Chapter 24

  Heidi

  Heidi leaned back against the flat of a towering lorn shard, panting and dripping with sweat. She would have killed for a steady sea breeze, but it seemed the Metal Moon didn’t go much for wind. Oh, the air got pushed around a bit by the tectonic movements of the truly massive shards, but that felt more like the sighing of a vast and ominous beast, lukewarm and stagnant. And loud, with the unceasing cacophony of chimes as the lorn crashed into itself. She had got used to the smell, like metal burnt when soldering, but even now it was hard to tune out the noise. Someone had told her about a story that her moon might one day sound beautiful, but that didn’t seem likely.

  She checked the spacious pockets of her canvas coat for spare ammo clips. Still there, of course. She knew they were. Just as she knew, although she could not see him, that Bahamut was nearby. He was entirely invisible in the deep shadows around her, but a scaly hand touched lightly at her ankle as though he had sensed her thoughts and wanted to reassure her of his presence.

  She stood up, her breath mostly recovered. The trembling hand she used to wipe sweat from her face felt sticky. She experienced a brief, crazy impulse to taste the stickiness. On her island, this would be a natural and safe means of identifying something sticky. But here it was probably blood. She briefly clicked on the light on the shoulder of her jacket. Yep, blood. But blue. Not hers. Nor Bahamut’s, whose blood was indistinguishable from ink. Hot ink.

  A rue cried out nearby. She shivered. She shivered every time; she couldn’t help it. She always thought she’d gotten used to it and was always wrong. A cold claw touched her ankle again. How strange that that was a comfort already. She’d only known Bahamut, what, two days? It felt like a week or more. How long did it take to be comforted by the mere touch of a friend?

  Ready to move again, she strode down an angular corridor made by branching shards. A pale violet glow illuminated the space above; black stripes of shadow concealed her intermittently as she walked. She gripped the weapon she had received as a gift, thumbing the safety on and off in a steady rhythm.

  She wished Alan were here. Not any of her new friends; she didn’t want any of them to be in this place. But she wanted Alan Sheppard. She wanted someone to talk to, someone human who knew her and could understand her. She had been an ungrateful fool. Alan had protected her, loved her, provided for her, taught her, listened to her, played chess with her, tried to read the same books as her…

  She wiped a tear away, then swore softly as some of the sticky blue blood got into her eye. It burned, catalyzing tears of a less emotional nature. This was good; she didn’t want to get distracted by homesickness. But she’d definitely have some things to say to Alan when next she saw him. If she saw him. She had seen him die in some kind of vision in the Museum, but now she thought that if either of them was going to die in the immediate future, it would almost certainly be her. She found that this did not particularly alarm her. If any of the six of them had to be on this Metal Moon, it definitely needed to be her. She had a job here, a purpose. This was a new sensation, or at least one she had never felt so strongly, and every time she considered the fact that she had apparently been entrusted with a vital duty, she experienced a powerful and alarming surge of resolve. Everything else faded back, all the doubts and anxieties. The fear remained, it always remained, but it ceased mattering.

  She had only vague notions of all of this. The thoughts swirled about in her head, mixing into a null grey murk. She had never been good at abstract thinking. She couldn’t keep her thoughts separate when they had no physical objects to anchor to, and when she had too many thoughts they all canceled out, leaving a blank void of stupidity. Heidi imagined Kaitlyn’s mind as a big white room, bright and clean, where thoughts flitted about like glowing butterflies, all of them precise and strong and sure. Whereas Heidi’s own mind was the water that remained in a cup after using it to rinse off a lot of paintbrushes. She just needed time to slow down and think about everything. But she had no time.

  The rue dropped on her silently from somewhere above. She hadn’t seen it because of the way the gravitational fields angled its trajectory. The rue were masters of such predictive locomotion. In the flurry of action which followed, she had no thoughts, but afterward she added “watch above and behind” to her rapidly expanding mental list of lessons she had learned the hard way and did not intend to have to learn again.

  She focused on defense; minimizing injuries to herself was her top priority in this engagement–another hard-learned lesson. This mostly meant flinging herself about with improvised gravitational fields while being careful not to fling herself into a patch of razor-sharp spikes. (One of the first lessons, that one.) She was still not very good at this, but she was just barely good enough to mostly avoid getting hit, and to occasionally stabilize and take a shot at the black shape of the rue with the bizarre rifle-like firearm that Balazar had given to her. This weapon fired what looked like glowing violet chunks of the lorn spikes, which shattered upon impact and apparently wounded the rue.

  She at last landed a hit. The violet crystal shattered in a puff of sparking light. The rue cried out, its awful sound somehow bearing meaning with it: …why?...

  Her opponent shifted, changed. A flurry of long spidery legs shuttered across its aspect. It folded into a serpentine form, and then skeletal bat-like wings extended, then the wings kept extending until they collapsed back into the dark shape, and then it all ballooned into the outline of a hulking ape-like beast. As usual, only the monster’s outline was visible. But she had never seen one change this drastically, this fast, and it caught her off-guard when it leapt at her.

  She reached out her left hand as though commanding it to stop. A circular compass shape of golden light materialized, split apart into three spinning circles delineating a sphere, and then pointed away from her, all in a second. She put as much force as she could behind it–possibly more than five or six Gs, though she as yet had found no way of measuring this. The ape-like black shape slowed in mid-jump, then plummeted back to the spikes below. It changed again as it fell, and a single thin line shot away from the dark mass toward Heidi. Without enough time to move herself, she could only twist awkwardly, counting herself lucky that she had seen the attack coming at all in the darkness and shadows. The extending black spine tore at her bulky coat and yanked her through the air. She tried to shoot it, but the thinness of the line and her own movement made this nearly impossible.

  She growled and seized the black spine with her free hand. This was, in fact, the first time she had touched a rue for longer than it took to get sliced up, and it burned in her grip like freezing fire.

  Then Baha was there. He coiled around the thin projection, and with a heaving muscular contraction broke the blackness. It shattered like glass, lacerating Heidi’s hand. Heidi decided to flee. She would meet up with the guards ahead as planned, but she’d take a roundabout way.

  This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  The compasses appeared, adjusting gravity, and she fell away up into the shadowy heights. She preferred walking, as it was less dangerous. Flying was perilous because it attracted attention, and her level of control was still sketchy. She had already once fallen directly onto a big lorn shard. It had been at an angle, breaking her momentum rather than her bones. It had jarred her so hard that she suspected she had cracked a tooth. But falling was faster. And exhilarating. It was a bit like surfing.

  She had to concentrate very hard to keep herself from falling too quickly, to stabilize herself, to orient herself directionally with the larger landmark shards, to watch the shifting shadows where she fell for unseen razor-sharp spikes jutting out from nearby clusters. Would she eventually get used to all this? Maybe it would suddenly click one day, like surfing.

  She had yet to land gracefully, and this time was no different, but she avoided landing hard enough to bruise herself.

  “The Warden arrives,” someone nearby observed in a profound, guttural voice that sounded half-drowned. This would be the one whose name she could neither pronounce nor recall. It was a hulking creature like a bluish reptilian gorilla with three arms, and it had tried to kill her when Balazar had first brought her to the prison. It had had four arms when it made the attempt.

  “The Darkworlders are near,” it informed her.

  Bahamut emerged from the shadows at Heidi’s feet. The blue creature did not react to the appearance of that which had taken its arm. Heidi had noticed this about the ape-like beast: it seemed devoid of any fear, as if it had a personality forged of raw defiance. She found herself oddly inspired by its attitude. Naturally, a creature like this would be in charge of doing the impossible.

  She only nodded in response. It turned and lumbered away, moving like one of the shifting shadows among a dense forest of softly glowing lorn shards. They glimmered in purple and blue and red and black, but none glowed brightly enough to do more than create a vague shimmer in the air.

  Heidi followed the beast, aware that she moved slowly and awkwardly by comparison. She tried to remember its name. If she recalled correctly, which was not at all certain due to her exhaustion at the time, it had been more of a sound effect than a word. Something like…vklashkga? Chigoshk? She didn’t want to make a fool of herself by getting it wrong, but this seemed unlikely to be a problem. She had said almost nothing to anyone except Balazar, who among them all was easiest to talk to, and it seemed that no one expected her to. She was “the Warden,” after all. The Warden of Prison Orpheus. She recognized the name Orpheus, but could not recall from where. Was it a computer program? She thought about asking in the group chat, but…she hated being worried about, and she could tell they were all worrying about her. She never should have said anything about fighting.

  Distracted by these thoughts, she nearly walked into chtkasghk-or-whatever, hidden silent and still among the shadows beneath a dense tree-like growth. Several other guards had gathered as well. Had they been there already, or had they come with her, unnoticed? Heidi shook her head at her own obliviousness. She needed to be alert at all times out here. No more daydreaming. Even with Baha around, she needed to watch herself.

  She heard voices beyond, the voices from which she and her guards concealed themselves.

  “Shouldn’t be here,” said one, nervous. Heidi chanced a look over a ledge made of a deep blue shard, its edge a sharp angle. A black vessel parked on the lorn, some windows illuminated from within, the size of a military transport helicopter. This comparison was no coincidence; she spotted weapons mounted on the underside and a half dozen obviously militant persons milling about beneath an open loading ramp. Most of them, like her companions, were not noticeably human. Only a couple might have been, but Heidi could not be sure. They wore helmets, or possibly masks, and their bodies were covered in armor, gear, weapons, all in a remarkable variety.

  “Don’t think about it,” advised a hulking Darkworlder to the nervous one, speaking in a thin, slight voice that seemed mismatched with his physique. “Gotta be here.”

  She hoped that the first speaker would ask why and then receive a detailed and comprehensive answer. Heidi herself was not clear on why these people were here and why she had to stop them. It had something to do with them being a threat. To her crew, to her prison, or to the moon? She didn’t know, nor did she have much incentive to get personally involved, when she thought about it.

  But someone needed her. Someone or something had prepared a place for her, here on this moon. Someone had entrusted her with a job. And she had to do something . So, even if she didn’t understand, and even if those dark armored figures betrayed her hopes and did not monologue about their purpose in this place, it didn’t matter. She had a job to do.

  She watched them for a while, aware that she was in utter shadow and ought to be invisible to them. This would not last forever, so she kept an eye on the slow shifting of the lights and angles around her. But her surveillance proved fruitless. They didn’t speak much, and when they did it was mostly to complain about the noise, or the strange gravitational tides, or the sound of a distant rue when it cried once. That noise made them all stand still, and Heidi swore she saw at least two of them shiver. She felt an inkling of kinship for them then.

  She realized that her guards were waiting for her orders; waiting for her to make a move, to attack. She also knew at once that she wanted to give no such order. Her duties aside, was ambushing these individuals seriously the only way? Maybe these Darkworlders could be reasoned with, or at least spoken to before any killing took place. She wanted to know more about this “Dark World” anyway. Her own world was dark enough. Shouldn’t she be killing the rue instead? So far, they seemed a much greater threat. The thought reminded her of her hand, which had been aching, alternately hot and cold, ever since she had grasped the rue.

  Her indecision lasted long enough for the Darkworlders to discover their presence, and then the choice was taken from her.