made of woven metal bands, tightened their grips on the kids.
“Please!” Phoebe cried to Makina. “Please stop!”
But the Great Engineer did not heed her words.
The Ona disappeared into the swelling white clouds of Makina’s body as they gathered force and expanded in a swirling vortex. Wind rushed past the kids, blowing back their hair and forcing them to squint. The worshippers’ frenzied chant seemed like it would shake the Depot to its foundations. Makina rose into the air, a hurricane again, a god-storm tumbling toward the tunnel in the distance. The army of mehkans followed, a thousand strong, bound for Albright City.
“Is this how your god makes things right?” Phoebe screamed at Orei. “With destruction? With murder?”
“With reckoning,” she replied. “Will send them to rust until demands are met.”
“What demands?” Micah scoffed.
Orei’s spinning discs sounded like the scrape of a knife on a whetstone. “Until leaders of Foundry surrender to Her.”
Phoebe and Micah exchanged a grim look.
“We can help,” Phoebe declared, mouth dry. “If She will promise not to kill him, we can bring Her the head of the Foundry. We know where he is. We—”
“Your words hollow,” Orei dismissed with a swipe. “Corrupt as your ember.”
The ground shook with a thunderous crash.
Makina burst open the sealed tunnel with the blistering force of a volcano. The petals of the iris door shriveled like a wilted flower. Howls of victory merged into ecstatic fury as the mighty army charged behind their savior, hungry for vengeance.
Their way was clear.
They marched onward to the unsuspecting world of humans.
With the columns of mehkans trailing away, the Depot slowly became an abandoned ruin, save for a scattering of scouts and guards.
Orei strode in the opposite direction, and the guards followed, dragging the kids along with them. The Overguard’s apparatus ticked as she led them away from the flattened cylindrical building and toward the ragged hole that was once the entrance to the Depot. Mehkan pilgrims were parading through the gap in a steady stream. They were covered in ore dust, some wounded and hobbling, all driven with religious fervor. The procession looked at Phoebe and Micah with hateful glares as they passed.
Ahead stretched the vast red wastelands that Phoebe had been banished to.
But Orei changed direction. They cut to the right, navigating through rubble to head down an alley between abandoned, burnt-out buildings. The sound of incoming pilgrims faded behind them as they turned the corner and out of sight.
“Where you takin’ us?” Micah asked, voice cracking with worry.
The alley walls were lined with a grid of soot-blackened pipes. Part of the disabled NET system dangled limply between the rooftops like a cobweb. The shadows danced with flickers of purple, the spastic death throes of a giant magnetic defense coil that had fallen from the ramparts and torn through a building like a wrecking ball.
Orei marched to the alley’s dead end, then stopped and inverted her body. She barked an order to the two guards, and they forced the kids to kneel.
“No,” Micah croaked. “No, no, you can’t do this. This ain’t what the Ona told us.”
“Have my orders,” Orei stated impassively.
A gleaming midnight-blue scythe unfolded at the end of each of her arms.
Phoebe felt like she had been submerged in ice water.
The world shrank down to a pinprick.
Micah tried to get away, wriggling and kicking, but the fibrous mehkan held him firmly. Despite her overpowering fear, Phoebe was surprised to find a core of clarity within her. It was like she was looking at herself from the outside, gripped with terror but detached and rational. Like Orei. Phoebe stared at the kailiak’s steadily swinging pendulums and whispering, orbiting rings.
An idea occurred to her. A chance.
“Orei,” Phoebe whispered, trying to master her emotions. “I…I trusted you.”
She looked up at the mehkan’s inscrutable face, imagining eyes there, trying to forge a connection. Orei tilted her head, taking measurements to assess Phoebe.
Don’t show your fear, Phoebe told herself. Dig deeper.
She focused on the memory of Dollop turning away from her. Had he known that they were being sent off to die?
“I looked up to you,” Phoebe whimpered. Though the seed prevented her from crying, she trembled with emotion. Micah swallowed hard beside her.
The change in Orei was subtle at first, a barely perceptible shift in the rhythm of her body. But she was listening. Phoebe remembered what Axial Phy had told her about kailiaks back at the camp: Emotion is poison to them, interrupts their systems so that they cannot act, think, or even breathe.
“When my father died, you said you were unworthy of his sacrifice. Do you remember?” Phoebe continued, her voice taut as a violin string. “You saved my life when no one else could. I had lost everything, but I saw how brave you were, how strong. Like my father. I wanted to be you. So how—”
Grief cut her words short as she tried to muster up her most painful memories. Her mother’s last look as the waves swept her away. Her father’s final wheezing breath. The sight of her Trinka sinking into the vesper oasis—the instant she first understood the tragedy underway in Mehk.
Orei wavered. There was a coarse scrape as pieces of her anatomy misjudged their timing and collided. She staggered, as if trying to evade an attack.
The two guards were unsure what to do. Phoebe and Micah slowly rose.
“How could you do this to me?” Phoebe sobbed, weaponizing her anguish.
“Demon!” the Overguard said with a warbling snarl.
With a whip-crack motion, Orei regained control, snapping her scythes and rings back into alignment. Every piece of her apparatus began to tick in rhythm once more.
The kids stumbled back into the guards. Phoebe had failed.
Orei raised her scythes.
A shadow passed over them. “Alley-oop!”
Mr. Pynch, inflated to maximum size, plummeted from above like a spiked boulder. The Overguard swiftly sidestepped. Mr. Pynch crashed down and rolled. The kids dove aside. The fibrous mehkan guard didn’t move quick enough and was flattened by the tumbling balvoor. The other guard was faster, moving with the twitchy reflexes of a bird. He slashed at Micah with his whirring chainsaw forelimbs.
But his deadly arms were yanked aside, mere inches from Micah’s throat. The Marquis, suspended between rooftops by his extendable legs, had seized the chainsaws with his long, rubbery arms. He twisted and twirled, tying the guard up in knots like a tangled marionette and squeezing with the strength of a boa constrictor until the thrashing mehkan passed out. The other guard tried to get up, but Mr. Pynch took a running leap, inflated, and came down butt-first, knocking him out cold.
Orei did not let the distraction divert her from her mission. She attacked, but Phoebe managed to wriggle through a narrow gap in a cluster of pipes on the wall. The Overguard unleashed a flurry of blows, trying to hack at her through layers of steel.
Micah grabbed a bent metal rod
from the debris and charged at Orei. Every blade of Orei’s body was churning as she drilled away at the pipes hiding Phoebe. The clatter was deafening. Bits of burning steel flew off, biting Phoebe’s skin as her shelter was carved away. Ducts burst, spraying water. Orei’s featureless face, its rings grinding as viciously as the rest of her body, pressed closer to Phoebe’s.
Micah swung his rod at the Overguard, but she anticipated the blow. Snatched his weapon, and tossed it aside. Orei lashed out at him with a gleaming scythe. Micah was jerked violently out of her reach. The Marquis had grabbed the boy with his extendable arms like a frog snatching a fly with its tongue.
Mr. Pynch charged Orei like a bull, but she twirled out of his way once again. He glanced up to see her ricocheting from one side of the alley to the other, zigzagging from pipe to pipe. She landed nimbly between Mr. Pynch and the Marquis.
“Never much cared for you kailiaks,” Mr. Pynch grunted. “Too uppity and aloofa’d for me particular penchant.”
Orei attacked both simultaneously, the linked rings of her arms hyperextending to slash at them. Mr. Pynch squashed and stretched, barely dodging her blows, attempting to slash at her with his quill-laden mitts. The Marquis punched with his snaky pneumatic arms, trying to not get sliced to ribbons. He layered his lenses to focus his opticle to an intense laser-like ray. But Orei parted the planes of her body—the beam passed through and scorched a yelping Mr. Pynch on her other side.
Phoebe took advantage of the distraction to twist free from her hiding place and run to Micah’s side. They backed up to the caved-in side of a building.
And discovered two figures hiding in the shadows.
A purple light strobed.
Orei hooked Mr. Pynch’s overcoat with her stiletto fingers and pulled it over his head, momentarily blinding him. She pivoted and smashed him into the wall of pipes headfirst. He fell in a heap. The Marquis kicked out at Orei, but she caught his foot. The Overguard clamped down on it and wrapped it around a ring in her body, turning and turning to reel him in. The lumie clawed at the walls. Something loosened in the Marquis’s torso, and he began to unravel as if he were made of yarn.
Then Orei turned back to Phoebe and Micah in the middle of the alley. Unprotected. Orei went for the kids, closing the distance between them in bounding strides.
Four yards away. Then two. Then—
“Down!” Phoebe shouted to the Associates.
A dazed Mr. Pynch and the Marquis saw what was happening and dove. She and Micah leapt into the torn facade of the building. Orei followed and came face-to-face with the fallen mag coil that had ripped the wall open.
She sensed the device ramping up to full blast, but it was too late.
FOOM!
A purple detonation. The Overguard left the ground, twirling like a discus. The two unconscious Covenant guards tumbled away like scraps of paper. Pipes bent like reeds in the powerful magnetic pulse. Orei slammed into the rigid steel wall with a nasty crunch. She stuck there for a moment, held in place by the dent her body had made. Then she slipped loose and clattered to the ground.
The mag coil crackled and faded out.
“In your face!” Micah crowed at Orei. “If you had one.”
Two silhouettes emerged from the shadows inside the torn-open building. There was Fritz, fiddling with a nest of wiring that spilled out the back of the fallen mag coil. Behind him was Goodwin, a piece of rebar strapped to his leg as a makeshift splint.
“Took you guys long enough,” Micah huffed.
“Is she dead?” Phoebe wondered, approaching Orei. A tiny pendulum on the Overguard’s chest ticked slightly.
“We should be so fortuitous,” Mr. Pynch grumbled, his quill hair wild and his eyes even wonkier than usual. He flicked his black tongue into a space where one of his grimy golden gear teeth had been knocked out. “Stupendous,” he muttered sarcastically, whistling his s’s.
The Marquis gathered up his unspooled tubes, untangled his limbs, and shifted around to get his anatomy back in order. He approached the two newcomers and flickered his opticle. Fritz was immediately captivated by the flashing light.
“Fritz. Bleeder,” Mr. Pynch grumbled at Goodwin. “Meet me dear associate and partner in all nefarities, the good Marquis.”
The lumie dusted himself off and offered his hand to Fritz for a shake. The Watchman inspected the Marquis’s hand, then extended his own sparking digits in return. Mr. Pynch pulled the Marquis back to avoid the imminent surprise shock.
“What do you want from us?” Phoebe asked Goodwin between panting breaths.
Rattletrap shouts of alarm rang out nearby.
“Incoming,” Mr. Pynch said, his nozzle spinning.
“There is no time,” Goodwin said. “Follow me.” He limped off into the darkness of the torn-open building.
Phoebe and Micah were wary, but they would have to trust him—for the moment.
The Chairman hobbled through a rubble-strewn machine shop and exited the other side. Every step appeared to be a labor for him—his leg must be badly wounded, Phoebe realized, maybe even broken. They snaked through a network of alleys, hewing to the shadows and steering clear of the procession of pilgrims trailing after Makina.
“How are we going to get through the tunnel?” Phoebe whispered. “There’s so many of them. We’ll be seen.”
Goodwin ignored her and navigated deeper into the alleys. He approached the rear of what looked like an administrative building made of gunmetal-blue steel and limped down a staircase alongside it. At the bottom was an unmarked hatch with a keypad. The Chairman entered a code, the door clicked, and he shouldered it open.
Sputtering yellow lights illuminated an echoing, industrial stairwell. Goodwin cursed as he tried to maneuver, but his splinted leg made it difficult. Fritz grabbed one arm, the Marquis the other, and they helped him climb down. The rest followed.
“What is this place?” Micah demanded.
“Service vault,” Goodwin grunted through clenched teeth. “Access to the power grid for the Depot. And the tunnel. Runs beneath it all the way back to Foundry Central.”
They reached the bottom of a series of flights. The Marquis shone his opticle brightly to reveal a narrow cement passage that stretched ahead of them as far as they could see. The ceiling was low and lined with dim safety lights. Equipment and electrical conduits ran in tandem along every surface, wrapping around corners to connecting hallways. To one side sat three Rangecarts, docked at a charging station.
Entranced, Fritz reached out to grab the Marquis’s shiny light, but the lumilow ducked away from his sparking touch.
“Get in,” Goodwin said.
The six of them clambered into a Rangecart, and Fritz hit the ignition. The vault amplified the electric motor’s quiet hum into an ominous drone. They sped off.
“You came back,” Phoebe said to the two mehkans.
“But of course, Miss Phoebe!” blustered Mr. Pynch, his s’s still whistling. “An Associate never leaves an associate behind.”
She smiled her thanks to them.
“And you,” Micah said to Fritz. “I told you to zap fatty if he tried to get away.”
“I knew that you were in over your heads, so I simply told the unit that you needed my assistance,” Goodwin explained, gesturing to Fritz. “It helped me track you and even managed to rig that coil. A very unusual specimen indeed.”
Fritz shrugged, almost as if he were bashful.
“But why?” Phoebe asked. “Why help us?”
Goodwin assessed her keenly.
“We have mutual interests,” the Chairman said. “And a common enemy.”
Just ahead, the safety lights were flashing red. Beyond that was utter blackness.
“Brace yourselves,” Goodwin warned. “We are approaching the membrane.”
All went black. A wave of living cold washed over them.
The Marquis’s opticle went dark—he flailed and panicked. Phoebe remembered the crushing icy weight that had welcomed them into Mehk
, but the memory of it didn’t help her cope with the startling and altogether oppressive sensation.
They were being compressed. Smothered.
And then they were through, gasping for air. The Marquis’s opticle shone brightly once more. Micah squeezed her hand. The path ahead of them was clear.
They were going home.
Something wasn’t right, Margaret could feel it.
She was trying to comprehend the trend that she was seeing, both on her Computator and the wall of projection screens in the Cube. It wasn’t her place to question orders, but the tactic that appeared to be underway was baffling to her.
Why was Meridian disengaging and withdrawing all their forces now? The retaliatory strikes were going precisely as planned. The Quorum nations had responded with pathetic defenses. So why retreat?
Margaret glanced around at the other workstations and caught a few confused expressions—she was not the only one.
A troop of soldiers quietly filed into the main floor and took up coordinated positions around the vast military warehouse. This was not all that strange, in and of itself, given the high level of security here. The thing that concerned Margaret was that these officers were outfitted in full combat gear. One of them saw her looking around and reported something into his Com-Pak. Margaret quickly resumed her work.
Was that the floor mat shaking, or was it just her nerves?
Military brass, both Foundry and Meridian, were gathering on the main floor. She sighed with relief when she saw General Freemont. Soon, there would be an announcement and this would be straightened out. There was an overarching strategy that she and her colleagues were simply not privy to.
But just when it seemed like all would be made clear, the crowd of higher-ups was escorted out by the soldiers.
Now Margaret knew something was up.
She pretended to resume her work, but there was no way she could possibly concentrate. Why had everyone in charge abandoned the most important military post in Foundry Central at the most crucial time?
“Attention.”
A soldier spoke to the Cube through an Amplifone. Other troops fell into position behind the man and stood at attention. This was it—finally an explanation.
