by John Daulton
“What do you win?” Pernie asked, stopping to take the tablet he turned toward her so she could see.
“Nothing,” he said, still grinning. “Except telling people that they suck.” He made a face at his friend, who was still standing a step away. Jeremy stopped and waited beside her, shifting uncomfortably.
“You’re that alien girl, aren’t you?” the tall boy asked. “From Prosperion.”
Pernie nodded, but she was looking at the game. “How do you make it work?”
He showed her, quickly going through the controls. “Combinations are here,” he said, showing her how to find the list on the game’s menu screen.
She perused the list and clicked to the second page, then the third. “Are there more, or just these three pages?”
He laughed. “That’s sixty-four combos,” he said. “Most people only use ten or twelve.”
She found an entry called “practice” and opened it. There were several warriors depicted to choose from. She picked the one that looked most like her, even though it was a much older woman with bosoms that were larger than her head. She had blonde hair at least, and she fought with a quarterstaff that wasn’t so much different than a spear.
She went through the motions, getting the feel of the controls. There weren’t that many buttons along the edges of the tablet, and only so many more around the edges of the screen. The image of the warrior woman leaped and spun about. The quarterstaff made very loud noises that didn’t sound anything like reality, but there were nice streaks of color that followed in the wake of spins, cuts, and thrusts.
“Okay, so how do we play?” she said, cutting off something the boy was saying in midstream.
“You want to play … against me?” His brow crinkled to convey the absurdity of the idea, but his smile suggested he was happy to oblige.
“Why not?” Pernie asked.
He laughed, mostly an air sound through his nose. He leaned over and looked at her screen. “Well, don’t use Starfaze. She’s weak, and that quarterstaff sucks until you unlock her fourth power—and even that sucks compared to Raven or Princess Drax, if you want to play a female.”
“I like her,” Pernie said.
“It’s your funeral,” he said. “Ritchie, give me yours.”
Ritchie handed his tablet to his friend.
“Prepare to go down … uh … What’s your name, anyway?”
“Her name is Pernie,” Jeremy blurted. He said it very suddenly, and it sounded odd. He stood beside her now, but then didn’t say any more.
The tall boy looked at him, gave a dismissive sniff, and returned his attention to Pernie. “Okay,” he said. “Accept my request.”
A square appeared over the top of the blonde woman with the huge bosoms and the quarterstaff. Pernie supposed her name must be Starfaze.
The image shifted. She was looking at eight small squares across the screen, each depicting a scene, like the set of a traveling minstrel’s play. “Where you want to fight?” he said. “Arena is easiest. Ghetto has lots of stuff to climb. Desert is good for your quarterstaff because you can flick stones, Mars is fun because—”
Pernie clicked the first one on the list. It looked like some kind of purple street. A moment later she saw her figure, Starfaze, standing there. The man in the oversize armor stood opposite her.
“You ready?” the blue-eyed boy asked.
Pernie directed Starfaze up to him and struck him down. It only required three successive “combos” to do it. The last blow, called “Coup de Grace,” had Starfaze pounding her opponent into the purple street with the butt of the quarterstaff.
Pernie frowned as she watched it, fake red blood spraying everywhere as the body was mashed and pulverized into a pile of intestines and gore. Pernie’s frown deepened as Starfaze put her hands on her hips, her head back, and laughed. The words “You Win” appeared on the screen.
The tall boy was staring at his screen as well, and he looked up with surprise upon his face. One side of his mouth began to turn up into a smile. “Damn,” he said.
She handed him the tablet back and made a face.
“What’s the matter?” the boy called Ritchie asked as she walked away. “Too much violence?”
Pernie turned back long enough to say, “That’s not what guts look like.” Then she and Jeremy went in to eat.
Chapter 19
As the bus came to a stop, Pernie looked out the window at the empty bench on the sidewalk. There was no Sophia Hayworth there today. Pernie smiled. She looked out past the bench to the tall buildings beyond the neighborhood. Some of them rose almost as high as the Palace did, though none of them were so broad and powerful. These were more like the uneven teeth of a very crooked bit of jaw. Horse teeth mostly, all squared off at the top, though there were a few sharp fangs to be seen. Many of them were still broken from the Hostile attacks during the war.
“I see they let you out on your own this time,” the bus driver said. “You be careful out there, you hear? This here is a nice neighborhood, but don’t you go off toward downtown.”
Pernie got off the bus without saying anything and turned in the direction of Sophia Hayworth’s house. She walked that way until the bus was gone around the block.
The nearest mountains were several measures away—several miles away. The toothy buildings were pretty close. If Sophia Hayworth was right and there really were no magic animals, she supposed the real adventure must be over there in “downtown.” The bus driver was the second person who had worried about what was over there.
Pernie set off immediately.
The neighborhood itself quickly bored her. The houses looked the same, concrete structures poured by the big machines Jeremy called “printers.” There was a street she traveled down on the bus ride to school that had several of them at work. The printers looked like four giant table legs to her, taller than a four-story house, and atop them were long metal beams. Attached to the beams, running across the space between the table legs, was a row of vats and hoses. The vats sat atop another beam that ran back and forth, and projecting from the bottom of the vats were pointed openings from which the concrete spewed. Jeremy said other things could spew out of them too. He told her they could make the whole house right there, plumbing, electrical, and all. He said in the old days before printers, people had to do it all. Pernie had seen enough things being built at home to think that Prosperion must be in the “old days.”
So Pernie had watched over the course of her first two weeks of bus rides as two of the printers printed twelve houses in as many days. They all looked exactly alike, but Jeremy said people would paint them and dress them up so they took on “personality.” Pernie wasn’t too sure about that.
One thing she was sure about was that the whole neighborhood was made of lots of those same kind of houses. She noted that sometimes the design changed a little bit. Some blocks were made up of three-story houses, some made up with fours. Other blocks, like Sophia Hayworth’s, were all one- or two-story homes.
Pernie used the towering buildings, viewed down streets and over the occasional patch of trees, to guide her on her way toward downtown. She passed by a park on the way. A man and two boys were there, sitting on curving plastic seats that hung from a frame. They were burning something and inhaling it through little tubes of glass. The man waved at her to come over, but Pernie ignored him. She didn’t want to inhale anything through a tube of glass.
Downtown took longer to find than she thought it would, but eventually she was close enough to walk down its streets. The buildings were even taller than she’d thought they’d be. There were cars moving about everywhere. There were a lot more of them than there were in Sophia Hayworth’s neighborhood.
Pernie wondered if she could get across to the other side. That seemed like it might be fun, but she thought they might likely stop. All the drivers were computers. The people in the driver’s seats were really passengers. Jeremy told her that computers drove everything but fighter planes and that t
hey even drove those sometimes too. That’s when she found out that the bus driver on her bus didn’t really do anything. He was just there to keep the kids out of trouble, apparently, and in case the computer malfunctioned. Jeremy said they never did, though. But he said humans made better pilots because they had better instincts, which was why he still had a lot of work to do on his android. Pernie did understand, though. It was the same reason the elves wanted a human to be Sava’an’Lansom.
Pernie decided to see if the computer drivers were as quick as an elf could be because, even if elves didn’t have any instincts either, so far they were all much faster than she. At least all the ones she’d gotten to try to fight with, anyway. Which was really only one. Seawind. She wondered how fast the Queen’s Royal Assassin must be. She thought he would be fun to fight with. Except that he would probably cut her up into little pieces right away. Just like Starfaze had pulverized the man in the oversize armor in the video game.
She looked left, then right, then left again. She assessed the speed of the vehicles coming from both ways. Three lanes each. Most of the vehicles had wheels, though there were a few of the fancier ones that flew by “antigravity.” She was still trying to figure out how that worked. She didn’t know enough science yet.
She figured she’d be better off not getting caught under anything with wheels, but she couldn’t help wondering what would happen if one of the gravity cars went over her. She imagined it would feel hot, because the air grew sort of hazy under them, like it did in the courtyard at Calico Castle on hot summer days. Maybe it would burn her. It was probably best if she didn’t find out. Maybe she’d ask Jeremy first, and then if he didn’t know, she could try next time.
For now, she contented herself with just running between them all. She figured she could dodge them easily enough, for they weren’t going very fast. Certainly not the speed of sound. Maybe as fast as a running horse was all.
She checked both sides once more and made her move.
A big truck in the nearest lane hissed to a stop. Pernie dove forward and rolled into the third lane. She knew there was a space between two cars that gave her time for that. She was on her feet and ready to dive for the median when she realized all the cars had stopped.
All of them.
The traffic in all lanes was at a complete standstill, up and down the street as far as she could see in both directions. The cars that had stopped in the nearest intersection formed Ts with those that had been coming the other way. Some of them were so close to each other that barely a hairbreadth separated front bumpers from driver’s or passenger side doors, paused just short of collision.
Pernie turned and examined what she’d done. She stepped across the median and looked down the lanes both ways, all the way down and out of sight. It was all stopped. It was as if she’d stopped the whole city. She thought that was interesting. And fun.
She smiled at the man in the tall truck in the first lane. He had rolled down his window and was yelling at her. She turned back and saw that a lady had gotten out of the car across the median Pernie had just come over.
“Sweetheart, are you okay?” the lady asked.
“Yes,” Pernie said. “They all stopped in time. Look.” She pointed down the avenue, where the cars were still stopped everywhere. “That is very fast reflex. Even without instinct.”
The lady made a face at that, but it quickly went away. “Are you sure you’re all right? Where’s your mother?”
“My mother is dead,” Pernie said. “She has been for a long time.”
“Oh!” said the lady, sounding startled. “I’m sorry. But, how about your father? Or your guardian? Who’s supposed to be looking out for you?”
“My father died a long time ago too. Master Tytamon looked out for me the most, even though really it was Kettle who did. Master Altin was supposed to, too, but then the elves took me away when I tried to shoot Orli Pewter in the heart. Now Sophia Hayworth is watching me, but I don’t need her to. I look out for myself most of the time. I don’t need a guardian. Someday I will be the guardian of the High Seat, so they really need me.”
The lady looked at Pernie for a time, her hands on her knees, her expression bewilderment. “Well, you shouldn’t be out here all alone. You could have been hurt. And you’ve caused a traffic jam. Come on now, let me take you home.” She reached out a hand for Pernie’s. “Where do you live?”
“I can find my way,” Pernie said. She turned and started across the street. She remembered what Sophia Hayworth had said, however, so she turned back because she was supposed to “try to be more polite.” “Thank you for stopping to make sure I was okay.” She smiled and then headed off across the street again.
When the lady finally got back into her car, and Pernie was safely on the sidewalk, the traffic started up again. Pernie watched all the cars go. She saw the people in them staring at her. Some of them very angry, others laughing or smiling. Pernie smiled and waved at them.
She didn’t think downtown was such a scary place. There were nice ladies who made sure you were okay, and there were cars that would stop the whole city just to make sure you were safe. She couldn’t imagine what Sophia Hayworth was so worried about all the time.
Pernie made her way along the boulevard again. She spotted down one street, far to the left, a row of buildings that were still broken from the war. She wanted to go see them. She hoped maybe she would find a dead Hostile.
Master Altin and Orli Pewter had seen Hostiles. So had Roberto and even Master Tytamon. Pernie was practically the only person at Calico Castle who hadn’t seen one yet. So off she went, her steps lively as a sprite.
The sidewalk got more and more broken the farther she went along. Weeds grew out of the cracks everywhere, and it seemed that nobody came along and picked the garbage up. Some of the garbage included broken cars, even a few of the fancy ones that didn’t need wheels, or at least that hadn’t needed them at one point in history.
Pernie went to each of them in turn, climbing inside and crawling over the seats. There were big holes in the front panels, and lots of wires hanging out. She could tell someone had torn out the vehicle controls. They weren’t so unlike the control panel in the bus for her not to know it wasn’t supposed to be like that.
In the backseats she found mostly garbage. There were lots of little tubes of glass that reminded her of the ones the man and the two boys in the park had been smoking through. She wondered if it was the same kind of smoke that Master Tytamon and old Nipper used, although they never smoked from little glass tubes. But she was rapidly coming to realize there were going to be many things that were different from Prosperion. Djoveeve had told her, “To blend with the enemy, you must bend with the enemy,” but Pernie didn’t think she was going to bend so far as that.
By the time she’d finished exploring her third trashed gravity car, the light was growing thin. The mountains threw a cool haze over the city, and the buildings began to shrink into it.
She hadn’t even gotten to the broken ones yet.
She crawled out the broken back window of the gravity car she’d been exploring and dropped onto the sidewalk. She took off at a jog. If she hurried, maybe she could find one dead Hostile before heading home. She was sure if she ran the whole way, she could still make it back to Sophia Hayworth’s house before it was too dark.
She realized a few blocks later that she needed to cut over another street to get to the biggest and most ravaged of the buildings. She spotted an alley that ran all the way through, so she turned down it.
There was a man relieving himself on a wall by a dumpster that was painted green. There were dumpsters just like it behind the cafeteria at school, but Pernie was pretty sure nobody got to pee behind them. She stopped and told him so. “That’s a dirty thing to do, you know.”
He turned to look at her, and she saw that the whites of his eyes were nearly as red as blood. What wasn’t red was so hazy it was almost orange. He had red rims around them too, like old Djoveeve’s w
ere pink, but his face wasn’t three hundred years old. She thought he might jump at her. He looked like a demon standing there, but she realized straight off that those red eyes were vacant and dull.
He smelled terrible.
She decided to ignore him and continued on. She could hear voices coming from the other end of the alley anyway. They sounded excited, young men shouting and whooping. She could hear breaking glass. She thought they must have found a Hostile in the rubble. She ran to see.
There were seven of them, all boys. They were older than she was, but not by a lot. Maybe the older two were past eighteen. The youngest couldn’t have been much more than twelve.
They were throwing bottles at someone who was running away down the alley across the street. They were laughing and swearing like the man in the stopped truck had been.
She didn’t think the retreating man was a Hostile, but she stopped and watched.
The man was soon out of range of the last bottle the boys could find, and the one boy who’d been chasing the man left off chasing him and started back. He was the one who saw Pernie first. He made a face, although Pernie couldn’t quite make it out in the darkness that was settling in, and he pointed. His friends turned to see what he was pointing at. They saw Pernie all at once.
“What the hell are you doing down here?” the twelve-year-old said. She could tell he was trying to sound tough.
The other boys laughed at him and started teasing him with “Ooooh” and “Ohhh.”
“You’re so damn scary, aren’t you, Artol,” said one of the older boys.
“Yeah, Jesus, Artol. Where was that shit back at the liquor store?”
The oldest of the boys approached her. He came with his head tilted sideways and sort of stooping some, one hand out as if Pernie were a stray animal that got loose from some neighbor’s yard.
“Hey there, little girl,” he said. “What are you doing out after sundown? Didn’t your mommy tell you there would be bad people out?”
