It was my turn to look as dumbfounded as Carson’s grandpa, here, with the broken pyramid.
“Uh …”
“Flycatcher,” said Heidi.
“Huh?”
She pointed at my slack-jawed expression.
I snapped it closed, then spun back to Carson—more of a head jerk, really, since it was so damned tight in here with Bub and his armor. Why he couldn’t travel without it once in a while was beyond me. I mean, we’d come to America, for crying out loud. Who was he expecting to need to battle off, exactly? Oprah?
“Sorry,” I said to Carson, “let’s back up a step here. We came all this way—we cut through to a university admissions office, mid-interview—and you’re saying no?”
“Yes, I’m saying no,” said Carson hotly.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I’m putting my life back together! And how did you even find me?”
“Ah,” I said, holding up a hand and grinning. “You’ll be impressed by this. See, after the four of us got together—”
“Four?”
“I’ll explain later. Anyway, after the four of us got together, we said, ‘Where would Carson have gone?’ And obviously the answer was back home—here, Ohio. But, we wondered—what would you have done when you got here?”
“Moped around,” said Bub.
Heidi frowned at him and shook her head.
The orc rumbled, “But we all agreed—”
“College,” Heidi cut across. “We knew you’d go, sooner or later. So we made some calls—converted a lot of coup to nowhere near as many dollars—” She arrowed a dark look at me; Benson’s rates hadn’t exactly been fantastic. But what could I do? The post office would laugh us out of there if we turned up with a sack full of coup to convert.
“—and we waited until we got the call. After that …” Heidi shrugged. “Just a matter of cutting through to the right office at the right time. Bing, bang, boom.”
“We actually came here once already,” said Bub, “an hour ago.”
I flashed an embarrassed grin. “I may have converted the time zones wrong.”
“Fortunately the office was empty.”
The admissions officer spluttered. “Well, I was—I had to go to the bathroom.”
“The point is,” said Heidi, “we’re here—for you, Carson. We came all this way.”
He met her gaze, for only a moment, and then twisted away. The first hints of heat were coming to his face again, riding high in his cheeks below his glasses. He’d a good, tight hold on his manbag, as ever, looking less and less petrified by the minute.
“Let me get this straight,” he said slowly. “You bribed the university …”
I nodded. “And a bunch of others. We weren’t sure you’d stay put, to be honest.”
“… and got them to call you and tell you when I’d applied, and the details of my interview …”
“Yeah.”
“… so you could turn up here and interrupt it and ask me to join up with you again.”
“That’s right.”
Carson considered this for all of half a second. Then he whirled around to the admissions officer. “You’re in on this?”
“I had nothing to do with it!” the admissions officer cried back.
“What happened to ethics? To privacy? What if that had been a killer trying to buy info about my movements?”
“A killer?” Heidi wrinkled her nose. “No offense, Carson, but I think you can strike that off your list of worries.”
“The university just gave up my location to you for money! That’s—that’s not right!”
“You should write someone a strongly worded letter,” said Bub. “The university-sitter. That’s what you call the person who observes this clutch of younglings, is it not?”
“The d-dean,” the admissions officer stammered.
“The Dean?” said Bub. “The first of such named men?”
“The head of a university is called the dean,” said Heidi.
“Why do you call him the Dean, though?” Bub’s eyebrows knitted. “Have I misunderstood human names? Should I have called you the Heidi all along? The Mira?”
“Dean is—yes, you’re wrong,” said Heidi, exasperation turning her words into a huff. “Just forget it.”
Bub did not look particularly mollified.
Carson’s mouth still hung agape. “I don’t believe this.”
“Me neither,” said the admissions officer, equal parts horror-struck and amazed by Bub.
“After the way you treated me,” Carson went on to me, “leaving me in that library to do the grunt work for you while you … you swanned off Seeking, following that stupid quest … after being a horrible friend … you think I’d want to come back to that?”
Ouch. All fair points though.
“You’re right,” I said. “And I’m sorry—truly. But things have changed now. I’m a better person—a better friend.”
“What are you even doing with them anyway?” Carson asked Bub, over my shoulder. “She kicked you out.”
Bub sucked in a long, steady breath. “Well …”
One Week Ago
Trudging through swampy marshland, Heidi, Borrick and I looked a bit of a state, honestly. The tide was farther inland today, swallowing the bases of the temples where we had fought months ago for the Tide of Ages. The secondary effect of that was that the swamps themselves were much more muddy and gross—my trousers were coated all the way up to my knees, Heidi was smeared with dirt even higher, and Borrick—well, he held up his long cloak to stop it slapping down into the mud.
“You look like a newlywed bride climbing down the steps of a church after getting hitched,” said Heidi.
“Hmm,” was all Borrick had to say about that.
Heidi harrumphed after almost getting sucked into the bog by a particularly devious sinkhole. “Are you sure this is where we’ll find him?”
“Bub was exiled here,” I said.
“That didn’t stop him from spending all that time in London the last few months,” Heidi said.
“He was paid,” I said, “just like you.”
Heidi clenched her jaw. “Right.”
“Once his source of cash dried up, he’d have gone straight back to being exiled,” I said with more certainty than I ought to possess. It was guesswork, honestly—Bub didn’t strike me as being particularly honorable, after the Lady Angelica business. Then again, save for Carson, was anyone among us? “His exile is doubly deserved now.”
“We’d better find him soon,” Borrick said. “Three times, I’ve been to the dry-cleaners this past month.” Lips pursed, he added, “How I’ll explain this to them, I’ve no idea.”
“Easy,” said Heidi. “Just tell them you failed to get to the toilet in time.”
Borrick scowled.
The trek grew muddier. At some point, I switched to breathing through my mouth, classic nerd style. Had the swamp always smelled so damned pungent? Damn, but it reeked. The seawater seeping into the boggy peat underfoot had released a smell like—and excuse the crassness here—a thousand orc farts after a feast consisting of nothing but eggs. Boiled eggs, deviled eggs, poached eggs laid on fried eggs … yeesh.
Just wading through the mire was enough to unleash pockets of the scent, bubbling up from below in a fetid belch.
Nasty.
A particularly gruesome burst of rancid air assaulted Heidi. She coughed and gagged, throwing her arm across her face.
I caught the tail end of it, and nearly heaved myself.
“Okay, I have had enough of this,” she said. She sounded like she had the flu where she was blocking her nostrils. “If Bub doesn’t show up in the next minute, I am leaving.”
“Seconded,” choked Borrick.
“Shout for him or something,” said Heidi.
“Uh … I mean, I know I said he’d be here in this world, but that doesn’t necessarily mean right here.”
She rolled her eyes, then hollered, “BUB
! GET YOUR BACKSIDE OVER HERE!”
I listened, to the echo of Heidi’s cry diminishing as it rebounded through the marshland—
And then came a thrashing noise. Wet, sucking sounds heralded something surging through the overgrowth and mud, something big—
I braced, one hand ready on Decidian’s Spear—
Through a tangle of vines erupted an armored orc. An armored, familiar orc.
“Bub!” I cried.
He blinked at me, at the three of us, a little confused—here I was with Heidi, who Bub knew very well had backstabbed me in much the same vein as he had, and Borrick, Bub’s ex-employer, who I’d enjoyed a bitter feud with these past few months. And on top of all that, after sending him away, we’d come back to the world of his exile to seek him out.
But Bub, in the expected Bub fashion, did not query any part of it. He just raised a meaty green fist to us and said, “Hello.”
“Finally,” said Heidi. “Mira, explain why we’re here—quickly.”
“I’m putting the team back together, Bub,” I said. “You want in?”
He considered, eyebrows lowering …
“Okay.”
“Done.” Heidi turned. “Let’s get out of here, before I vomit.”
“Uh … okay then,” I said, kind of stupefied at just how easy that had been.
We began to lumber back the way we’d come, able to retrace our steps easily by the tracks our feet and legs had carved in the mud, slowly reshaping as the swamp oozed back to unperturbed flatness.
“You have swamp mud on your cloak, Mr. Borrick,” said Bub jovially.
Borrick jerked it around him to stare. Sure enough, the bottom of it was coated in a murky brown layer of foul-smelling mud. Borrick just sighed and bowed his head, shaking it, presumably as he tried to figure out what to tell his dry cleaner.
Today
“And so here I am,” Bub finished, “at the Mira’s side once more.”
Heidi’s jaw clenched. “You do not need to add ‘the’.”
“So you’re all just friends again?” Carson asked me. “After everything you went through—everything you put me through—it’s all hunky-dory? Like nothing ever happened?”
“Uhm … yes? Kind of?” I shrugged. “I’ve forgiven them—mostly.” I shot a dark look at Heidi, who returned it with a wave of her middle finger. “And now I’m hoping you’ll join us again too.” Stepping forward—that is, inching forward, since space was at a serious premium right now—I looked at Carson as earnestly as I could and said, “We’re a team, Carson. In fact, we’re legends, all of us—you included. The lost treasure of Ostiagard—you remember that, don’t you? You haven’t forgotten?”
Carson’s mouth quirked downward. “No,” he said quietly. “I haven’t forgotten.”
“I meant what I said before—about you being the best of us. I still believe it.”
His lips pursed. “Funny way of showing it.”
“I know. And I’m sorry. I mistreated you. But I can promise you, right now, that it’s not going to happen again—not ever.”
“I’ll slap her in the back of the head if she slips up,” Heidi promised from over my shoulder. Then, voice easing down a notch, she said, “Please, Carson. Come back with us.”
He glanced at her. For that short moment as their eyes connected, I had the feeling that, in their minds, they were suddenly the only two in the room—no Mira, no Bub, no cowering admissions officer clutching a broken paperweight.
Then he jerked his gaze away. Sullenly, fiddling with his manbag strap, he said, “Why would I.” There was no intonation to it, no rise at the end of his question.
“We’d be nothing without you,” I said. “You, Carson—you’re the brains behind the operation. You’re smarter than all of us, put together, multiplied by ten. An army of Miras and Heidis and Bubs couldn’t come even close to what you bring to the table.”
“Thanks,” said Heidi dryly.
I gave her the middle finger back. She grinned, a slightly venomous smile.
“I made a mistake before,” I said. “A kind of long-winded, extended mistake. I promise you, I will not make it again. So—what do you say, Carson? Will you come back with us?”
He met my gaze. Considered—I could see the gears whirring in his head. He licked his bottom lip, averted his eyes, clutched tight onto his manbag strap—and said, “No.”
My heart skipped.
My stomach dropped.
Heidi flinched back as if she’d been struck.
“No?” she repeated in a whisper.
“I need to get my life back on track,” Carson mumbled, pointedly looking away from any of us. “I need to move on.”
I stared, dawning with a kind of horror I hadn’t felt in—well, a long time. Carson was—saying no? He wasn’t coming back to us? I knew I’d been awful to him, but I’d learned from my mistakes, I’d grown …
I thought if he saw that, he would—
Before my thoughts could draw on any further, a riotous commotion outside filled the air. A menacing scree! split the morning in two, vibrating the window panes—
I jerked around to see—
“Oh no,” I gasped.
The massive robot amalgam from Laknuria was dragging itself out of a searing red rift that devoured the greens spread out behind the university.
3
“What is that thing?”
The admissions officer’s eyes were practically falling out of his head. White-knuckled around his paperweight, I was half-tempted to slap it out of his hands in case he cut himself on the hard edge where it had fractured.
I didn’t do that, because I, too, was close to having my eyes burst out of their sockets.
“What’s it doing here?” I cried. “I thought we banished it to a void!”
Carson spluttered. “This thing is here because of you?”
“I didn’t bring it on purpose,” I said. “We sent it through to a void in Tokyo like two weeks ago.”
And now Carson’s eyes were bulging too, his optic nerves fighting wildly to keep them from pinging off around the room like a bouncy ball from one of those 20p dispensers in supermarkets.
“Tokyo—that was you?”
“Uhm … maybe?” I said.
“The news said it was a tradeshow demonstration gone wrong! I don’t believe it,” said Carson. “I thought all this was behind me.”
“Mira,” Heidi said. “We’ve got to do something about this.”
The massive amalgam had dragged almost three quarters of its length through the gateway now. Rising dozens of feet, and growing every second, it was every bit the monster it had been when it set upon us in Laknuria and then Tokyo.
Actually, it was worse now. In the daylight, the full extent of its hybrid design was apparent. Its surface was a seething mass of automatons, melded but still with their own instincts and drives, rearranging and contorting, peeling off and firing out cables or long, flexible arms to help heave the hulking brute out of the ‘void’ we’d banished it into.
It had been damaged, somehow. Wherever it had gone, one full side of the thing was sheared open, the automatons there cracked or smashed inward into a mass of ugly, deformed metal. A cavity had been torn under one of its pseudo-wings, and from inside it red lights shone like the fires of a hellscape.
“MIRA BRAAAAAAND,” it roared—and then the call turned into a digitized garble.
“I do not believe this,” said Carson faintly.
It wrenched itself free at last—at least mostly. The gateway underneath it suddenly collapsed, slicing off the hulking amalgam’s feet. It lurched, catching itself from falling as the wings drew forward and rearranged like spider legs to hold it up. Then the bottom began to shift, automatons pulling themselves off and moving downward, clambering over each other, reattaching and melding to create a new set of legs—
It pushed itself up—
The eagle-like head swept over the university building. Its jaw was battered inward too, the da
mage too great for the automatons there to adjust and fix. An orange-red glow indicated a new gateway gun—or perhaps the old one, scavenged from where I’d made the idiotic mistake to toss it into the void with it—although it was a void! How had it even made a gate out of nothingness—
“MIRA BRAAAAAND!”
Automatons detached from the shoulders of the massive amalgam. They scuttled upward, onto the hawk-like head glaring across to this building from a couple of hundred meters away—
My blood froze. “Heidi—you don’t think—”
They launched themselves through the air, propelled by incredible force. Their spidery legs closed inward, turning them into the equivalent of obduridium rocks hurtling through the air, like massive stones thrown by a child—
The windows exploded as both automatons smashed through.
Their legs exploded outward, wrapping around me—
“DOWN, THE MISS MIRA!”
I caught a momentary glimpse of Bub’s massive sword, with its two prongs, swiping through the air. The wind of it whipped past my skin, then one of the automatons’ bodies went flying. Its legs, entwined around me, unfurled and fell quivering to the floor.
“This is a bad dream!” the admissions officer bawled. He’d disappeared under his desk.
“Yes, totally a dream!” Heidi shouted, loosing the cutlass and swinging it to full-size—
“Careful!” I almost had time to shout, my heart skipping again. Actually, I didn’t have time for it at all: Heidi thrust in with the blade, burying it deep in the hull of the other automaton still latched around me.
It shrieked a mechanical death scream. One of its legs unwrapped from me, whipping out for the cutlass—but Heidi was swinging it, carving through the scant bit of air available between us, and the leg was cleaved straight off, falling with a hard thunk on the desk. From beneath it, the admissions officer bleated a shrill squeal.
“Just a dream!” Heidi bellowed again. “You'll wake up shortly!”
The automaton still hadn’t given up its ghost. The wound it had sustained might soon be fatal, and it might have lost one of its long, flexible legs, but this thing had sailed through a void for a fortnight as part of the huge hawk shuddering across the green toward the university. It had been through who knew what horrors, survived—and now it was very, very insistent on achieving the goal my father had programmed into these machines: to capture me—although, seeing as the amalgam had ultimately overridden my father’s command, there was no question in my mind that it was none too fussy about making sure that I survived said capture.
The Gang of Legend Page 2
