by John Goode
It was the last thing he recalled before being knocked unconscious.
Chapter 2
“Three can keep a secret if two
of them are mechanical beings.”
From the brochure entitled
“So you want to build the perfect
person? We can help with that.”
Tinker and Jones Promotional Material
THE RABBIT in the circle looked like it was about to have a heart attack.
Of course, when I thought about it, most rabbits looked like they were on the verge of dropping dead from fright no matter how chill the situation was. Of course, those were rabbits who couldn’t walk or talk or wear a pretty snazzy vest. If you had asked me how I would have reacted to meeting the white rabbit before all this nonsense started happening, I would have sworn I would lose my shit.
But now, looking at the real thing in front of me, all I could think of was how big those two front teeth looked. Weird? Not so much.
Okay, truth—I never liked rabbits. I had a bad experience with one when I was little, and instead of the visions of happy, fluffy balls of joy the word evoked in other people, whenever I looked at one, all I could think was how big their teeth were. And none of those rabbits came past my waist like this one did. No matter how much I personally feared bunnies in general, this one was way different. For one, he was yelling pretty loudly.
“You have no right to hold me here!” Milo practically spat at Hawk as he glared up at him. I say glared, but the actual look came across far cuter than the rabbit intended, because no matter how angry he was, there was no denying he was an adorable rabbit. And let me assure you of something I’ve been learning from being with Hawk—it is hard to be scared of adorable.
Hawk slid Truheart from its sheath an inch at a time, and Milo stopped talking.
“I have every right,” Hawk stated. He began to walk slowly around the circle, waving the sword back and forth the way an annoyed cat’s tail moves. “After all, I am the effective ruler of Arcadia at the moment, and you—” He stopped and pointed the sword at the rabbit. “—are my captive.”
I swear I could almost hear Milo’s heart beating inside his chest.
The rabbit straightened his back and said as convincingly as possible, “Your threats mean nothing to me. I am protected by the Seven Accords!” He couldn’t have sounded less threatening if he had started tap dancing and singing rock and roll.
Hawk gave the rabbit an evil smile and said, “I never signed the Accords, did I?” He moved the sword farther into the circle for effect.
That was when I lost it.
“Are you kidding me?” I asked, knocking his sword arm away from Milo. “You brought a rabbit here to threaten it?”
Well, I now knew what Hawk looked like when he was mad, because the expression on his face was a whole new one. I could hear the anger in his thoughts, though luckily, no actual words were conveyed. He lowered his sword and gestured for me to move out of the way.
“You can jerk your head all you want, but I am not letting you stab a defenseless rabbit wearing a bow tie, for God’s sake.”
“He is a messenger for the royal family,” Hawk growled through his teeth.
“I don’t care if he is related to the queen of England. I am not letting you attack him.” Defiantly, I put myself between the circle and Hawk.
“You don’t know what you’re doing,” he warned me.
I put my hands on my hips. “Try me.”
He must have felt my anger, because he sighed and put his sword away. “Fine, you get him to help us.”
Shaking my head, I turned around to face Milo. His whiskers quivered as I knelt down and put my hand out toward him. “I’m Kane,” I said softly. “And I’m not going to hurt you.” His ears, which up to this point had been flattened to his head, slowly started to rise. His eyes looked like huge pools of bright blue water as he fixed his gaze on me. I could see his hands were moving open and closed in some nervous reaction to the situation. I moved my hand closer. “It’s okay, you’re safe.”
Which is, of course, when he bit me.
Turns out I was right. His teeth were sharp and pierced through the palm of my hand like it was nothing. I wasn’t sure whose screams were louder, Hawk’s or mine. Since I was busy, you know, screaming in pain, I couldn’t really judge. From the way he went down gripping his hand, it was obvious he felt it just as bad. Tell the truth, this could have been a really short story called “How a Defenseless Rabbit Took Over Arcadia” if Ruber hadn’t been with us.
A beam of light shot out from the ruby and hit the rabbit in its face. Whatever it was must have been potent since his mouth went slack instantly, and he fell over onto his side. If I wasn’t looking at a gusher of blood coming from my hand, I would have been worried that Milo looked pretty dead right then, but since I was, I didn’t, and part of me, real small, hoped he was.
I fell back onto my ass, holding my injured hand at the wrist as hard as I could. I suppose part of me was trying to apply pressure, but it was more likely I was just too terrified to do anything else.
“Heal,” Ruber said, moving over my hand, projecting an orangeish beam on the wound.
I flinched, expecting the beam to be like some magical version of alcohol, which always burned like acid no matter how much my dad assured me it wouldn’t. Instead, warmth started from the open wound and moved outward across my entire palm. The pain went from a white-hot ball of ouch to a burning cut to a small flicker of annoyance within seconds. Ruber’s magic gave me an instant contact high.
Stop looking at me like that. Do you know how many stoners live in Athens? Yeah, I’ve had a contact high just attending the Summer Music Festival. I never understood before now why so many people like pot, but if it made you feel this good, I was starting to get the idea. Luckily the feeling did not stop Hawk’s thoughts coming through loud and clear.
I scrambled to my feet and threw myself on him as he lunged at the rabbit’s prone body.
He tumbled to the side as I made contact with him. I could feel the impact in my ribs as we slid across the library floor. Hawk’s fury was like a tangible thing as he tried to get out from under me. If we weren’t connected I would have been worried, but since true love’s kiss and all that, I knew my being bitten and him feeling the pain was just the crap cherry on the shit sundae we were calling life lately. He was venting his anger in a situation he could handle because there was so much he couldn’t deal with.
Using his own moves against him, I held him down until he could start thinking rationally again. The red that was his rage began to fade from his mind, and he stopped fighting me so hard. He looked up, and I could feel him come back to me. He was half-embarrassed, half-regretful, but mostly too proud to apologize.
I saw him open his mouth, and I waited for him to try to make it better.
“He’s getting away.”
I looked behind me and saw that Milo was not only awake but had his pocket watch out and was opening it. I remembered what Hawk had told me back in Athens about his watch being a piece of time or something.
“Ruber! Stop him!” I yelled out as the watch began to glow.
Milo fumbled with the watch dial as the giant ruby sailed closer. The moment the watch flipped open, golden light poured out of it like it was a minispotlight. I squinted and saw Ruber move into the center of the light and heard him say, “Magnify.”
The light changed from a beam to an ocean, and the entire room was engulfed with its radiance. I had thrown my arm over my eyes as a reflex and waited to be blinded because the light seemed strong enough to shine through skin. Seconds passed, and the only thing I noticed was the silence.
Complete and utter silence.
The total absence of sound was screwing with my mind. Part of me wondered if I’d gone deaf, the change was so quick. I decided to check things out and looked up cautiously. Milo crouched in the center of the circle, slapping the side of his watch with his paw. Ruber had raised an en
ergy field around him, ensuring he couldn’t physically move anywhere.
“What’s going on?” Hawk asked from underneath me.
“We are frozen in time,” Ruber explained. I heard just a little bit of pride in his voice. “Milo was attempting to remove himself from normal space-time with his artifact. I simply expanded the effect to include us as well.” He tried to sound casual about what he’d done, but I knew he was doing that to be a gem’s equivalent of cool. No way was pulling off a trick like freezing things in time easy. I remembered I was crushing Hawk and rolled off him.
Hawk got up and held out his hand to help me to my feet. Then he looked around and marveled, “This is incredible.” He moved his hand through the air, and I could see smudges in the specks of dust from his fingers. “This is how you disappear,” he said to Milo. “You take yourself out of time and then are free to travel anywhere and any when you wish. To the outside, it appears as if you simply vanish.”
The giant bunny ignored his words and futilely shook the watch again. He reminded me of my dad trying to “fix” the remote by shaking it until it behaved. Didn’t work for Dad either. “Oh dear, oh dear,” Milo mumbled to himself as he realized his escape had been foiled.
Hawk put his hand on Truheart’s hilt and asked me, “Still think he is a defenseless rabbit?”
I slapped his hand away. “Yes.” I returned to facing Milo. “You can turn this off. We aren’t going to hurt you.”
“We aren’t?” Hawk asked under his breath.
Milo looked up at me with those damn eyes, and I held up a finger for him to wait a second. Turning back to Hawk, I pushed him out of earshot. “What in the hell is wrong with you? When did you become a bunny killer?”
“Don’t let his form fool you. He is not a rabbit. He is a royal spy.”
“Messenger,” Milo corrected from across the room. When we both stared over at him, he pointed to his ears. “Sorry. I can’t help it. And for your information, I am, in fact, a rabbit. I was born to this form, not flipped.”
I looked at Hawk and he looked at me as we tried to figure out what that meant. Ignoring it, Hawk glared at me. “This is a diplomatic negotiation.”
I tried not to scoff in his face. “No it’s not. It’s called intimidation, and trust me, it doesn’t work.”
He countered with “Like hell it doesn’t!” I was pretty sure he had heard my mental scoff and was pissed.
“It doesn’t. You threaten him to do something for us, and he will be waiting for the first second he can screw us over. You know how I know that? Because if you kidnapped me and forced me to help you, that is exactly what I would be doing. Stop thinking the Arcadian way is the only way to do things.”
Without waiting for him to answer, I walked back to the where Ruber was still holding the rabbit captive. “Drop the shield, Ruber.”
To his credit, Ruber didn’t ask me if I was sure. He just paused for a moment and then dropped the field.
“Look,” I said to the terrified rabbit. “I get why you bit me, and I’m not mad. Don’t do it again, but I am not mad. This entire thing is a mistake, so let’s start over again. You put the watch away and listen to what we have to say. After that, you can choose to help us or not. The choice will be all yours.”
“We aren’t letting him go,” Hawk called out.
I shot him a glare and then looked back to Milo. “Forget him. I swear to you, hear us out, and if you want to leave, you can leave.”
His ears were pressed flat against his head, and he still had that feral, crazy look in his eyes, but he slowly closed the watch. “Put your hand out again?” he asked.
“He’s going to bite you again,” Hawk warned.
I looked into the rabbit’s eyes, and all I saw was fear. Slowly I extended my hand out to him. He sniffed it a couple of times, and I clamped my mouth shut to not laugh as his nose tickled my palm. After a few seconds, his ears rose a bit, and he proclaimed, “You smell trustworthy. I will listen to what you have to say.” He slipped the watch into his waistcoat pocket and folded his paws across his chest. “You have my undivided attention.”
I looked over to Hawk and gave him an “I told you so” smirk. He just shook his head and stared away, mentally telling me that this was my plan, so it was my responsibility now.
I began to explain to Milo what Puck had done.
CAERUS WAS not easily startled.
Part of her poise came from the reserved way in which her people held themselves. Some of it was the result of training as part of the royal family. Royalty does not indulge in public expressions of emotion. But the honest truth was that most of her calm manner arose from the fact her race was nearly indestructible. She was thrown to the ceiling of the elevator as it hurtled hundreds of feet down the dumbwaiter shaft and received not a chip from the impact.
She thought briefly of trying to stop her fall but came to the conclusion that whatever lay at the bottom of the shaft had a better probability of containing an entrance to the workshop than the small greeting room did.
Seconds turned into minutes, and minutes began to add up when Caerus realized she might have misjudged how deep the shaft was.
She had just finished that thought when the car ended up smashing itself into the floor of the shaft. Caerus’s gem body ricocheted around the small compartment until her momentum was spent. When she was able to steady herself, she was surprised to find the dumbwaiter car still completely intact. She flicked on a green beam and scanned the walls for a brief moment.
“Not good,” she muttered to herself as she detected no way to open the door from this side. Doing some calculations, Caerus realized that whatever substance the walls were made from was more than capable of withstanding her strongest blasts. That meant brute force was a waste of effort.
Taking her time, she began to examine the dumbwaiter’s door with meticulous care, making sure she hadn’t missed anything in her initial scan.
On her third pass over the virtually invisible seams, she found the slightest of cracks, most likely created by the elevator car’s crash. It was microscopic, but it was there. Without Ferra’s ice to expand it, Caerus knew she had no chance of widening it. She probed the crack one more time, measuring exactly how large it was down to the micrometer. She projected an image of her own body next to it and began a series of magical calculations that would have confounded any earth-made computer within seconds.
All members of the Crystal Court were trained in the Arts before being allowed to choose their branch of knowledge to examine. Because of their life spans, the gems studied magic for centuries, which was barely a year to them. Though not as adept as a trained Weaver, their knowledge of the Arts was unsurpassed in the Nine Realms. Runes of power flashed around the projected image of Caerus’s form as she reviewed the spell in her head.
Satisfied she had figured the precise amount of arcane energy needed for her task, she positioned herself next to the microscopic gap and pronounced one word.
“Shrink.”
The room’s dimensions ballooned around her as she shrank. The once-microscopic crack became more and more pronounced until it looked to her like a jagged crevice on the side of the wall. From her new perspective, the seams of the door were readily visible; in fact, the entire chamber was covered with details that would have been impossible to detect with a normal field of vision. She could see the fine machine grooves on the dumbwaiter shaft and the infinitesimal gears built into the corners that once made the car move up and down. To the naked eye, the dumbwaiter walls seemed smooth, but as she grew smaller, she could see it was filled with mechanisms that controlled its actions.
The strain of maintaining her size was beginning to tell on Caerus, so she flew into the inky blackness that resided inside the crack.
Logically, Caerus knew the span of the crack could be measured in grains of sand, but as she flew into the blackness, she felt as though she was descending into a trench deep on the ocean’s floor. She used impulses of energy to make her w
ay through the gap, not pausing even as she wondered what would happen if her spell failed. What would give first, the strange substance of the elevator door or her own body? As the gap shrank around her, she realized she did not want the answer that badly. The faster she flew and drained her reserve of arcane energy, the faster the shrink spell wore off.
Until it was a race.
What had been a trench seconds earlier was now a small crevice that shrank more quickly as she raced through it. There wasn’t even time to calculate her chances; instead, she simply pushed herself faster as the sides of the crack began to press against her body. Sparks flew as the edges of her body made contact with the crack, and she rotated herself to keep from getting stuck. She flew and flew, trying to banish the images of a tomb from her mind.
The shrink spell sputtered and headed toward failure, and her body began to expand.
“Is this where I die?” she asked herself as she used the last of her strength to push forward. Oddly, she was more disappointed by the fact she had let Ferra and Molly down than she was afraid of her own demise. One more pulse, one more….
Caerus shot out of the crack like a bullet, a glowing green bullet that hit something in the dark and went careening off.
The explosive sound of metal crashing on metal echoed throughout the chamber as the sapphire lay on the floor, automatically pulling on her depleted energy reserves in order to float again. The thunderous sound of metal crashing down was deafening; she must have started a reaction when she slammed into whatever she’d hit in the dark. Oddly, the noise seemed to move away from her, echo a little, and then go silent. After about a minute, she was able to float upward and tried to extend her glow outward to see where she was.
There was nothing but black in front of her.
Caerus allowed her light to dim as she summoned up what little remaining energy she possessed. Shouting, she called out, “Flare!” A fiery meteor shot out from inside her and arced high into the air, illuminating the area as it went. She could see the arched ceiling of some kind of complex above her, and as the flare started its downward trajectory, more of the area came into view. As it began to fall, she could see the tips of metal trees, covered in dust and rust from centuries of neglect. The flare hit the ground, and she could see that under the trees there were things moving. Forms with huge, misshapen metal faces connected to clockwork bodies that possessed wheels for hands and feet, and they were moving toward her. She barely had time to take in the scene when the flare died.
