The reflective, silver doors were two hundred feet tall, but only five feet wide. They clicked and parted, granting us entrance to the dark space beyond. Only when the doors shut did lights brighten enough to see the cool mist lying at ankle level. I couldn’t see the ceiling, but we were forced into a narrow corridor and the walls on both sides of us were mirrored.
“It’s like a funhouse,” Dak muttered.
I recalled his fear of clowns and said nothing. Ronin and Dak had their blades drawn and Eliandra’s staff glowed. Realizing I had nothing, I scrambled for my art pad. The sketches within might help me in a pinch.
We inched down the corridor, our images replicated in the dozens of mirrors to either side of us, and the path was a zigzag instead of straight, often splitting in two directions. We kept bumping into dead ends, forcing us to backtrack so many times I got disoriented. We were lost.
We stayed close, until we came into a broader chamber with glittering mirrors on all sides. One long mirror made up the far wall.
The reflections staring back at us weren’t us. Or rather, not quite.
My reflection was piloting a giant steampunk war suit that stood fourteen feet tall. The pilot light on his flamethrower arm glowed blue. Perhaps marginally more disturbing was that Eliandra was wearing what could be generously described as stripper boots and lingerie. Her breasts were also well beyond the B-cup I’d given her—well into back-problems territory.
Ronin wore her demon mask and Dak was unchanged, except he looked bored and wielded a lightning cannon with a Tesla coil on the end.
The mirrored wall—which now appeared to be transparent glass—lifted, making our two chambers one.
“It’s evil us!” Dak said. “Hey, Isaac, it looks like your evil clone is power mad and horny.”
“So I suppose that means your evil version is going to be well balanced and gentle.”
Evil-Isaac glanced us over and frowned from behind the transparent plate that armored his head. “Where’s your gear? I was expecting more.”
“Burn,” Dak whispered.
“I had a rune-stone gun, but Ronin took it,” I told my doppelganger.
Evil-Isaac laughed, a loud and mean sound. “You’re so useless. Seriously—you have zero gear? The first thing I did was grind out awesome toys. Including magic armor for Eliandra.”
Evil-Ronin growled at my double. “Stop wasting time. They’re in our way. End them.”
“No, I have to know.” Evil-me grinned. “What did you spend your time drawing?”
“…a turtle.”
“Oh, I get it now,” Evil-me said. “The Mirror Room forces us to fight our lame sides.”
A scary thought occurred to me: what if I was just a lame-side replica?
Eliandra furrowed her brow at her double. “That’s your magic armor?”
“It protects me from harm,” Evil-Eliandra answered sweetly. “Master Isaac designed it to keep me safe while he and his allies do battle.”
“You don’t fight?” asked Eliandra.
“It wouldn’t be sensible in these shoes,” Evil-Eliandra said. “I’m here to support my friends. I take care of Isaac, Dakrith, and my mother. They’d probably prefer you and I sat this battle out. Do you think we could?”
Eliandra looked ill.
The Ronins assumed fighting stances. While battling dragons, Ronin’s blade had sported a katana’s oval crossguard; now both their swords morphed before my eyes, the ovals expanding into full dueling crossguards. They closed on each other, our Ronin’s blade high and Evil-Ronin’s low. No words were exchanged. They circled.
Dak hefted his sword. It played “Battle Without Honor or Humanity” from Kill Bill: Vol. 1. “All right, everyone. The only reasonable thing is to kill ourselves.”
Chapter Nine: Suicidal Tendencies
“Well,” said Evil-me with a casual shrug. “Time to roast some nerds.” He leveled his flamethrower, mounted over one of his armored suit’s crab claws, its blue pilot light dancing in front of the dark hole from which flammable liquid would spew. His war mech bristled with weapons and armor plating, every deadly angle visible in the mirrored walls.
I glanced for help from Dak and cold fear lanced up my spine. The room was transforming. Reflective walls silently glided from the floor, their tops disappearing into the dark shadows above us, boxing me and my double into the same narrow chamber. I was cut off, alone with a sadistic clone and his flamethrower.
Evil-me came to the same realization. “Just us.” He looked me up and down. “Hardly seems fair.”
“You could let me summon a weapon,” I suggested.
“Who says I like fair?”
The mirror beside me fractured. I jumped at the sound, managing to shield my face as it burst inward. Glittering fragments rained to the floor and my best friend charged through. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner!”
“I thought you were doing action lines,” I whispered.
“Swayze was in Road House. It counts.”
“Good—two of you.” Evil-me grinned. “I hate doing area-of-effect damage to single targets. It’s wasteful.” The flamethrower spewed crackling, liquid-orange fire down the corridor.
Dak hopped in front of me, hunkering behind Not-Captain-America’s-Shield. Fire broke against the disc, molten heat dripping off impervious metal. “You know that mech is a Legend of Korra rip-off, right?”
“It’s a fucking homage!” Evil-me screamed. I wondered if I was ever that shrill. “Where the hell is Evil-Dak? I mean, Dak. Get in here and kill your lame-side self!”
Evil-Dak eased in through the hole made by my friend, heaving a belabored sigh while pointing his lightning cannon vaguely our way. “What’s the evil plan?” he asked.
“It’s not evil! It’s a regular plan,” Evil-me corrected. “Castling. I kill you; you kill me.”
Evil-Dak rolled his eyes. “Brilliant.”
I could see my Dak making calculations—trying for an exploit to take them both on. He glanced my way, fear in his huge face. “Run.”
The word struck terror through my heart.
“Now!”
I turned and sprinted for the chamber’s exit. Behind me, Evil-Dak’s big orc feet thumped after. My sprint faltered when I entered the maze proper, aware that its zigzags and nigh-invisible dead ends could knock me unconscious for a wrong turn. I slowed to a jog to keep from hurtling like a doomed bird into a window.
Quick but cautious, Isaac. I took a bend just as a burst of hair-raising lightning zotted from behind me, streaking through where I’d just been and shattering a mirror down the hall. Perhaps heavier on the quick, though, I decided.
Twisting through the maze, I realized Dak’s plan hadn’t been entirely desperate: Evil-Dak wasn’t right behind me, so he was taking his time. He’s afraid of mirrored mazes, I realized. It was Dak’s fear of clowns, and by extension, funhouses. That’s the strategy. Distract his double with me in the maze, get me out of the room with all the firepower, and beat down the mech. I had to finally give him credit: my friend was better at this game than me.
I thudded into thin air and bounced off. No, not air, I realized—I’d hit a panel that was made of clear glass instead of mirror. I could go no further. How the hell was I going to stay ahead of Evil-Dak if I kept doubling back?
It hit me: the map! I scrounged in my vest for the knock-off Marauder’s Map and unfurled it. After a moment of loading time, it displayed me as a stationary X among the constantly shifting pathways. They were arranged in a sort of honeycomb pattern to maximize the confusion produced by reflections. Individual wall tiles periodically rose from or dropped back into the floor, so that the pathways kept changing. Evil-Dak was marked by a red D. Two walls separated us—until one disappeared.
With the map as my guide, I darted through several turns. Even with my aerial view of the room, Evil-Dak pursued. Has my scent, I realized. Sometimes I heard a lightning zap and walls blocking his path abruptly disappeared.
The wall tiles on my ma
p were different colors. Black meant regular mirrored walls, blue meant glass, but there were also red ones; when I ducked around a corner and came face to face with a wall displaying Eliandra squaring off with her duplicate, I realized the red ones scried on other people in the Mirror Room.
Our Eliandra circled her clone. “Draw a weapon,” she ordered.
“I will not.” Evil-Eliandra folded her arms petulantly. “Just because you’ve taken up arms doesn’t mean I will.”
“Who told you not to fight?”
“My mother,” Evil-Eliandra said. She tilted her chin up with the same imperious mien I’d seen from our Eliandra.
The Queen narrowed her eyes. “Wait. Your mother’s not enslaved by Dracon?”
“Oh, you mean her.”
“Of course I bloody well mean her, you twit!” Eliandra snapped her glowing axe from the head of her staff and her doppelganger shrank back as the Queen advanced, her barbarian side in evidence with every catlike step. “You mean to say Ronin won’t let you fight? That simply because you can’t get to your real mother, you’ve abandoned her? Replaced her?”
“It is what it is.” The doppelganger firmed her lip. “I’m just one woman. What am I supposed to do?”
“What could you do?” Eliandra spat, raising her axe. “I’ll show you what you could do. You could have fucking learned to fight!” She drove her axe into a magical force field that erupted around her foe’s lurid outfit. The shiny light of the axe crackled against an equally brilliant protective bubble. Yet our Eliandra put her clone on the ropes by beating the field again and again, showering sparks, staggering the scantily clad elf atop her crappy heels. The barbarian snarled. “Die, you useless, top-heavy bitch!”
I hurried past the image and worked deeper into the maze. Once, I passed another scrying mirror that showed both Ronins. They were statues one moment and flew through space the next, invisibly quick swords glancing off one another. They ended the exchange with their original positions switched. Each clutched her side in precisely the same place and their magical outfits tightened over the shallow wounds to staunch the blood loss. Their blades dripped.
Their blood was silver.
A mirrored wall abruptly rose and blocked my path. I kicked it in frustration, consulted the map, and backtracked several turns. I was coming uncomfortably close to Evil-Dak when I turned a corner and witnessed, through a scrying panel, my best friend locked in melee with a multi-ton war suit.
A powerful green adhesive from a prior exchange glued Dak’s singing sword to the floor. He still had the shield.
Six feet shorter and badly out-massed, Dak slammed shoulder-first into the monstrous contraption. Evil-me staggered, planted his mech’s back foot, and lunged with a giant metal claw, snapping for Dak’s torso. My friend wedged his shield into the claw before it could close on him. He released the shield and unleashed a series of perfect punches into the mech’s crotch and thighs, crumpling metal, shattering housings, forcing Evil-me to delicately cover his groin with his other clawed hand. “Hey, stop, this is enchanted steel, you can’t do that!”
“Orcish racial feat: armor-piercing fists. Should’ve checked my sheet.”
“You goddamn munchkin!” He kneed Dak in the chest so hard I heard bones snap through the mirror.
“No!” I screamed.
Dak’s rattling cough produced blood. “Also took ranks in engineering.” He thrust a hand into the cracked housing of the mech’s thigh, ripping free a thick hose. Steam billowed from the hose and the suit’s leg went limp.
“Should have taken ranks in emergency surgery.” A shoulder-mounted cannon on my clone’s suit flipped up, leveling on Dak. Its brassy, Gatling-style barrel blurred into fast rotation, firing a swarm of crossbow bolts point-blank. The hail of bolts peppered Dak’s torso, two dozen studs of wood punching clean through his armored breastplate and leaving a cluster of fletchings poking from his flesh.
By sheer miracle, Dak merely slumped instead of dying. Through a trickle of blood from his mouth, he wheezed, “Behold… my constitution score…”
“Stop it!” I shouted.
Briefly, my double made eye contact and grinned. The scrying panels were two-way.
He savored my expression, snapping one pair of claws open and shut over Dak’s wilted body.
The scene shattered as the mirror displaying it broke; Evil-Dak barreled through, backhanding my shoulder. The impact bounced me off a mirror, fracturing it, and I landed hard on my tailbone. I was too stunned to breathe.
“Hold still.” Evil-Dak leveled the crackling barrel of his cannon on my throat, intent on smiting me dead. “This’ll be over in a second.”
I finally got a breath and crab-crawled futilely away. “Why are you doing this?”
Dak advanced. “Maybe I want to.” There was cold hurt in his voice.
Realization hit. “Why do you hate your Isaac?”
His face twisted. “I don’t.”
“You do. I can see it. If he were your friend, he’d see it too. Why do you hate him?”
The gun lowered three inches so that Evil-Dak could meet my eyes with nothing between us. “Because it’s his fault.”
My breath hitched. “Our fault you ended up in the wheelchair.”
Nodding, he leveled his weapon on me again. “I have one question before you die. I saw the way he got you out of there—why doesn’t your Dak hate you?”
Guilt squeezed my insides. “I don’t know. He should. I was the one who insisted we see that stupid movie.” My laugh was hollow. “Wasn’t even that good.” I looked past the deep muzzle at Dak’s clone, and couldn’t help seeing a semblance of my friend there. “Why do you hate him?”
“He puts it on me. He said he was tired and slow at the wheel; that it was my fault because I should have driven…”
Wait—he was the one driving in their world?
“…but that’s bullshit. He was wide awake and saw it coming. He had a choice: swerve left or right. Go right and take it on his side. Go left, and it was me. He swerved left.” Dak snorted. “I’d have done the same, but I still hate the guy for it.”
“No,” I said, swallowing at the pinch in my throat. “You wouldn’t have.”
“What are you talking about?” he growled, gun snapping back to attention.
“In my world, Dak drove.” My voice was ragged. “He swerved right.”
For the first time, there was uncertainty in Other-Dak’s eyes. He didn’t want to believe me, but only because of his innate cynicism, which penetrated so deeply it affected his view of even himself.
These weren’t our evil sides. They were our fears incarnate. Dak’s doppelganger manifested my best friend’s abandonment issues. “You need to break up with him,” I said.
“He’s my friend.”
“The first thing he did when he arrived in Rune was summon you, wasn’t it?” I knew because my evil clone was everything I feared becoming, and summoning Dak into harm’s way had been my most selfish desire.
“Of course.”
“He is not your friend. He uses you. You’re dependent on him because your self-loathing makes you think no one wants to hang out with you. You’re only with him to keep from being alone. But being with him leaves you feeling worthless. It’s toxic. Leave him, Dak.”
“You have no idea!”
“When we were ten years old, we had the biggest fight of our lives after I ate your Fruit Roll-Up. You punched me and knocked out my last baby tooth. I told you I’d never talk to you again. Somehow I nursed that grudge for three weeks, until I walked outside one morning and found a box of Fruit Roll-Ups on the porch. We hung out that afternoon and split the box. No one apologized and we never spoke about it again. It’s one of my favorite memories.”
Other-Dak lowered his head. “In my world, I think I brought you ten boxes before you forgave me for that stupid tooth—which, by the way, was hanging by a thread before I hit you. I probably did you a favor. You still never let me forget it.”
&n
bsp; “You deserve better.”
“Know what? Screw you, and him, and all this. I’ve got legs again. I’m using them to walk away. Dak out.” He dropped the lightning cannon and turned to leave. The moment he did, he and the cannon grayed into colorless glass and shattered into a heap of smoky fragments.
I had no idea if he’d been an illusion or a real Dak from some other dimension. I wasn’t sure which to hope for.
Walls stood on three sides of me, trapping me on a triangular patch of floor. Each of the panes scried the same scene: both Ronins, swords clashing with quicksilver strokes.
Their crossguards locked and they stared into one another’s eyes.
“You’re slower.” With her mask still on, Other-Ronin’s voice was scrambled and terrifying. “Less than a hundredth of a second. But slower.”
My Ronin shoved her clone away, delivering a series of precision thrusts that Other-Ronin parried with clockwork timing.
“Concern for your daughter slows you,” Other-Ronin said. “My daughter is bespelled. Shielded from violence. I have clarity you lack.” She countered with a single, well-aimed lunge.
My Ronin batted the attack aside, circling for an opening. “That’s not why I’m slower. I taught Eliandra to fight. You taught her to cower. I already know who will win.”
“Nothing can break through the magic of her armor,” Other-Ronin said. “My daughter is safe. Yours, I will soon kill.”
“ ‘Mine.’ ‘Yours.’ They don’t belong to us.” Ronin flicked close, their blades crossing again, but this time she cracked her elbow across her doppelganger’s jaw. “They aren’t ours.”
Other-Ronin dropped to a knee and caught a vicious downward slice, staring through the crux their blades formed. “If she doesn’t belong to us, she belongs to another; nothing is truly free, except that which is damaged—like you. Free things are broken.”
“Broken things are free.” Ronin kicked her double in the jaw.
Other-Ronin rolled with the blow and to her feet. “You’re flawed.” She swung her sword through a battery of deadly arcs. My Ronin fell back from each blow, the final one catching her off balance. She twisted away, but the blade tore open her shoulder, shooting a thin silver spray into the air. “Flawed, slow, and defective!”
Mistakes Were Made (A Pygmalion Fail Book 2) Page 12
