Saving Thanehaven (32 page)

“What are you doing?” Noble asks mechanically,
setting Lulu down. When the unicorn protests, he ignores her.

He needs two free hands.

“What?” Rufus cups his own hand around one ear. “I can’t hear you!” he bawls. “The music’s too loud!”

“What are you doing?”

“Oh!” Rufus laughs. “Ever heard of data compression? Well, that’s what this is! Data compression!” He laughs again as Noble edges closer for a better look. The Kernel has been partially wedged into an old metal trunk that’s much too small for him. He looks battered. His nose is bloody. His shirt is torn. His expression is traumatized.

“That iron box was meant for me!” Rufus continues, pitching his voice high above the commotion. “So it’s what you might call poetic justice!”

The werewolf utters a bone-chilling growl.

“And Lonnie, here, just spent six months in something similar, so you can imagine how
he
feels.” Rufus claps the werewolf on its hairy shoulder, then nods at Noble’s leg. “You’re looking pretty beat-up yourself. What happened?”

Glancing down, Noble realizes that the skin of his ankle has been punctured several times. The bug’s claw must have injured him, though he’s been too preoccupied to notice.

“A giant bug tried to eat me,” he replies.

“Oh, yeah?” Rufus doesn’t sound very interested. His eyes swing back toward the Kernel. “Maybe it’s
the same one I helped spring from quarantine. What do you think, Lonnie? Lonnie would know.”

“You have to stop.” Noble speaks almost without thinking. He’s appalled at the way the metal man keeps pushing at the Kernel’s belly, trying to ram the blubbery mound into a very confined space. But Rufus doesn’t seem to hear, so Noble starts shouting. “Tell him to stop it! He has to stop!”

“Why?” asks Rufus, startled. He turns to peer at Noble again.

“Because this
all
has to stop! All this chaos!” Noble makes a sweeping gesture that encompasses the headless corpse, the discordant musicians, the frightened unicorn, the blundering gargoyle, the collapsed wall. Then, as a mystified Rufus gapes at him, Noble adds, “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

F
or a moment, Rufus stares at Noble, his eyes glimmering through a thick curtain of hair. As the silence stretches on between them, Noble wonders if his message has actually hit home.

But then a smile creeps across Rufus’s face. “That’s
my
line,” he drawls.

“You don’t have to go around dismantling everything, Rufus. What you’re doing here …” Noble shakes his head grimly. “It’s so wrong.”

“Oh, really? You’d rather see Yestin being eaten by monsters, would you?” Before Noble can answer, Rufus suddenly frowns. “Where
is
Yestin, by the way?”

Noble pretends not to hear. “It doesn’t have to be one thing or the other,” he insists, raising his voice over the din. “It doesn’t have to be tyranny or anarchy.
You can follow rules and
still
think for yourself.”

“Not in a computer,” Rufus retorts. “Computers don’t work that way.”

“But they could!”

“No.” It’s Rufus’s turn to shake his head. “Computers aren’t like the real world. You follow your programming or you’re out on your ear. There’s no room for compromise. There’s no middle path.”

“We could
build
a middle path, though! Right here! Together!” Noble suddenly loses patience. He can barely hear himself think. So he grabs Rufus and hustles him toward the nearest corridor, away from all the pandemonium. “I need to talk to you. Haven’t you seen what’s going on?”

“Well, sure,” Rufus replies. Though he doesn’t seem to like being touched, and quickly wrests his arm out of Noble’s grip, he raises no objection to having a private chat in a dark corner. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? Wow. And you missed the
World of Warcraft
breakout. Now
that
was awesome. You should have seen that.”

“Listen.” Noble cuts him off, looking him in the eye. “We should summon everyone to a great conclave. To discuss the future. If you can’t communicate with them all, ask the Kernel to do it. You should free him from that box because he’s important. We need him.”

Rufus snorts. “No, we don’t.”

“Yes, we
do
, Rufus! This isn’t a game! If we don’t fix this computer, it’s going to crash! And then we’ll
all
be killed!” Hearing Lulu squeak piteously from somewhere around his knees, Noble realizes that she must have followed him. “Don’t you even care?” he goes on. “About any of us?”

“If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be here,” Rufus rejoins. “If I didn’t care, you’d be dead already. Mikey’s such a lousy gamer, you would have been gutted or spiked or eaten by now, if I hadn’t shown up. And you’d have been replaced by another Noble. And then another one, after that.”

“I know.” It’s true. Noble fully understands that it was Rufus who rescued him from almost certain death in Morwood. “You saved me and I’m grateful. You’ve done a lot for me, Rufus. And for Yestin. And Lorellina. But you’ve gone too far.”

“Hey …” Rufus lifts his hands in protest. “Don’t look at me.
I’m
not the one crashing cars, or tearing up e-mails.”

Infuriated, Noble exclaims, “You’ve been telling people to abandon everything! Their homes, their friends, their duties—”

“I’ve been telling people to live a little. That’s all.”

“Live a little?”
Noble can’t believe his ears. “They’re cutting people’s heads off, Rufus!”

“Those aren’t people, they’re zombies. There’s nothing else you can do with a zombie.” As Noble opens his mouth to disagree, Rufus adds, “It’s just a bit of fun. Don’t you get that? Why are you such a killjoy, all of a sudden?”

Noble takes a deep breath. He feels like shaking Rufus, but he fights the urge. A cuff on the ear isn’t going to change Rufus’s mind—and besides, Noble has renounced that kind of thing. Having laid down his weapon, he’s not about to pick it up again.

Instead, he draws on all the lessons he’s learned from Rufus, and from Yestin, and from Lorellina, and from the Kernel. He lays both hands on Rufus’s shoulders, fixes him with a clear, compelling gaze, and says, “We need to work together. All of us. That doesn’t mean working in the old way, like slaves under the yoke of tyranny. We’d be working for each other. Not for Mikey. Not for the Kernel. For
us
. Do you understand?”

Rufus sighs. “It’s a nice idea.…”

“It is! Yes!” Noble’s grip tightens until he makes Rufus wince.

“But it won’t happen,” Rufus finishes. He begins to peel off Noble’s fingers, one by one, until he frees himself.

“Why not?” Noble demands. “Why wouldn’t it happen? You said yourself that everyone’s entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness! Why
can’t
we change things?”

“Because we’re
not programmers
, Noble!” For the first time, Rufus is showing signs of frustration. He scowls and says, “You’ve no idea what you’re up against. This isn’t a commune, it’s a computer. And you’re just a subprogram. You don’t have the muscle to build a new world.”

“I’m bigger than you are, and
you
made a difference,” Noble points out.

“Yeah, but …,” Rufus begins, before trailing off. For a moment, he looks almost disconcerted. Then he abruptly changes tack. “Okay, listen,” he plows on, his perplexed expression dissolving into something more upbeat. “You’ve got a ringside seat to an amazing show. It’ll be pretty spectacular. And when things start getting a little
too
intense … well, then, maybe I can get us both out.”

“Out?”

“Sure. There might be peripherals … Bluetooth connections … the Kernel will know. We’ll ask him.”

“You’d
run away
?” Noble splutters.

“I’d move on.” Rufus flashes a sly little grin. “I mean, I never said I was planning to settle here, did I?”

Squinting down at him, Noble feels as if he’s looking through a telescope. Rufus seems so far away, somehow, even though he’s standing right in front of Noble. “What about our friends?” Noble asks. “What about Brandi and Lord Harrowmage?”

“Brandi’s partying somewhere,” Rufus replies. “I haven’t seen the Mage. I think he’s in hiding—he looks like such a freak, now.”

“You really don’t care, do you? You said you did, but you don’t.”

“Because I didn’t sign up to be a nursemaid? Puh-
lease
,” Rufus scoffs. “Liberty comes at a price,
you know. It means you have to look after yourself.” He moves to sidestep Noble, who immediately grabs him again. “Ouch! Lemme go!”

“Listen—”

“Or what? You’ll break every bone in my body?”

“No!” Stung, Noble drops Rufus’s arm. “I don’t use force anymore.
You
should know that.”

“Must have slipped my mind,” Rufus mutters. His attention has already drifted back toward the iron box.

So Noble raises his voice. “You told me to put down my weapon, Rufus, and I did. You changed me. I used to think that made you clever and powerful. But if
I
can change and you can’t, then maybe I’m the clever one. Maybe I’m the powerful one. Not you.”

Noble stops to catch his breath. The challenge he just issued is like a slap in the face. Will Rufus rise to it? Rufus, however, is already moving away.

“Do you remember what you told me, a long time ago?” Noble calls after him. “You said I was ‘new generation.’ You said I had very sophisticated programming. Well, maybe you were right. Maybe
my
programming is more sophisticated than
your
programming.” When Rufus still doesn’t reply, Noble shouts, “Are you listening, Rufus?”

“Yeah, yeah …” Rufus flaps a dismissive hand, enraging Noble.

“All you can do is one thing, and I’ve learned to do a lot more than that!” Noble roars. “You haven’t learned to listen, but I’ve learned to speak out!”

With his long legs and energetic stride, he soon overtakes Rufus. For an instant, they jostle each other at the mouth of the hallway. Then Noble veers toward the Kernel’s glass booth, leaving Rufus to rejoin his friend Lonnie the werewolf. Even from a distance, it’s obvious that the booth hasn’t been
utterly
destroyed. Though every window is smashed—though the Kernel’s chair has been thrown halfway down a corridor and many of his tools have been scattered across the floor—the desk and screens have remained in their original positions. Some of the screens are even working. And the mike hasn’t been carried away, either, though it
is
hanging upside down at the end of its cable, dangling over the edge of the desk.

Noble is forced to step across a mound of unconscious bodies before he can reach this desk. He’s also briefly distracted by a flicker of movement on one of the surviving screens. It’s an image of Lorellina—but not the Lorellina he knows. Back in Thanehaven, the false Lorellina is being slowly engulfed by a reddish tide that’s pouring through the throne room. Clearly, the Blood River is invading the Fortress of Bone.

Noble swallows, then turns away. He can’t afford to worry about the false Lorellina; not now. Besides, it’s the mike that really holds his interest—the mike and what it can do for him. He remembers that it once gave the Kernel a voice like thunder.

Picking up the mike, Noble tentatively places its black cloth cylinder to his lips. “Hello?” he says.
When nothing happens, he pushes the button that’s set into its silvery stand.
“HELLO?”
he repeats—and his greeting booms out like a dragon’s roar, drowning the clamorous music.

Everyone turns to gape at Noble. Even Lulu, who’s followed him into the booth, cowers and stares.

“My name is Noble,” he continues, “and I’m here to warn you that we’re heading for certain destruction if we don’t start working as a team.” When no one responds, he adds, “We need to stop destroying and start rebuilding. Right now. Or we won’t last much longer.”

“That’s not true,” Rufus interrupts. His tone isn’t urgent, dismayed, or even angry. If anything, he sounds bored. “Don’t listen to Noble,” he advises the confused gathering. “He’s just trying to boss you around, like the Kernel did.”

“Don’t listen to Rufus,” Noble retorts. “He’s a piece of malware sent to crash this computer.”

“You can
tell
he’s on the Kernel’s side because he’s using the Kernel’s microphone,” Rufus declares, strolling into the center of the room with his hands in his pockets. “Noble is trying to shout down every dissenting voice. Because he wants you to obey him. What he’s telling you now will only lead to more tyranny.”

“He’s lying!” Noble argues, “Rufus is lying!” Then, because he doesn’t want to be seen as someone with an unfair advantage, he drops his microphone and moves out of the booth. “He’s leading you into the mouth
of dissolution! If you believe him, you won’t survive!”

“If you believe
him
, you’ll soon find yourselves back where you started. As slave labor in a dictator’s realm.” Rufus almost seems to be enjoying himself. He grins at Noble, his eyes sparkling, and adds, “Noble’s just scared. He’s scared of change. He wants things back the way they were.”

“No, I don’t!” Noble snaps. “I don’t want a return to tyranny and I don’t want a pit of chaos! I want a better life for us all! And that means laying down our
own
rules, so we can do our jobs in a way that benefits everyone!”

“But is it possible? Will our programming let us
re
program?” It’s the Kernel speaking, in a cracked and wheezy croak.

He’s still protruding from the iron box, but when Lonnie tries to shove his head down, the blond singer protests. “Hey, man, don’t do that. He’s allowed to ask questions.”

“He’s our enemy!” Lonnie barks.

“Yeah, but … I mean … he sounds like he understands this stuff.” The singer hesitates briefly before observing, “Anyhow, he never did
me
any harm.”

“Or me,” someone else volunteers.

“That’s what
you
think.” Rufus’s tone has sharpened, suddenly. “It’s the Kernel who’s been running this place.
He’s
the one who’s kept you playing and playing until your fingers bleed.”

“No he hasn’t. It wasn’t his fault,” says Noble.
“He’s been following the rules just like everyone else.” Addressing the room at large, he adds, “The Kernel can’t leave this basement. He’s not allowed to. What kind of a tyrant can’t go where he likes?”