We Aimless Few

by Robert J. Crane

  Then he said, heavily, one word: “Seeking.”

  I was not sure what emotion I detected there. Perhaps a mix of them, all negative, not remotely like he would’ve sounded before—before.

  He rolled the totem about. It was carved with a winged demon, its face a garish display of teeth and angry eyes. The stone that made the totem had always seemed to be cold, however long you held onto it. Not that I had gripped it for hours at a time, the way my father likely had this morning. But I’d been passed it, after he’d told stories, brandishing it like a trophy—which it was, of course—and it was still cool, like it had swallowed the residual heat from his palms.

  “I told you,” he said, “about the Sant’anung’ana?”

  He had. He’d told damn near everyone, as it happened, particularly at Seeker gatherings. If I’d heard the story once, I’d heard it a thousand times—which was likely true for anyone who’d listened to him tell it. But listen I did, as he began again.

  “They were so wrapped up in their petty little conflict, those people,” Dad said heavily, staring into the totem’s eyes. “Utterly consumed by it. It was a way of life, almost. And over what? Land.” He snorted derisively. “Always is—but the Sant’anung’ana and the Sant’anung’unon both wanted each other’s! Think of that: three decades, spent hurling rock at each other, detonating their primitive explosives, armies rushing at the other with lances and staves—all for the other tribe’s land. Why, if they’d just sat down and talked about it …

  “So I mediated for them. They weren’t willing to talk at first—they’d much rather gouge each other’s eyes and throats out than have a civilized chat—but I wore them down eventually. And after all those years, all those lives … they just swapped. Like that!” Dad clicked his fingers, and the snap was loud and crisp, nothing at all like I’d have expected when he slumped there in that state. “And it was all over. Decades of war came to an end at the drop of a hat.

  “They thanked me for it. Said I was a gift from the world-birther that had ‘laid their egg’.” This, he scoffed too, like he always did when he told the story—it was, of course, a particularly backward belief those pygmies had. But his heart was not in it—and this time, as I listened for the one-thousand-and-oneth time, I did not think it so silly. A world-birther, laying eggs on which the inhabitants of this tangled universe lived? It wasn’t that crazy. No crazier than, say, a vast, all-seeing, godlike, ethereal species that left puzzles all around the universe so lesser intelligences could find them and figure them out, hopefully dying in the process, for a little extra excitement here and there.

  “And they gave me this,” Dad said, lifting the totem. “A carving of the Sant’anung’unon people.” He appraised it, holding it level with his head.

  And then he laid it upon his desk with a soft click, beside a dreamcatcher woven from alpaca wool, and a metal remote control of sorts, with an inset pink gem atop it, winking on and off.

  He sighed, looking down at the totem.

  “Your brother used to love that story,” he said.

  Manny had. Everybody had.

  Except me, as time went on. I’d liked it at first, been real damn impressed by it. But as time went on, I found myself only despising it.

  It was, after all, a symbol of everything that I wanted—and everything that he and Mum were determined that I could not have.

  The doorbell rang, breaking my father’s melancholy reverie. He straightened, as if it were summoning him from a place deeper within himself, to which he had descended in the quiet that had befallen us. “Get that, Mira, will you?” he asked.

  I nodded and went.

  The front door entered into a wide lobby. It was never shut off, because it was neatly ordered, all the coats hung nicely and the shoes stacked into a rack. My damned mum.

  I unflipped the latch, pulled the door around, and—

  I reeled back, like I’d been stung—no, slapped—for there, on the doorstep, stood—

  “You,” I breathed.

  5

  Now

  I screamed, whipping Decidian’s Spear around in the scant few moments I had as I fell, tipped by a living mechanical street, into the churning embrace of the automaton hellbent on swallowing me—

  Its arms thrust out, all half a dozen of them, grippers on the end groping—

  I fell into them, the spear pointed downward. The bladed end drove into the automaton’s metal carapace, up near the top where I’d say its head was, if it recognizably had one.

  My momentum, thanks to gravity, was enough for the spear to penetrate the machine’s hull.

  It shrieked with a high-pitched whine, as if I’d actually wounded it. For a moment, I thought I had, that whoever programmed these things in the first place had done a damned good job of making them lifelike—but then I felt a juddering vibration in the haft of Decidian’s Spear. All the arms ceased their motion, except for a spasmodic twitching.

  I’d buried the spear into some kind of motor.

  “Take that,” I growled, standing upon it. I twisted the spear around, to shred the motor and kill the automaton completely—

  Wrong move. The blade had caught between the teeth of some interior component. When I twisted, the frozen cogs were granted permission to move again—and they did, spinning wildly, bringing the arms once more into motion.

  “SUBMIT,” the automaton whined.

  “I will not submit to anything that looks like General Grievous!” I shouted, staggering backward from its flailing arms. Apparently I’d done some sort of long-lasting damage, because they no longer had the reach they’d had a few moments ago. And that high-pitched, whining scree, it didn’t relent.

  It lurched after me as I pelted down the wide concourse.

  Do not lift this street too, I prayed.

  One automaton, I could deal with—just about. A handful more, like the dozen or so that had set upon us when we stepped out here—maybe. But when the city itself was alive too, capable of reorienting itself to force us into combat? I couldn’t fight back against that.

  As though my thoughts had cursed me, up ahead the city began once more to reconfigure. Where before I had been fighting on a concourse, walled in by skyscrapers to either side, now the concourse itself began to lift. In came up in blocky levels, disparate from each other, the far end rising fastest and followed quickly by closer and closer chunks, as though the squares of a checkerboard were suddenly lurching skyward.

  I pelted forward, shouting, “NO!” in failed protest—

  The grinding sound overpowered me.

  Not that the city would’ve stopped if it could have heard. The entire place was hellbent on stopping my advance.

  I juddered to a halt at the end of the much-shortened concourse, blocked by a tall, black metal wall.

  “Oh, come on,” I said, banging fists against it.

  Hah! As if I could force the new walls to give.

  But I had to do something. More of these shiny, boxy things were around the corner. I’d run out on my own, managed to get into a one-on-one.

  I had to disable it—thrust Decidian’s Spear back into the puncture wound I’d made, and jam up its servos again—permanently, this time, because I could not afford to leave the spear buried in there just to still one of the bots, when there were others to fight off.

  Of course, maybe the whole city would tire of me then. It would stop corralling me toward the automatons, and just contort itself to crush me, like a spider under the heel of a well-aimed boot.

  Spinning about, I brought Decidian’s Spear around. It was slick with rain, a heavy downpour that glued my clothes to my body, and which made the smell of motor oil richly potent in the air.

  With any luck, it would coat these damned things in rust and end this.

  But then, when was luck ever on my side?

  The many-armed thing lurched toward me. The bottom pair of arms, it used as its feet, taking long, wide steps—not straight ahead, but in a sort of sideways, curving motio
n, like a crab. The others flexed and twirled.

  I jabbed out with the spear, even though there was still a good thirty feet between us.

  The arms flinched, ready to grab for it. Perhaps it anticipated I’d throw it?

  Yeah, no chance of that, either. The arms were enough. I didn’t need to inadvertently give my mechanical adversary an extra weapon to attack me with.

  “SUBMIT, MIRA BRAND,” the automaton bleated again, a high-pitched mechanical whine, as if its speech was not made by a processor but rather a series of motors, all emulating human speech by altering their spin.

  “I'm not really the submitting type,” I answered.

  Closer it came, closer, a hulking, clanking thing that had two full feet of height on me, and many, many times the reach even with just one pair of its writhing, chaotic arms.

  My fringe threatened to block my eyes, the way Camille’s so often did, forced down by the rain that glued it and my clothes to my body.

  I released the spear with one hand to swipe it away—

  The automaton surged forward.

  I barely clasped the spear’s haft again, bringing it up against its seething mass of arms—

  They collided with a powerful CLANG!

  And Decidian’s Spear went flying from my grip.

  I gasped, turning to follow its arc—

  One of the automaton’s arms slammed into the newly risen wall, blocking my view. It landed with a resounding THUNK, reverberating all the bones in my body.

  “SUBMIT, MIRA BRAND,” it intoned.

  It leaned forward, the rain a heavy drumbeat on its shell, so close I could hear the motors spinning madly inside of it as it seemed to leer down upon me with eyes it did not have, a sneer it did not possess—

  “Hey, you!” shouted a voice from up high. “Get off of her!”

  The automaton twisted, as did I—

  Something streaked through the air, falling—no, jumping, down to meet us, knees bent to brace for the impact—

  The automaton’s arms whipped up—

  But the figure whipped out too, so swift that it was damn near impossible to see.

  She landed beside me, with her blade in hand, two of the automaton’s detached arms crashing down a moment later. Her face was grim.

  “Hi, Mira,” said Heidi Luo grimly, her layered hair plastered down to her face, making her look very much like the drowned rat Alain Borrick had once described her as. “Thought you could do with a bit of help.”

  6

  This Morning

  Standing upon the grand doorstep, overlooking a huge gravel driveway into which they had pressed divots with their footfalls, were Heidi Luo and Alain Borrick.

  Heidi stood at the front. She’d knocked, evidently, because Borrick sort of hung back, looking wary. She did too, to be fair—but there was a stubbornness about that girl, one I’d come to admire and feel great frustration with in equal part over the time we spent together, and so however nervous she was at standing upon my doorstep after over five weeks apart and a huge knife in my back, she was doing her best to fight against it.

  She opened her mouth to say something, this pixie girl, in knee-length shorts and a strappy top that looked pretty ridiculous on her—

  And I slammed the door in her face.

  I walked down the hall.

  The doorbell rang again just as Mum stuck her head out of the kitchen. She had a deep frown on her face, forehead covered in heavy lines casting over-large shadows. Still with a bright yellow pair of rubber gloves on, complete with a coating of Fairy liquid bubbles, she scrutinized me with a laser-sharp stare. “Did you answer it?”

  “Yep,” I responded, moving past.

  “Well, who was it?”

  “No one.”

  The doorbell chimed again.

  “It is not no one. Someone is still out there. Come here and answer this bloody door.” A short ‘o’, in ‘bloody’, because of her accent: bloddy door.

  I had more than half a mind to evade her, this time. But the doorbell chimed again—apparently Heidi was more or less hammering the button, which made me hate her all the more right now—and Mum wasn’t going to relent. Best that I follow and head off this nonsense before she decided that propriety was more important than my feelings—what’s new there?—and invite my two mortal enemies in for tea and cakes with me.

  Mum stepped up to the door, tiptoeing to put an eye to the peephole.

  “It’s not no one!” she hissed, turning back to me. “It’s that Borrick boy, and a very skinny Asian girl.”

  She tugged off her rubber gloves, turning them inside out as she did so they looked like a deformed pair of rubbery Pac-Man ghosts, then opened the door.

  Heidi stood with her finger resting where the doorbell button had just been, before the door’s swinging momentum carried it away from her.

  Borrick, to the little credit I would give him, had an even more nervous look about him than thirty seconds ago. Didn’t take a genius to see that he hadn’t been totally convinced by Heidi’s technique of pressing the doorbell either until I caved and answered, or the battery gave out.

  “Thank you,” said Heidi stiffly, lowering her arm, like Mum had done her a favor by allowing her to forgo a repetitive strain injury. “We’d like to speak to Mira, please.”

  “No,” I said shortly—

  “Mira!” Mum cried. “Manners.”

  “These two don’t deserve manners.”

  “I will not tolerate you being rude to guests,” said Mum. To Heidi and Borrick: “Would you like to come in?”

  “Mum!” I protested, at the same time as Heidi confirmed with a “Please.”

  Mum squinted at me, doing her best Popeye impression once more. She did not look happy—and why would she? Maybe because this was the biggest, most non-zombie reaction she’d had from me in weeks? Wrong—it was a strong reaction, yes, one that proved I was not dead—but it also flew right in the face of her polite invitation, as well as her expectations of me—which I would not be meeting right now.

  “This is my house,” Mum said softly. “And while you are under my roof, you will be polite to our guests.”

  “Then I’ll go—”

  “No, you won’t,” she said, cutting me off by thrusting her arm out and gripping the door frame.

  I glared at her, teeth clenched. It would be so easy to just duck under that arm, or muscle past her. But she was quick, annoyingly so, and she had quite a strong grip too, I realized after she’d stopped me escaping Borrick in the town center. Less likely that I’d escape than just end up in a physical scuffle with Mum, one that I wouldn’t actually win. And then there was, of course, the little matter of evading Heidi and Borrick—which I could not do. Not by solely human means.

  “Fine,” I growled at last. “But you’re not having tea,” I directed to Heidi and Borrick.

  Mum warned, “Mira—”

  “Fine. Have tea. But you’re not getting biscuits, or sugar, or milk. And,” I said, turning to Heidi with an acidic glare, “I’m spitting in yours.”

  Mum made a noise of protest, which also doubled as a noise of disgust.

  Heidi met my gaze head on. “Fine,” she said. “I didn’t want tea anyway.”

  “Well, in that case you might as well leave.”

  “Mira Brand!” Mum hissed.

  ARGH. “Fine,” I grumped, turning tail and stalking for the parlor. “Bloody well let them in then, why don’t you?”

  The parlor abutted the kitchen, connected by a door with frosted glass windows arranged in a lattice from top to bottom. Usually, that door was open—but after seeing us all into the room, which smelled of an older bouquet from a couple of days ago, this one a much less glamorous spray of yellow petals, Mum bustled into the kitchen to make us all tea and closed the door behind her.

  The parlor was a fair-sized room; it had in it a piano with ivory keys going a touch yellow (not elephant ivory but some animal from some other world; I didn’t know what), a very large oa
k table which could be extended, and a view out of two back doors, glass, that overlooked a porch and the garden that sloped down toward a patchwork of fields.

  I waved Heidi and Borrick into seats at one end of the rectangular table. Then I took my own, as far from them as I possibly could. Elbows on the wooden surface, I clenched my fists together under my chin, and lifted my eyebrows.

  “Well then?” I prompted. “What brings you two to Colchester? The Castle Museum? Roman walls?”

  Borrick hesitated, looked to Heidi.

  Apparently she was in charge of the two of them.

  “First of all,” she said, “I owe you an explanation.”

  “You owe me an apology,” I corrected. “No, more than that.”

  Her lips thinned. “Fine. I owe you an apology too. Want the explanation first though? So my ‘sorry’ has some context?” Her words dripped with sarcasm.

  I huffed a laugh. “If you think either means anything, you need a reality check.”

  Her lips thinned even more, pressing down to a tiny little line.

  Heidi jerked so sharply at my reply I thought I could hear it crack. She started to spit some retort—but before it came out, Mum opened the door and poked her head through.

  “How do you like your tea?” she asked Heidi and Borrick. “Milk? Sugar?”

  “Black, please,” said Heidi stiffly. “No sugar.”

  “And you, Mr. Borrick?”

  “Two sugars. Heavy on the milk.”

  “Ohh, you like it the way my Jacob does,” said Mum with a polite smile.

  “Almost white?” When Mum nodded, Borrick cracked a grin of his own. “No other way, for tea.”

  Heidi didn’t look impressed at that. I didn’t like tea a bit—couldn’t bear hot drinks in general, unless they were fairly sweet—but even I knew that the way Dad liked his tea—and Alain Borrick too, now—was sacrilege.

  “Coming right up,” Mum said, and closed the door again. Her smeary silhouette disappeared through the frosted glass.

  “Thanks for offering,” I grumbled.

  Heidi laced her fingers together. Placing them on the table in front of her, she began again.