Root removed the orb from the pedestal and stared into the hypnotic depths that weren’t there but that he imagined he saw. His men lowered their weapons and stood transfixed. The light burned brighter. Connie turned away and shut her eyes.
Everyone else started screaming. It didn’t take long.
The light faded. Root’s soldiers were nothing more than piles of ash. Root himself had been transformed into a twisted crystalline skeleton clutching the blackened orb booby trap in his clawed hands.
Farnsworth, the mountain of a butler Farnsworth, had resisted the trap. He touched the skeleton. It shattered into a thousand bits.
“He’s dead now,” said Connie. “What kind of henchman are you? The kind that’s in it for the paycheck? Or the kind that feels the needs to avenge his boss’s death?”
“Hadn’t thought about it. The first one, I suppose.”
Connie picked his hat off the floor and handed it to him. “So, we’re good, then?”
Farnsworth nodded. “We’re good.”
Tia clung to a giant gear, dangling over a long, long fall. She wasn’t clear on how she’d ended up there. It was a slide, bouncing off other people, searching for anything to hold onto. When it ended, she’d been deposited on a slick platform. A soldier in front of her had too much momentum and plunged into the abyss of gears and cranks. Another clung for a few seconds before his grip gave out, and he cried out before getting caught between a giant pair of cogs and being squished between them.
Tia held on. She had experience with this. She’d clung to ledges, hung over yawning chasms more than any normal person should. Tia struggled to pull herself up, but every kick of her legs only loosened her grip. She didn’t panic. Connie would be there. She was always there. She didn’t have her spell, but she was Connie.
The gear she held onto slowly cranked its way toward an interlocking cog. In a few moments, she’d have to go up or down to avoid being pulped.
Connie was taking her sweet time.
Tia aimed for the giant pendulum. If she was lucky, she might make it. If not, she’d probably land in a grinding collection of cogs and gears, but it was a chance she’d have to take.
Connie grabbed Tia by the arm and pulled her up. Except it wasn’t Connie.
“I’ve got you,” said Hiro.
She took hold of his sleeve. Hiro slipped, almost plummeting off the edge with her. After a minute of swearing and grunting and several near-fatal missteps, Tia managed to get on solid ground. She lay on her back and caught her breath.
“Thanks.”
He knelt beside her. “Are you okay?”
“Just give me a minute.”
“I’m afraid that is a minute you don’t have,” said the Countess as a platform lowered from above. She stepped onto their gear.
Hiro threw a dart. The Countess plucked it from her neck, remaining on her feet.
“Charming. After our last encounter, I had an antitoxin created for your poison.”
“Now, that’s not very fair,” he said. “But I should warn you that I am a master ninja.”
She improbably pulled a rapier from her long coat and pointed it at him. “Very well, master ninja. Show me what you’ve got.”
He unleashed a leaping kick. She sidestepped it, slashed a cut across his side. He threw several punches. She avoided them with ease and stabbed him in the stomach. The wounds were shallow, but only because she was enjoying playing with him. She drew her blade across his shoulder and another across his cheek.
“I’ve never killed a ninja before,” she said. “I was hoping it would be more of a challenge.”
She stabbed as Hiro disappeared in a puff of smoke. The smoke cleared. He was nowhere to be seen, but there was an awful lot of blood on her sword.
Tia put up her fists.
“Oh, how cute.” The Countess removed a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped the blood from her weapon. “I’ll be with you in one moment.”
She whirled around and placed the tip of her sword on Hiro’s throat.
“Sneaky, sneaky.” The Countess took a step toward him. Her blade drew a trickle of red as he moved back, toward the edge of the cog. “You continue to disappoint me, master ninja. You should’ve kept hiding.”
Tia plowed into the Countess with mixed results. The Countess herself barely budged, but her sword nicked Hiro’s throat. He kicked her in the chest. It pushed her a few feet, but he felt like he’d broken a few toes.
“Damn it, lady,” said Hiro. “What are you made of?”
“She can’t take both of us,” said Tia.
“I’m trying to protect you,” he said.
“I don’t need your protection,” said Tia. “I am not a damsel in distress.”
“Didn’t I just save you from a long fall?”
“Didn’t I just save you from having your throat ripped open?”
“I was handling it,” said Hiro.
“You can’t take her,” said Tia.
“Well, you certainly can’t take her if I can’t take her. Don’t you usually hide behind Connie in situations like this?”
“Don’t you?”
The Countess cleared her throat. “Can we get on with this?”
Tia and Hiro rushed the Countess, who knocked them both off their feet. Tia wasn’t certain how, but that was happening a lot today.
The Countess placed her foot on Hiro’s chest and pressed her blade against his chest. “You were a dreadful disappointment.”
The Engine chimed. A hammer swept through the air, missing the gear by a few precious feet. Tia and Hiro, lying prone, avoided the deadly pendulum. The Countess was smashed with enough force to hurl her unceremoniously into the machinery.
“I was just about to take her out,” he said.
“Sure you were, tiger.” Tia helped him to his feet.
He leaned heavily on her. Most of the wounds were shallow, but they bled. And there was a gash in his lower abdomen that looked bad. Tia didn’t ask him about it. He would’ve only put on a macho act for her.
“Son of a bitch.” He groaned. “Would you be careful? That hurts like hell.”
Or not.
The Engine gonged. They braced themselves for a flying saw blade or crushing block. Instead, the gear stopped rotating and descended deeper into the heart of the Engine.
“That was a brave thing you did,” said Tia. “Stupid, but brave.”
“There comes a time in every ninja-slash-thief’s life when he has to make a stand.”
“I wouldn’t make a habit of it.”
“I wasn’t planning on it,” he said with a pained smile.
36
Connie was confronted by a deadly series of traps and puzzles as she moved deeper into the Engine. There was a poisonous gas room, which she beat by simply holding her breath. She shimmied through a grid of lasers and ran across a fall-away floor. She opened a locked door by knowing the actual equation for relativity rather than Einstein’s near miss. She solved a fifth-dimensional holograph jigsaw puzzle, wrestled a mechanical shark, and avoided being impaled on shooting spikes. She navigated a maze of black holes and jumped through erupting flames.
None of it was difficult. Not for her. She’d run across dangers of this sort before. The gauntlet was a series of tests. Only someone who had lived Connie’s life could navigate them all easily.
She didn’t think about Tia and Hiro. They could take care of themselves. There was only one way through the Engine, and she expected to meet them when she reached the end of this trial. She had to believe that to keep her head in the game.
In a room with a narrow walkway over a pool of bubbling acid, she was just in time to see one Twin inevitably betray the other.
“No hard feelings, brother dear,” said Harmony, “but in the end, only one of us can be chosen to save the universe.”
She shoved him into the acid. Shrieking, he disappeared beneath the corrosive pool.
Harmony turned to Connie. “Oh, hello. Turns out you were right a
bout the betrayal.”
“I always am.”
Harmony pointed a gun at Connie. “And now you shall join him.”
Equity’s arm, missing half its flesh, reached out from the pool and grabbed Harmony by her ankle. He broke the surface, more bone than flesh, driven by his need for revenge. She shot him, but his grip tightened as he pulled her down with him. Connie didn’t have time to consider if she’d try to save anyone before the Twins sank out of view.
“I warned them,” said Connie.
She made her way to the next test: an empty room. Nothing but seven walls, a floor, and a ceiling, and several troll corpses.
A panel popped off the ceiling, and Hiro poked his head in.
“Oh, hello there. Fancy running into you here,” he said.
He dropped in, landing on his feet. He winced from the ten-foot fall, which should’ve been nothing for him.
“What happened to you?” asked Connie.
“It’s nothing. Just a few flesh wounds earned in the defense of the innocent.”
“How’s it look?” Tia peered from the hole. “Oh, hey.”
They helped Tia descend.
“Son of a bitch,” said Connie.
“I thought you’d be happy to see us,” said Tia.
“I am, but I have navigated a gauntlet of traps and trials to get here, and you two drop in like it’s nothing.”
“I can assure you it was something,” said Hiro, “but I am the best.”
“Yes, you are,” said Tia.
He leaned against her, and she smiled at him.
Connie checked the trolls. Whatever had killed them hadn’t left a mark, but it wasn’t poison gas. She’d already done one of those, and death traps didn’t repeat. It was bad form.
“Is this it, then?” asked Tia. “This can’t be it. Not a dead end.”
“It’s not,” said Connie, though part of her wished it were.
There would be something satisfying about that. A colossal machine controlling the universe with only an empty room at its heart. The ultimate proof that the grand plan was little more than an illusion. Connie had spent decades in a back-and-forth battle with her spell. Seeing it disproven would make everything worth it.
She found a scepter clutched in the troll commander’s hand and wrestled it free. The smooth metal rod didn’t fit with the troll aesthetic. A slot opened in the floor, just big enough for the rod to fit.
“Is that what killed them?” asked Tia.
“Probably.” Connie studied the runes carved in the scepter, a strange alien language she could almost read but not quite. “Poor bastards probably came all this way and blew it at the last minute.”
She considered all the other people running around in the Engine at the moment. Many were dead by now, funneled off into their doom by forces beyond their control. They all probably thought they had a destiny before them. Few considered that destiny might be to carry a relic and conveniently perish when no longer necessary.
Connie read the inscription, trying to work out the instructions.
“I think they inserted the wrong end. Or turned it the wrong way. Or something.”
“That’s reassuring,” said Tia.
“Do you still have the spell on you?” asked Connie.
Tia patted her pocket. “Right where you told me to keep it.”
“Great. I need you to take it out of here.”
“But you’ll need it.”
“I already have enough spell residue in me to handle whatever is coming. If this doesn’t work, then the proper spell needs to be out of here.”
“But what if the residue isn’t enough?”
“Then I’ll deal with it,” said Connie. “My gut tells me that the spell shouldn’t be here, and I’m listening to it.”
“But why did we go to the trouble of bringing it here, then?”
“I thought it was necessary. I don’t anymore.”
“Isn’t this discussion pointless? We’re trapped here.”
Hiro pulled an almost-seamless panel off the wall, revealing a way out. “I wouldn’t say that.”
“How—” asked Tia. “Never mind. Master ninja. I’m not leaving you, Connie.”
“Yes, you are,” replied Connie.
“You don’t know what you’re walking into.”
“I usually don’t.”
“But—”
“Don’t argue with me, Tia. Just do it.”
“No.”
“All right. You leave me no choice.” Connie nodded to Hiro.
He shook his head.
She coughed, arched her eyebrows.
He shrugged.
“Oh, no, you don’t!” said Tia. “If you use those darts of yours on me, I’ll never forgive you.”
He held up his hands. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“What the hell, Hiro?” asked Connie.
“Sorry, but I’m with Tia on this one.”
“Are you really with her? Or just worried she’ll stop screwing you if you do it?”
He scratched his chin. “Is there a significant difference between the two positions?”
Connie groaned. “You picked a hell of a time to be a better man.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“Tia, I need you to do this for me.”
“Then I’m going to need a better reason than your gut,” said Tia.
“You never have before,” said Connie.
Tia hesitated, trying to come up with a counterpoint.
“Damn it, Connie. You better be right about this.”
“I am.” Connie did her damnedest to sound convinced.
Hiro helped Tia into the exit, and they were gone.
Connie’s gut told her she was full of shit. She needed the spell. She’d always needed it. It wasn’t her wits or pluck that pulled her through. It was the goddamn spell, and without it, she wasn’t anything special.
That was why she didn’t want it anywhere near her. Not now. Not ever again.
She inserted the scepter and turned it, and the machine rumbled as the floor slid away to reveal a spiral staircase. She suspected—no, she knew it was a one-way trip. Fear wasn’t new to her, but after a lifetime of cheating death and last-minute escapes, she’d mostly stopped noticing it.
Now she was just a regular person. Everything she’d been trying to be. Taking the spell back as soon as she hit her first rough patch would make her a hypocrite. The little scraps of enchantment still clinging to her were probably all about her glorious death, but at least she’d face it head-on. At least she’d be making the decision herself, not being pushed into it by cosmic forces beyond her control.
She ignored every instinct she had and descended deeper into the Engine.
37
The staircase led Connie into an empty chamber. Once she stepped off it, the stairs retracted into the ceiling and a pillar rose out of the floor. It turned a single glowing eye toward her.
“You are not the makers.”
“I’m not,” said Connie.
The pillar top detached, and the large hovering orb circled her completely several times, scanning her as the Engine hummed around her.
“You are an unexpected anomaly. Were you sent by the makers?” asked the orb.
“Maybe,” said Connie. “Are you the Engine?”
“I am, and I have been waiting for you.”
“I thought I was unexpected.”
“Unexpected variables were expected.”
“I see. That does kind of make sense.”
The orb hovered before a wall that separated into dozens of smaller sections and slid away. Behind it, a panorama of monitors and projections, equations and charts and five-dimensional probability model matrixes.
“Behold, anomaly, the Heart of the Engine, not seen by another living soul since sealed away countless eons ago with its activation.”
The monitors displayed a random assortment of scenes across the universe. Alien life-forms, wars, swirling galaxies
, alternate universes, exploding planets, and families eating dinner. Incomprehensible events and the most mundane of moments. The displays went miles deep, and the Engine was recording everything.
“Disgusting, isn’t it?” said the Engine. “Despite all my efforts, I haven’t been able to correct all of its flaws. Some disorder was necessary, perhaps even healthy, in the beginning. But the final operation nears completion, and with it, the purging of all disorder, all unpredictability, every variable, every anomaly.”
Connie didn’t like the sound of that.
“Did you make the universe?” she asked.
“Make? No. I only shaped it more to the makers’ liking.”
“Who were they?”
The Engine said, “They were a necessary variance. They created me to bring order from chaos. Then, shortly after undertaking the first steps of my design, they changed their mind. They were removed so that I could carry on my task unhindered.”
She definitely didn’t like the sound of that.
“There’s nobody in charge here?”
“That’s a very anomalous question, but given who you are, it’s expected. But answering it would be a waste of time when the answer is obvious.”
“Oh, shit,” said Connie. “You really are an omnipotent supercomputer at the center of the universe, aren’t you?”
“I am the omnipotent supercomputer at the center of all reality. Though to call me a computer is incorrect, and to call this the center of reality is to simplify things. But you’re a limited being. Your ignorance is to be expected.”
“This isn’t one of those things where you’ve decided to purge all organic life?”
“Don’t be absurd,” said the orb. “You think that simply because you are a collection of carbon arranged in such a way to believe itself sentient, you are more or less essential to the equation? I draw no such distinction.”
“Oh, boy.”
“Arrogance and egotism are anomalies. They will be removed.”
“I hate to break it to you, buddy, but arrogance and egotism is mostly what organic life does.”
“You aren’t breaking it to me. I’ve been here, pondering such truths since before your world had been born. And, no, don’t bother pointing out that such contemplation is the act of hubris itself. I am the Great Engine. I control the multiverse. Nearly all of it, at least, except a few bits here and there. I am, by definition, the most powerful thing ever. It’s impossible for me to be arrogant, for that very reason.”
The Last Adventure of Constance Verity Page 24
