Chapter 15

  Heidi

  A hexagonal metal slate floated in the dark, with a door in the middle and a wounded girl sitting in front of the door. It drifted in meandering orbit around the gleaming machine, in tandem with five other distant, doorless platforms. Its door side faced the machine no matter how it circled, but Heidi never fell off. This had confused her at first.

  Nowhere to go, that was the problem. Bahamut had vanished upon entry, leaving Heidi alone with the door. The door opened onto nothing.

  Heidi didn’t mind. Although she did not know where she was, or which way was up, or what that spinning, shining, vaguely sinister monstrosity above her was for, she felt relaxed and calm. She leaned back against the cool metal door. The bleeding had stopped. She was not particularly hungry or thirsty. She could rest here for a while.

  Sometimes she looked up at the thing above her. Spinning circles, rotating gears and mechanisms, all in silver, gold, steel-grey. Something fierce shone at its core, but she could never quite see what it was. She couldn’t look at this brilliance for very long. It warped the vision; it made her nauseous. It was watching her.

  Sometimes she gazed dead ahead at the strange distant walls enclosing her in with the machine. Long angled shapes formed these walls, some of them small, most of them huge. Darkly colored, red and purple and blue, shadowed with their distance from the bright machine, chaotically latticed. Dark gaps showed here and there. Heidi thought they might be responsible for that unpleasant noise she heard almost incessantly, a noise like huge chimes being rung in the most god-awful clamor possible. She could ignore the noise if she tried hard enough. She could ignore how the walls seemed to rattle and shift.

  Sometimes she looked at the small white hexagon she’d stepped on when she first came through. It was split six ways and had all their symbols on it. Hers, apparently, was the compass-looking one, possibly a crosshair. Each little symbol glowed with color. Hers glowed black.

  Sometimes she closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the cool metal of the door. She felt the faint cool breeze, smelled hot metal, oil, burnt plastic like circuit boards frying, listened to the bizarre ambient disharmony of the bell-like sounds.

  Time felt insignificant. Heidi did not know how long she had sat there before Bahamut returned. He came when her eyes were closed, and he came silently, but somehow she sensed his presence. A clawed hand tapped her right shoulder, checking to make sure she was all right. She looked at him, unafraid, though his sharp-toothed reptilian face filled her vision. He crawled to the edge of the metal platform and gestured beyond as if urging her to leave.

  She looked around. Still nothing. Still no one. Still nowhere to go. “What?” she asked.

  Baha slithered back to her and reached out to tap the white hexagon she’d found on the metal floor. The black claw on his finger made a metal-on-stone sound against it. He turned and reared up on his four back legs while spreading his other four at the scene in front of her.

  Heidi turned the hexagon in her hands. Was she supposed to do something with it?

  Bahamut watched her puzzle over this for a moment. Then, with the speed of a striking snake, he gently curled his length around her. He carried her with irresistible strength, though she did not resist, to the edge of the platform. Without hesitation, he launched them both right off the edge. Heidi clutched at the muscular coal-black mass of Bahamut in alarm. A jolt of pain through the wound in her side made her suck in a sharp breath through her teeth.

  But they did not fall. They drifted outward, steadily, lazily, away from the compass-engraved platform, away from the awful machine. Heidi twisted helplessly, turning. Bahamut clung to one of her legs, and his eyeless viper’s head gazed up at her expectantly.

  “Okay…” They weren’t falling. Was she in outer space? But she could breathe. What was happening?

  She decided not to worry about it. For now, for the moment, she was okay. She drifted, and the sensation was pleasant. No gravity tugged at her, weighing her down. It was a little like swimming, like snorkeling, drifting down in the water, feeling the tug of the tides. Relaxing. Calm. Although, her head was starting to feel a little stuffy.

  A claw tugged at her shorts, shaking her out of her reverie. Baha was dimly visible in the sickly golden light of the machine. He tapped his head with two claws, pointed at her with two more, and gestured out, away from the bright machine with yet another pair. Heidi hesitantly tapped her head in response. Baha nodded. She held up the small hexagonal plate, and he nodded again.

  “I wish you could talk,” she said. Baha nodded again.

  After a few minutes of spinning slowly in the air, Heidi decided to ask for help. No shame in that. Kaitlyn, apparently, knew a lot of things, and was not dead if those images she had seen with Eric could be trusted. She would ask Kate.

  But Kaitlyn did not respond, nor Elizabeth. Reluctantly, she tried Eric. She waited several minutes, but received no reply from him either. She began to worry. How long had she been here? Had something happened? Was everyone else in a place like this, stuck and alone? Were all her signals being blocked?

  Jimothy didn’t have his phone on him. Disappointing. That left Isaac. Or maybe she should try that Banana Quest? No, she didn’t want everyone reading that she was helpless and stuck. She especially didn’t want Isaac reading that, but…

  She hesitated for another minute before reluctantly deciding that it couldn’t be so bad. She opened CHIME and texted Isaac.

  HS: Hello?

  IM: Woah, hey there

  IM: Hey you program computers right?

  HS: Yes.

  IM: Might need some help over here

  IM: maybe

  HS: Why?

  IM: Actually this is like super-advanced technology

  IM: So nevermind, you probably wouldn’t be able to help

  IM: What I mean is, it’s like Science Fiction computers, not REAL computers

  IM: So I’m probably more qualified than you

  HS: Why are you programming a computer?

  IM: So that it can acquire sentience and dramatically betray me later on

  HS: Why would you do that?

  IM: ^[joke]^

  IM: What’s your theme?

  IM: And moon?

  IM: And did you ever get an angel?

  IM: Or a sense of humor?

  HS: I need advice. Do you know what I should be doing?

  IM: Okay!

  IM: So you came in at your door?

  HS: Yes.

  IM: And you were on your platform, and you got the coaster thingy

  IM: The little white hexagon

  HS: The what?

  HS: Yes.

  IM: So what’s your moon like? And your home base or whatever

  HS: I don’t see a moon.

  HS: Are we on a moon?

  IM: Forget that, but what is your place like?

  HS: You are frustrating me, Isaac. I don’t know what you mean.

  IM: Okay

  IM: You’ve been here for like two hours already. What have you been doing?

  HS: How do you know how long I’ve been here?

  HS: I was sitting on a platform orbiting a large machine.

  HS: And now I am floating in zero gravity.

  HS: Bahamut wants me to do something. But I don’t know what.

  IM: Woah! Bahamut like from D&D?

  HS: what

  HS: No.

  HS: He is my angel.

  IM: Oh cool! What type of animal is he?

  HS: He is some kind of large black lizard with eight legs.

  IM: Wait your angel’s black?

  IM: I thought they were supposed to be white

  IM: I bet that’s significant

  IM: Let me know if you feel like you’re starting to turn into a villain or something

  HS: Isaac, I have been shot.

  IM: What, like just now? Are you okay?

  HS: I will be fine. My point is that I am not in the mood for jokes. I am amazed that you are.

  IM: You mean because I was shot too? Hey, it wasn’t so bad! I guess you heard about me dying but actually being okay somehow.

  HS: And Kaitlyn?

  IM: Oh, she’s fine

  IM: Still there?

  HS: Thank god

  IM: Way ahead of you haha

  IM: Back to your difficulties, you should probably just figure out what your angel wants you to do?

  IM: *shrugs*

  IM: Where are you?

  HS: I am nowhere.

  HS: He wants me to go somewhere.

  HS: But I cannot move in zero gravity.

  IM: Maybe you CAN move in zero gravity

  HS: How?

  IM: What’s your theme?

  HS: My what?

  IM: haha wow it probably sucks not knowing any of this at the beginning

  HS: Just continue.

  IM: I mean Kate explained it all to me at first

  HS: I don’t care.

  IM: Your theme is like your powers or whatever

  HS: Powers.

  IM: Mine is space!

  IM: (I don’t know what that means yet)

  HS: I don’t know what mine is.

  HS: If I have it.

  IM: Hmm

  IM: The compass must be a clue!

  IM: Navigational powers, perhaps?

  IM: That sounds pretty lame though

  IM: no offense, if that, like, turns out to be what your domain actually is

  IM: You know, this might all be in my databases somewhere

  HS: If I had powers, how would I use them?

  HS: Also do you know why the others aren’t responding?

  IM: Busy, maybe? Or probably asleep, actually

  IM: I was thinking of heading to bed soon

  HS: Where are you?

  IM: I have a space station!

  IM: We each have like a special place

  IM: And a moon, apparently, although my moon is MIA at the moment

  IM: Wait!

  IM: Maybe I can see your moon!

  ?

  IM: What’s it like?

  HS: All I can see is these huge metal spikes

  HS: They are everywhere.

  IM: Okay hang on

  IM: As for the powers thing, I don’t know

  IM: Maybe try, like, concentrating

  HS: On WHAT?

  IM: Like a compass or something?

  IM: Magnetism?

  IM: !!!

  IM: You said you’re surrounded by metal!

  IM: I bet it’s magnets!

  IM: You’re gonna be Magneto!

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  IM: haha!

  HS: I will see what I can do.

  IM: Okay

  IM: I’m having a hard time with all these telescopes but I’ll keep trying to see if I can find your moon

  HS: One more thing.

  HS: Do you know of anything named Anzu?

  IM: Nope

  HS: Okay.

  HS: Goodbye.

  IM: See ya!

  As she had expected, not terribly helpful. But at least he’d had an idea. Magnetism? She looked down at Baha, still wrapped around her leg. “Is it magnetism?” she asked. He shook his head.

  Heidi sighed. Feeling silly, but not knowing what else to do, she closed her eyes and concentrated. She shut out the clamor of the bells, the sensation of falling, and the light of the bright machine. She visualized a compass, just like the one on the platform.

  Bahamut tightened around her leg with such irresistible force that she thought if he wasn’t careful he could snap her bones like a hydraulic press. She opened her eyes with a start just in time to see a glowing white circle wink out of existence in the air before her.

  Baha squirmed in excitement and pointed at the place where the shape had been. He opened and closed his mouth a few times in a way that made Heidi smile. She had watched cute geckos do that all the time back on her island.

  She tried to hold an image of the compass in her mind. It formed in the air: a loop of white light with six arrows within. She reached out to touch it; it moved just out of reach of her hand. The loop divided into a perpendicular circle, and then again. The result was the skeleton of a sphere: three circles on three planes. They shifted, rotated, forming a hollow ball with a cluster of outward-aiming arrows at the center.

  She twisted to look at the bright machine with all of its spinning wheels and rotating parts. The object she had made resembled that. It looked like a…what were those called? Artillery spheres? No. Armament spheres?

  The thing she had created was the size of a beach ball, and it looked like a holographic projection of light. It turned and moved on its own, but she could reach out her hand and shift it around in the air, repositioning it.

  Heidi Sheppard hated all of this. It was too abstract, too bizarre. It was stupid. She had played enough video games to know that if this was something like that, it had been poorly designed. She had no instructions, no guidance, no direction.

  No direction. That’s what the sphere needed, right? It was supposed to point at something, like a compass.

  With a sigh, she reached out and visualized the forest of arrows within the sphere aiming in a unified direction, away from the sinister machine.

  With a startling and gut-wrenching sensation, she fell–away from the bright machine, away from the moving platforms, toward the forest of giant metal spikes. She tumbled through the air, and Baha fell with her, clinging to her leg, trying mutely to communicate.

  Heidi closed her eyes and focused. She visualized a three-dimensional compass. It pointed in one direction. She swiveled it around. At once she experienced the disorienting lurch of deceleration, felt a downward pull from the other direction. It was the sensation of hitting an aerial when surfing–reaching the apex of the jump and hanging for a fraction of a second before the fall.

  She released it, all of it, and opened her eyes to see the wall of spikes. She had retained a sliver of momentum toward this wall, but it was bigger and farther than she had thought. “Okay,” she said. “Okay.” She looked down at Bahamut. “Gravity, right?” She felt him move, but at this point they were far enough from the light that his dark shape faded away against the darkness of the background.

  They drifted along at what Heidi judged to be a walking pace. Still she rotated helplessly in the air with no way to stabilize herself. She tried to watch the direction they were going. She thought it altogether too possible that one of those wicked metal spikes could skewer her as she approached.

  She was in a much larger space than she had at first imagined. The huge bright machine shrunk behind her to a distant ghastly star. She also realized, as they drifted past the first enormous metal spike (shiny and angular and blue, like a blackened skyscraper from Chicago), that they were traveling much faster than a normal walking pace. She made another attempt to slow them by creating a ball made of circles/compasses and briefly pointing the arrows away. It jerked them roughly to an almost complete stop.

  At last they drifted into the forest of spikes. These ranged from dull to shiny, and in color from blood red to deep blue to a black almost as dark as Bahamut. Some of them clustered like thorns or spiky crystals, while others stretched on indefinitely. She approached an enormous flat plane that may have been a wall of some kind, or simply another spike too huge to be perceived as one.

  It began to pull them in as they neared it. Heidi had felt other pulls, like weak tidal forces, but this one washed them irresistibly. It was like being rolled by a wave underwater. They fell toward this deep purple surface, picking up speed as they went. Heidi, near the end of the fall, created another compass to awkwardly check their descent.

  They hit the surface easily. Heidi rolled as she landed, breaking open the wound in her side. She cursed and re-secured the makeshift tourniquet. The surface was a dark purple, like burnt metal poorly welded. It was cool to the touch and completely solid. Darkness and shadows stretched everywhere down here. The light from the bright machine, which as far as she knew remained the only source of light in the area, only arrived in sporadic jagged streams. The patches of light that did make it to the surface shifted and changed. This was the most obvious indication that everything here, all of the enormous spikes looming around her, were moving.

  The noise was louder. The awful chaotic clamor like massive bells resonated erratically through the air. Every once in a while, a slight vibration ran through the solid metal beneath her feet. These massive metallic objects colliding must have been the source of the clamor. Like wind chimes. Really huge, really terrible wind chimes.

  Metal spikes grew erratically from the surface on which she stood, and more spikes grew on those. It almost seemed natural, like a fractal pattern found in nature, and the randomness of it supported this idea.

  Heidi felt light here, as though she could jump several times her height. The tether of gravity was flimsy. What would surfing be like in this gravity?

  Bahamut, when they landed, indicated that she should follow him by tugging on her cargo shorts. She tried to follow, but it became increasingly difficult as he led her deeper into the metal forest, away from the light. Bahamut was invisible in the shadows, and soon they were almost entirely in darkness. Heidi learned caution when she blundered into the sharp edge of a random spike in the gloom, cutting a thin gash across her right shoulder and collarbone. It was not deep, but it stung. And if she had been walking a bit further to the left, it might have sliced her neck.

  After this, she frequently felt the cold hard claws of Bahamut at her knees or shoulders, stopping her, turning her, guiding her. Soon she crept into nearly total darkness, surrounded by razor-edged spikes. For the first time since arriving, Heidi became afraid. She could see nothing, and she didn’t dare move without the guidance of the strange creature she still knew nothing about. The fear sprang from the unknown. Where was she? She didn’t know. Where was she going? Didn’t know. Was anything else here in the darkness with her? Didn’t know. Was Alan okay? Leah? Didn’t know. Was she one step away from skewering herself on a razor-sharp spike? Didn’t know.

  At one point, ten seconds passed without a touch from Bahamut. Then twenty. At last Heidi heard a soft slither, then felt a light pressure at the top of her head. It guided her down and forward inch-by-inch. A scaly hand took hers and moved it in a rough circle in front of her. She crouched and shuffled through that circle, several times brushing against the razor edges. She crawled in a cramped, crouched position, gritting her teeth against the pain in her side, for twenty or thirty feet before the invisible claws straightened her up again and, taking her by the hand, led her forward in utter darkness. It reminded Heidi of a trust exercise, which she had never performed with anyone but had read about online. Surely this put all trust exercises to shame. What if Bahamut, making a simple miscalculation, led her into a sharp spike that pierced her already wounded side, or stabbed her right in the eye? It was all too possible that Baha, regardless of his intentions, might make such a blunder, and Heidi walked every step in fear of a sharp pain. And what if she tripped and fell? She shuffled her sandaled feet, checking every step before committing.

  The gravitational tides made it worse. It was hard enough to maintain balance and move with precision in unusually light gravity; it was much more difficult when at random times she felt strangely pulled in random directions. A gash across her left knee taught her to keep a wide stance. Low and steady, like self-defense practice with Alan.

  She did not trip, and neither was she skewered on a metal spike, although on a couple occasions Baha halted her movement with a frightful suddenness which made her think it had been close. After ten minutes, or ten hours, she saw light ahead. She at first dismissed it as her imagination, which had been populating the utter darkness with phantom images for some time. But the light ahead remained steady, a faint pinkish glow.

  Soon it grew strong enough that she could discern her surroundings. The black shadow of Bahamut led her out of a jungle of thorns and into a more open space. Small clusters of spikes glowed softly around her. The surface on which she stood, flat and hard, cut off near the glowing spikes. In the vast abyss beyond, more of the pinkish lights glinted in the distance, ranging in shade from magenta to lavender, adorning slowly moving objects of incredible size.

  Gravity altered as she walked to the sharp edge. It pulled her more in a backwards direction. She understood. She could cross the edge, and then “down” would be in a different direction. She had played a game with physics like that.

  The glowing spikes, when she approached, were semi-translucent, almost crystalline. They looked like thorns. Also, she saw on closer inspection that they grew out of two desiccated corpses. More specifically, out of the bones. Heidi reached down to investigate, but Bahamut was there in a flash, stopping her hand from touching the glowing thorns, the corpses. She could just make out the emphatic shake of his head, which gleamed with an oily shine of reflected pink lights.

  Heidi gazed out at the slowly churning galaxy of lights in the empty vastness before her. Some brighter lights shone, presumably from small clusters of crystals growing out of bodies, and these illuminated large swaths of the ludicrously huge metal objects, cutting them into stark shadows. Continual dissonant gong-like sounds rang out in the distant darkness.

  Someone else, thought Heidi–Kaitlyn, perhaps, or Liz–would find this view beautiful, or at least interesting. Heidi just wanted a place that made sense. She was hungry, she was thirsty, and felt the building need to use a bathroom. She barked a harsh laugh when she looked down at herself. It looked like she had come out the losing end of a knife fight. Streams of blood stained her clothing, and her tattered tank top hung by only one strap. None of the injuries were serious in themselves, and all had stopped bleeding, but they throbbed with dull pain like large paper cuts. She wondered if the others were having troubles like this. The thought of Kaitlyn or Jimothy being in this situation somehow made her feel sick and angry.

  She began to remove her tattered tank top, then hesitated for the sake of decency. She wasn’t worried about Baha seeing her, but others, if indeed they were here…then she laughed at herself. Such fears, she decided, were childish. She guessed that this was not a place where being shirtless was a big deal.

  She removed the shredded shirt, took the longest, least bloody strip, and fastened it as a headband around her forehead. She liked having a headband; she was used to the feeling. This left her in only her sports bra (which, she hated to admit, was hardly necessary). But that was fine; she went around the island like this all the time.

  She turned for a last look at the thicket she and Baha had squeezed through, and only then did she realize that she’d had her phone the whole time. Who knew how much battery it had left, but it could at least have provided some light. Idiot. She nodded in confirmation. She was an idiot. At least she’d saved battery.

  Bahamut stood up on his back two legs, which brought him up to eye level with Heidi. He gestured out at something in the distance. Heidi saw nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing she hadn’t seen here already, apart from the brighter lights of unknown origin. “The lights?” she asked. He nodded. Then he wrapped himself around her leg.

  Heidi took a deep breath and visualized the sphere, the intersecting circles. It appeared in the air before her, beach ball sized. She reached out with one hand and very slightly gestured up, toward the lights. Gravity slackened. She gestured again, more strongly, and this nearly negated the pull of the metal below. Just a bit more and the two of them drifted away into the air.

  They had to navigate around spikes like skyscrapers that floated into their path. They landed on a particularly large one, walked around it to the other side, and took off again. She adjusted course to avoid a drifting cluster of thorny shards. She and Bahamut glided silently, and with increasing finesse, through darkness and purple stars and sharp shapes drifting in the void. When she was far out into the open, Heidi saw that there was no end to the scale of the metal structures. The one she and Bahamut had walked upon before was but a parasite clinging to one that took up nearly a third of her entire field of vision.

  It took a half hour to traverse the great gap, even though in the middle she had accelerated to a fair speed, perhaps forty or fifty kilometers per hour. When at last they touched awkwardly down in a well-lit area, she hoped fervently that Bahamut knew where it was leading her, and that their destination was close. She wanted rest. The creation and management of those gravity-altering sphere things took a lot out of her.

  Almost as soon as she landed, she heard something else besides the omnipresent noise of disastrous bells: a shuffling, a clinking. Something nearby. She retrieved the gun from the left pocket of her cargo shorts and held it at the ready. She wasn’t too concerned with Bahamut present, but in this place…

  A shadow moved in the darkness behind a row of spikes, barely visible. “Hello?” said Heidi, gun partly raised. How many shots left? She had no idea. This wasn’t her gun, it was Shade’s gun. She had fired it once at Black, right? And several times in Chicago…but she couldn’t remember, and she didn’t want to remove the magazine and check now. She should have checked earlier. Idiot. Alan wouldn’t have made that mistake.

  Something stalked out from among the spikes with startling suddenness. Heidi had just enough time to raise the gun and get off a single shot before something she could hardly see slammed into her. Gravity was relatively strong here but still weaker than Earth; she was flung aside by the force of the blow, collided forcefully with a painful edge, and fell down toward a cluster of sharp metal shards that promised to lacerate whatever part of her body touched them.

  She desperately created a sphere and gestured “up.” Up became down, and she fell into the dark void. With a series of short, unimaginative curses, she made a desperate effort to steady herself. A rasping cry of pain sounded from the lit area, and she recognized its source as Bahamut. This infuriated her. The number of things in her entire life that had hugged her could be counted on one hand.

  But she could hardly steady herself. She had nothing to hold on to, nothing to stabilize with. Unless…

  She created a small sphere directly in front of her and tried to seize it as she spun through the air. It passed right through her hand. She cursed again.

  Bahamut made another noise, a fierce hissing growl, something that sounded like anger, or like a snake hissing in warning. Something resounded in answer: a low moaning which somehow chilled her like ice sliding down her spine. Heidi thought she heard something in there–a word, or an idea, or a sensation: …alone…

  Then, a high-pitched yelp from Bahamut.

  Heidi snarled in impotent frustration. She tried something desperate, the only thing that came to mind: she visualized the sphere inside of herself, all the arrows pointing inward toward the central point.

  A peculiar pressure tingled all over her body. Gravity pulled her feet up, her head down, her arms in. The momentum of her spin slowed. She cast her gaze about to locate Bahamut, saw two dark shapes: one small and serpentine, one large and insectile. She threw herself toward them, braking at the last second to tumble awkwardly to the ground, where she sliced herself on wayward shards.

  She came up in a sitting position and blindly pumped four rounds into the larger dark shape. It flinched back, whether from the noise or from injury she didn’t know. She struggled to her feet and checked Bahamut. He seemed fine, not that she thought she’d be able to tell if he wasn’t.

  The creature she faced stood in the light, but like Bahamut this did not help in distinguishing its features. Only the outlines of thin leg-like appendages, claws or blades extending and flexing, wings of some kind shifting behind, were half-visible against the shadowy spikes. It changed as she watched. It shrieked out again in a horrible wail.

  …lonely…

  It charged. Twice more her gun boomed, echoing in the vast spaces beyond. Then the shadow was on her, pinning her to the cold floor. She saw or felt Bahamut intervene, but in the black against black she couldn’t see what was happening.

  They should run. She didn’t know if they could outrun this thing, but she was already hurt, and she didn’t want Bahamut getting hurt, either. She tried pushing up against the force pinning her down, but it was like pushing against a mountain of slick, cold tar. The gun apparently did nothing and must have had only a few rounds left, anyway. She had a knife, but this thing was huge and she did not know what it was. That left her with one tool.

  She created a compass in front of her eyes and swiveled it to point up. They tumbled into the sky, the cold shadow grappling her with sharp, frigid angles. She erased the arrows of the compass, swung her legs up, and manage to launch herself off of the black creature, back to the ground. She saw, from the corner of her eye, Bahamut following her lead. They struck the ground together and rebounded gently back into the air. The dark creature still squirmed in the air overhead, drifting away from them. Could it fly? Could it navigate the weightless void? She didn’t want to stick around and find out.

  She released the compass and fell a few inches to the ground. She’d forgotten her injury; the jarring landing sent a lance of agony through her side. She saw as she rose that she had new slices in her skin. So many cuts. Such a sharp place. She sensed musical jokes in there somewhere, but did not even try to think of any. She was, after all, an idiot, and now a very tired one, and she was now even less in the mood for jokes than when she had texted Isaac. Her hands were sticky with blood, probably her own, although she wasn’t sure.

  She resecured the belt-tourniquet and proceeded with Baha. A bruise on her left hip and a series of lacerations on the other foot made her limp. Not a problem. She could walk it out.

  The landscape ahead was more of the same: the dark metal spikes everywhere. But ahead lay something different. It looked like an actual building, gray and foreboding, somehow nestled in among a cluster of large spikes. The shortest path there took them along several of the larger spikes, although flight by gravity-manipulation was also an option. It had better be worth it. She wanted a safe place to eat and drink. And she needed to pee. She didn’t want to do it out here in this wasteland of shadows and metal. But if she had to, she would.

  Not long after evading their attacker, Baha suddenly rose up in front of her. Heidi, her reaction time only marginally slower, crouched in a ready position with the Glock (three rounds remaining).

  A person emerged from the darkness. It was shorter than her, thick, humanoid, wearing a weathered greenish uniform that looked vaguely police or military. Its entire head was loosely but thoroughly wrapped in blue and purple bandages. Tufts of white hair stuck out wildly in the back, and one half of a moustache and pieces of a wiry beard protruded from the front. Of its face Heidi could only make out a single dark opening where an eye should be. Its hands were bandaged like its face, and each hand had three fingers in total, fat and stubby. Of particular note, it held a long, dark spear upright in its right hand.

  This looked like the kind of thing she could kill with bullets if she had to, which was a comforting thought.

  It did not lower the spear at them; if it had, Baha might have charged. The creature backed off a few paces, but Heidi did not relax her guard. “Who…are you?” it asked in a rasping whisper that sounded unhealthy.

  She didn’t know how to respond. Name? Should she give her real name?

  “You wouldn’t be…” the creature began, but had to stop for a series of wheezing coughs. Bandages fluttered as its small frame shook. It hunched over for the coughing fit, but it straightened up again when it was finished, and she thought she saw the glint of an eye peering out from the dark hole in the bandages of its face. “The hero?”

  Heidi looked to Baha for guidance, but he had his focus trained entirely on the bandaged figure. Which was guidance enough, in its own way. “Hero?” she asked.

  “The hero of Orpheus…” A few more wince-worthy coughs. “The Metal Moon.”

  Metal Moon? Accurate. Didn’t Isaac say she had a moon? And a home of some kind. And powers. And a special door. She probably was this hero, although she knew nothing about it. Somehow, this pissed her off. Where was her choice in this? Someone, somewhere, must have decided that she was going to be this hero, and it sure as hell hadn’t been her.

  Instead of answering, she said, “Who are you?”

  The creature swayed side to side as though rocked by a breeze. “I am…Balazar. A…wanderer here. An…outcast. All…are outcasts here.” He turned his gaze to Bahamut. “A…rue guards you. Does it…share your pain?”

  “Pain?” she said. It continued to make no threatening moves, but something about it unnerved Heidi.

  “All…are lonely here. We…attract the lorn.”

  “Lorn?” She regretted saying this at once. She sounded like an idiot, just repeating things this guy was saying. But on the other hand, she needed information. But she wouldn’t do that again. If she was some kind of hero, she could at least try to sound intelligent.

  The wrapped figure reached out a hand to one side. Baha and Heidi tensed, but he merely patted a nearby reddish spike rising from the floor. “It…gathers. It…grows. The lorn…and the forlorn.” A horrible choking sound followed this. Heidi almost took a step forward out of concern to ask if the person was okay before she realized that it was some kind of laughter.

  “Let us go…” it said as it turned, “to the prison.”

  “Prison?” Damn it!

  In response, the thing–Balazar–said, “All…are prisoners here.” Then it laughed again, in such a way that Heidi half expected it to drop dead from a collapsed lung at any moment.

  Heidi and Baha followed the creature, but kept a safe distance. It led them all the way to the far point of the shard they walked on and then removed a small golden sphere from a pocket. It looked like the spheres Heidi could make. It looked like the big bright machine.

  “What is that?” she asked. Good, a longer-than-one-word question. Progress.

  The blue and purple bandages shifted as it turned to examine her. “PGS,” it replied. “Personal…gravitational singularity. ARKO…tech. You do not…possess one?”

  She held out a hand, causing Balazar to flinch back, and created a glowing compass in the air. It multiplied into a sphere similar to the one he held.

  The bandaged head nodded. “You…are the warden. Welcome…to Orpheus. Follow…me. And…be on guard. There may be…rue about.”

  He twisted the sphere a few times and rose to rise from the floor into the dark void above. His shadow, cast by the huge pink spike, left his feet and slid away. Baha attached himself to Heidi’s leg, and they followed.

  Balazar took them through the shifting chaos of the metal to a prison. Here Heidi found her home, and it was not anything like she expected. Hours later, she and Bahamut retired to a reinforced room, locked and sealed the door as much as they were able to, and slept.