by A. R. Knight
“Sorry,” was the first thing Bryce said after he retrieved his weapon from the wall, the split-headed spirit falling to the ground. “I’ve never seen one turn away from a fight and go after someone else.”
“Me either.”
We studied the body lying on the island, the source of this whole thing. The outfit was easy to recognize. A guide, though not one from Chicago. A newer one, going by the slim toolset on his belt.
“You know him?” I asked. Bryce nodded.
“Part of the latest class. He shouldn’t have been out here alone,” Bryce said. “The name was Felix. Out of Europe.”
“You going to tell Piotr?”
Bryce nodded. “It’s my job.”
Then, without warning, Bryce slammed his fist on the island. I backed up a pace.
“He shouldn’t have been here. His mentor, where was he?” Bryce said, though I could see wasn’t really talking to me. “We don’t have enough guides for this. We can’t lose people because they decide to play lone wolf. Especially not now.”
“Bryce,” I said. “Think about it. We came in here, saw one spirit, and thought it would be easy, but there were two more hiding. Felix probably had the same set up. Saw one, got ambushed.”
“Spirits don’t ambush,” Bryce said.
“These just did.”
Bryce chewed the scene for a moment, glancing around the island. Then he snapped his voulge together and slung it over his back.
“I have to go report this,” Bryce said.
“Three is short of our quota,” I said.
“The quota won’t matter if we’re getting killed. Guides need to know that some of the spirits aren’t the usual mindless drones. If they’re setting traps, then Riven’s a lot more dangerous than it used to be.”
Which was just what I’d asked for, right? More danger?
I needed to learn to shut up.
Chapter 12
I dropped Bryce off back at our headquarters; the old clock tower in the fountain-centered courtyard.
“Try to find Alec, if he’s in here,” Bryce said as he went through the door.
“Yeah, I’ll keep an eye open, but I think Alec only gets found when he wants to be,” I replied.
Bryce nodded. “Be careful. If you’re chasing your quota, don’t go following any spirits down alleyways. If these were a trend...”
“Don’t worry. I can handle myself.”
“Felix probably thought the same,” Bryce held up a hand, then vanished through the door. I was not jealous of the conversation he was about to have. Any dead guide resulted in a massive review. An investigation into what led to the fatality, and what could be done to prevent the next one. That’s why we now carried sparkers and tried to work in pairs as much as possible. All of our tools had come about through failure. Survival today due to the deaths of those that came before.
Leaving the courtyard, I struck out to the west. Unlike the Warrens, the buildings here weren’t as tall, weren’t as run down. As though whomever built them had an eye for beauty rather than simple efficiency. Along the avenues I walked, two-story shops and bungalows with swooping fronts and faded marquees dominated the sides. Had this been a real neighborhood, I imagined it would be filled with families on a night out. People looking for restaurants, a play, or a chance to see the newest fashions on display. Here, in Riven, it was like walking through a half-realized dream.
I paused in front of a larger building. This one went three high stories, the tallest one on the block, each floor separated from the one beneath with small balconies bordered with weaving iron made to look like vines crawling up the side. My favorite place in the neighborhood. The place Selena and I chose for her.
“You around?” I said as I walked into the third-floor apartment. Furniture in Riven was, by its nature, a dull gray affair, but Selena and I had found enough interesting pieces to give her apartment a sense of character. A long thin table sat in the living room, surrounded by a few different types of skeletal chairs. One metal, one wood, and another seemingly made of wicker. It was a mystery how anything like wood, made from something that been alive, could exist in Riven, but it did.
The walls of the place were decorated with hanging, unframed, drawings. Selena’s. Most were of Riven’s cityscapes, the scenes she saw as she wandered. A couple were portraits of people I didn’t know. One, of a girl and boy, I assumed were her children. I hadn’t asked, and she hadn’t offered an explanation.
“I’m outside,” Selena called from the balcony.
I went by the kitchen, a galley-style affair that was pointless in the food- and drink-less land we were in, and out through the opening onto the balcony. No door, no barrier for the nonexistent bugs here. Selena had her hands on the railing, looking out over the city. Riven’s endless haze gave the vista a fog effect, the rows of structures collapsing into the mist in the distance as though the world vanished into nothing.
“It’s a nice day,” I said.
“They are always nice,” Selena said. “One of the things I miss the most, and I didn’t realize it until the other day, is a bit of rain.”
I followed her eyes up to Riven’s cloud-smeared sun. Or moon. It was hard to tell exactly what hung behind the cover. All we knew was that it was always in the same spot, never moving, giving Riven the constant pale cast.
“Look at it this way, it’s never cold here.”
“It never changes,” Selena said. “That’s a strange thought, isn’t it? That what I want more than anything else, is change?”
“You might be in luck,” I said. “We found something different today.”
Selena turned away from the sky and looked at me. That scar, those big beautiful eyes. Still no hint of the pale blue fire. I swallowed away the nervous flutters that always bustled up the first time I saw her face. Even now, there was so much packed in that simple look that I had to prepare myself before I could continue.
“Bryce and I, we found a dead guide. The spirits that tore him apart, they were working together.”
“I thought all of the angry ones were mindless?”
“That’s what I thought too. I wanted to ask if you’d seen anything strange?”
Selena shook her head. “But it’s not like I’m looking for them. Unless I’m with you, I try to stay away from the angry ones.”
“Probably a good idea. You’ll keep an eye out?”
“It’s not like I have much else to do,” Selena said. “I wander around the city and, eventually, I come back here and wait for you.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. It wasn’t like I could gift her something new. I didn’t even know what she wanted. If, beneath all the grief at her past life, she wanted to find something here that could take that away, or if she just wanted to stay for a while and live with her memories. Eventually she would go to the Cycle, as would all of us.
“Nicholas wants to talk,” Selena said after a minute’s silence. “He’s got something he wants to show you.”
“I suppose it’s been a while,” I said. “You want to go for a walk?”
“Aren’t you afraid we’ll be spotted?” Selena’s voice slid into a mocking tone. “That you’ll be seen with me?”
“Anybody says anything, I’ll just pretend I’m wrangling you,” I replied, slapping a smile on my own face. The joke didn’t get the reaction I was looking for. Selena looked away and nodded. Someday, maybe, I’d understand how her mind worked.
Back on the street we continued west. Towards the edge of the neighborhood. The spots for Selena and Nicholas made sense because they were quiet. Like Selena was saying, angry spirits had a tendency to find each other. To go where other spirits already were. We saw few wandering around here, this part of Riven. Was never sure why, just that it was empty. Maybe Riven’s creators wanted to keep the area pristine, and so kept most of the foul things away. The other bonus was that guides rarely went here so Selena and I had to spend less time ducking into alleys to hide.
“Do you
ever think about your family?” Selena said as we crested a hill, the street bending through what would’ve been a beautiful park in the real world. Leafless trees stood in plots of dead grass. Shells of bushes lined the sidewalks. On the other side, the nice neighborhood fell away into a long series of broken factories and warehouses. If I wanted to fill my quota, I’d be able to do it there, no problem.
“What family?” I said. “Bryce?”
“No,” Selena said. “I mean, the ones you love. I think about mine all the time. Every day.”
“I think about you, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “I don’t really have anyone else.”
“So you say.”
“You think I’m lying?” I said, guiding us to a bench to sit down for a minute. Once we reached Nicholas, it’d be hard to have a moment to think. “I’ve never known anything other than the guides.”
“You’ve never tried figure out where you came from?”
“What’s bringing this up?” I asked.
Selena wrapped her arms around herself, took a slow look around the park. “We used to come to places like this, when I was alive. I loved to run and play. My mother, father, we would go here and have picnics on the days when he didn’t work.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
“Isn’t it? Most people, they have childhoods full of memories. Of their parents, or friends, or family. I’m trying to find yours.”
“Why?” I said. “They aren’t very interesting.”
“Because a woman has a right to know a little about the man who’s trying to win her heart.”
“I can tell you that I didn’t go to a park like this,” I said. “I can tell you that I went to a series of schools. That I moved around a lot as certain houses, guides, had the space to take me. I was never around anywhere long enough to make real friends.”
“That’s sad.”
“That’s life,” I replied. “Only, now that we’re talking about it, you’re not the first person today to bring up my family.”
Selena gave me a questioning look and I told her about Anna, the sneaks, and the offer about my mother.
“You’re not going to help her?” Selena asked when I was done.
“Why? She’ll just get herself killed running around Riven. Better if her work fails and she does something else.”
“That’s her problem,” Selena said. “What matters is that Anna might help you find out who she was. Your mother.”
“I’ll think about it,” I replied.
“I’ll help you,” Selena said, her hand reaching out and grabbing my wrist. “It’ll give me something to do. Something to fill the time here.”
I wanted to say no. To tell her that risking herself in this whole mess wasn’t worth it. But looking at that face, feeling the pressure from her hand, I didn’t want to take that away from her. So I nodded, then stood.
“Come on, let’s go see Nicholas,” I said. “Whatever new toy he has is bound to be thrilling.”
So long as it didn’t kill me.
Chapter 13
Nicholas Salzer. A man so brilliant he blew himself up in a west side lab district not long after I came to Chicago. I found him in Riven two days later looking around, trying to take notes using a rock and a wooden board he’d found on the street. Like Selena, I’d helped him find a home.
In return, Nicholas built my lash.
The building we chose for the lab was a squat, wide structure that might’ve been used for machining, or maybe as a school. Inside was a large empty space. Nicholas seemed to take the vacancy as a challenge, and filled the building with random junk he found wandering through Riven.
Selena and I came up to the front door, one that had been wood when we first found the place, now replaced with a slick steel slab. Worked metal was a rare find in Riven, but the factory district near here had a fair share for the taking.
There wasn’t a handle on the door. Only a button on the right that, if pressed, would set a series of lights aglow in the lab. Nicholas insisted the lights were a better way of alerting him, as there was usually so much noise that a bell would go unheard.
I pressed the button and winced. A habit. More than once, Selena and I tried Nicholas’s inventions and found them to be a tad more dangerous than the inventor had explained. Nicholas blew himself apart here in Riven with unsettling regularity. Pulled himself back together through the simple magic of not being alive in the first place.
The door popped open. Literally popped. Shot off its hinges and fell over to the side, bits of smoke rising from where the door been attached.
“That wasn’t quite the result I was looking for,” came the breezy voice of the inventor. Nicholas, wearing a set of makeshift goggles, nearly disappeared into his large, very stained and burned lab coat. His waving hand stuck out from the wide sleeve like an island in an ocean. “Answering the door was getting to be too much of a hassle. I thought, perhaps, a more automatic means might save me some steps.”
“How many times are you getting visited?” I asked. So far as I knew, Selena and I were the only ones aware that Nicholas existed.
“Oh, just you. And Selena, of course,” Nicholas replied.
“So you’re building this to save yourself time for one visit every few days?” I asked.
“It’s really more of the principle,” Nicholas said. “It’s something that is less efficient than it could be, therefore, I must do what I can to fix the problem.”
“Also, we’re in Riven,” Selena said. “It’s not like we don’t have time.”
“Right. Time. I’ve been thinking about that,” Nicholas said. “Do you know the extent of your binding ability?”
Nicholas addressed the question to me, but I didn’t know the answer. A guide could, as could a sneak if they really tried, bind a spirit to Riven. Prevent the Cycle from calling them. Leave the spirit in limbo, essentially.
There was always a chance a spirit could grow angry, and so guide rules forbade binding a spirit unless you had a good reason. Nicholas and the things he made qualified as a reason. Selena, well, that was complicated.
“Let me know if you start feeling any weird urges. Or if you start getting angry,” I said. “Don’t want you deciding the best use of your inventions is to go killing me or anyone else.”
“No urges beyond the usual,” Nicholas said, his eyebrows popped. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve got something fun for you to try.”
“What are the odds it’ll kill me?” I replied.
“If you pointed at yourself, high. Point it anywhere else, low,” Nicholas said, ushering us inside.
The lab was arranged into a large U shape. Long tables, made from smaller desks and other furniture cobbled together, were arranged along the outside walls. In the middle, compiled tools and stacks of books sat on the hard floor. Books, in this case, being sheafs of paper that Nicholas had filled up with notes and bound together. Paper that Nicholas had made on his own by processing the wood that could be found around Riven.
On the back wall sat a boiler, hooked up to a mechanism that leveraged steam to generate electricity. How Nicholas powered his lab in a world that had no other options.
Nicholas led us to the central part of the U, a workbench that had on it a crossbow. It wasn’t the basic kind that I recalled from medieval tales. No, this one was longer, bulkier. A lever along the main shaft cycled between three separate series of bolts. I reached for it but Nicholas blocked my arm.
“Now, here you are talking about how you hope I won’t kill you and then you go grabbing for it?” Nicholas said, a laugh tweaking the edges of his voice. “You might think that this is just a simple crossbow-“
“Believe me, I don’t think that at all,” I interrupted.
“I suppose it is a tad obvious. I couldn’t find an efficient way to hide the extra bolts. Trust me, I tried.”
“I’m guessing there’s a reason for the different types?” I asked. Looking closer, the bolts were shaded. Feathered with diff
erent colors. The first set was black, the middle blue, and the last orange.
“No, I just did this all for fun,” Nicholas said. The scientist’s sarcasm was like getting hit with a wet sack of flour. “Of course they’re different. The first ones are your run-of-the-mill bolts, they’ll shoot through a spirit and pin it to the wall. Or, you know, do a number on any living thing you run across.”
“I’m not planning on killing a guide anytime soon.”
“Not saying you would. Only saying you can,” Nicholas said. “Moving on. The blue ones you can probably guess. They give you a shot at wrangling a spirit from afar. The orange ones, well, it’s best if you see those in action.”
Without waiting for my reply, Nicholas picked up the crossbow from the table. From the way he hefted it, I could tell the thing wasn’t going to be light. He shifted the lever on the shaft to the third setting, the orange bolt. Then he pulled the crank on the right side. As the crank turned, an orange bolt slipped out of its slot and shot up to the front of the crossbow where it latched into place. As Nicholas continued turning the crank, the string tightened, pulling the bolt back into a firing position.
“Now, it’s probably better if we try this outside the lab,” Nicholas said, looking around. “I’d rather not rebuild this whole place.”
Outside, on the street, Nicholas moved us to the center and aimed the crossbow towards the factories. He pointed it at a large container a couple hundred yards away, one probably made for holding industrial liquids in another time and place. Then, without any warning, he raised the crossbow and pulled the trigger.
The orange bolt streaked off down the street and struck the container, bursting into a fiery lightning that crawled around and arced off to the surrounding building and even to the ashy flakes in the air. The burning rays jumped from object to object, expanding in a bright nova for a dozen yards or more in every direction before slowly petering out and leaving only charred wreckage behind.
