Skybuilders (Sorcery and Science Book 4) (22 page)

Leonidas waited until the echo of her words had faded out, then said, “When I asked you to tell me something, I was thinking more along the lines of a humorous anecdote than a scientific dissertation.”

Marin sighed. “I’m not feeling in much of a humorous mood right now, Leo.”

“Ok.” He bounced three times on his toes to stretch out his calves, then took off running along the next stretch, silently cursing his ridiculous boots. “Then just tell me how you took care of all those beasts and machines.” Knowing Marin, that was guaranteed to be amusing.

“We caught one of those dogs from hell inside a trap I built,” she said. “It got separated from its pack, so it wasn’t too hard. We considered eating it, but after recalling it had acid spit, we decided against it. I saved some of the spit.”

“Really?” Leonidas asked, struggling to keep his tone level. Marin had done a lot of weird things, but collecting beastie spit? That was just gross.

“I figured anything that could burn through flesh might come in handy later on.”

She was lucky she hadn’t burned her own hand off.

“Sure,” he said. “Better than eating the monster.”

“We did eat a strange two-headed bird. It was ok.”

Served it right
, thought Leonidas.
One of its brothers tried to bite my hand off.

“When we ran into the rest of the dog pack, we led them to the Crescent Order and let the assassins deal with them.”

“Did you run into any unicorns?” he asked.

“There are unicorns?”

“Apparently so.”

“No, we didn’t have such luck. We ran into one malicious creature after another. By the time we got out of there, I was convinced every nightmare creature ever conceived of had spawned in that forest and that they were collectively conspiring to eat us all alive.”

“But you did get out.”

“Barely,” she said. “And only to fall into a lake of electric fish. We just barely managed to pull Ian out of the water before they could barbecue him. I hated those demonic fish. And catching them was a phenomenal pain.”

“I don’t think metallic fish taste any better than acid spit dogs, Marin.”

She let out an exasperated sigh. “Of course not, Leo. We were catching them for bomb parts.”

Leonidas wasn’t surprised. Marin made a game of dancing too close to death’s door.

“The fish alone wouldn’t have been too bad, but whenever we came out of hiding, those deranged birds would immediately start screeching and then dropped knives down on us.”

“How did you take care of them?”

“Threw a fish at them.”

Leonidas tried to picture that but only came up with the sight of a flapping fish smacking the birds over the head with his tail while screaming, ‘Naughty! Naughty!’ It was as comically ridiculous as a children’s cartoon.

“Why are you laughing?”

Leonidas clamped down his lips, choking the final chuckle. “Sorry. How did that work exactly? Throwing a fish?”

“We netted it, then catapulted it into the birds. When it collided with one of them, it shot out a web of sparks that encompassed the entire flock. They short-circuited and dropped out of the sky like a swarm of dead locusts.”

That was even better than the talking, flapping fish.

“And the golems?” he asked.

The line was silent. “I didn’t like them,” she finally said.

Who did?

“When we came through the portal, there was a golem standing right in front of us. It wasn’t moving at all. I used one of the bombs I'd made from fish parts to blow off a leg and half an arm. It also left a big gaping hole in its back, straight through to the circuits. While it was trying to stand up, I hopped on its back and had a look inside. Did you know that all seven are linked? Once I figured that out, I just reprogrammed the lot of them. They collectively decided to let us cross the field, but I didn’t see any reason for them to extend the same courtesy to the Crescent Order. As we escaped through the portal, the golems were closing in on the assassins.”

Leonidas thought about that for a moment, then said, “You’re a clever girl, Marin.”

“Why, thank you, Leo. I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

Leonidas snorted. That wasn’t a tall order. The two of them were in the habit of trading insults, not compliments.

“But I would have preferred ‘woman’,” she added.

“No, Marin. You’ll always be a girl to me.”

Her soft laughter blended with the static. “I think I can live with that.”

“You’ll be ok,” he told her.

“Yes,” she agreed. “I'll be ok. Not ecstatic, but ok. Now, I need to go. I have a misbehaving update to gift the Helleans.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

~
The Helleans ~

526AX August 23, Blizzard’s Point

GRIM GREEN SPOTLIGHTS illuminated the whitewashed walls of the tunnel on either side, two rows of ugly green blotches extending as far as the eye could see. Marin jogged through the tunnel, doing her best to soften her steps. But she was no Elition, nor was she a spy, an assassin, or anything else of the sort. The tunnel was wide, and its sloping walls echoed every scrape of her sneakers and every whisper of her breath. The auditory evidence of her intrusion mingled and magnified until it might as well have been fifty men stomping around down there—and not doing an especially quiet job of it.

Her only consolation was that no one was around to hear it. The Hellean city was such a marvel of technological achievement that it nearly ran itself. It was almost a shame to sabotage it.

But if they wanted to make it out of Blizzard’s Point alive, that’s exactly what she had to do. She’d made her choice. Leonidas and Ariella were already running their laps around the city. It was too late to second guess herself now. She reminded herself that brilliant or not, the Helleans were trying to kill them all. She ran faster. She couldn’t let the others down just because she’d paused to admire the scenery. They hadn’t stopped. They'd come for her.

Even crazy, off-and-on, hot-and-cold Leonidas. He’d tormented her as a child, but then he'd been there for her three years ago in Orion, helping her decide which job to take. He’d acted like he cared. The next time they’d met, he’d blown her off. And when they’d met on that boat in Lear, he’d gone back to tormenting her. But now he’d risked his life to come and get her. He was a good friend. Finally, she felt she could call him a friend.

Marin stopped to check her watch and catch her breath. She heard the clink of hard-soled boots on metal. The reverberating footfalls sang out loud, blocking out her stunted wheezing. The noise was descending, crescendoing. It was nearly on top of her. Her lungs burned and her heart raced, but through sheer willpower Marin forced her breaths to steady. She wiped her sweaty hands on her torn and dirty pants and scanned the tunnel.

She found a ladder in the middle of the next intersection. A pair of white and grey boots had just appeared through the opening in the ceiling. As legs dressed in the signature ivory-trimmed white cloth of a Hellean technician descended, Marin ducked into the nearest room and tucked herself behind the open door. She kept her back to the wall and her eyes on the sliver between the door and the frame.

“Evan, hurry up,” the technician called up.

As a second pair of legs climbed down the ladder, the Hellean technician dusted off his white jumpsuit. The Helleans’ obsession with white was puzzling, most especially their decision to outfit their technicians in the color. Maybe it was their way of boasting that even their hands-on workers never had the need to get those hands dirty. Of course, here were two of them now in the underbelly of the city, and they certainly weren't down there to drink in the scenery.

The second Hellean jumped the final rungs and landed beside the first. In addition to her technician’s uniform, she wore a dark braid pinned to her head and a sour expression plastered on her face. She handed her colleague a sturdy metal toolbox.

“Why are you giving me this?” he asked, a perplexed expression on his face.

“So you can see what it feels like to carry a ten kilo toolbox down a ladder one-handed as some helpful soul is all the while demanding that you ‘hurry up’,” the woman named Evan replied shortly.

“If we don’t get the power back on in District 4 soon, Hobb will have a meltdown.”

“Let him. I don’t see him coming down here to fix this mess he created. Fried cables throughout the city. One district completely without power. And a whole lot of work for us. I told him the cables couldn’t handle the power they wanted to channel through them. I knew this would happen.” Evan frowned. “But did they listen to me? No. As always.”

“We technicians aren’t supposed to tell them what to do.”

“No, we’re just supposed to clean up their messes. When our esteemed scientists are concocting these ridiculous schemes, I don’t think they ever consider the fall out. They don’t think about those of us who have to pick up the pieces.”

He shrugged. Or tried to. The weight of the toolbox in his hands made the movement choppy. “Such is the way of things.
Our
way. We must do our part so that advancements can be made.”

“Sometimes I think we’re advancing to places we would do best to stay well enough away from,” she grumbled. “Manmade portals indeed! As though we're obligated to replicate every magical trick the Elitions possess.”

Ha! I was right!
Marin caught herself from jumping around in a victory dance. Her knuckles scraped against the wall.

“You know the Council’s policy, Evan.”

“I know,” she said, not looking too happy about it. “But some things should just be left alone.”

“Let’s just focus on getting the power back on in District 4.”

Evan sighed and stepped into the room nearest the intersection. She returned with an open backpack in her arms, stuffed to the brim with metal cylinders, each only the length of a matchstick. She zipped the bag closed and swung it over her back.

“Did you pack enough?” he asked her.

“No, I packed as many as I could reasonably carry,” she replied drily. “Once power is temporarily back up in District 4, we can move on to switching out the cooked cables. And to convincing our esteemed leaders to never, ever try something as insane as an inter-world portal again.”

“Do you think they will listen?”

“No,” she replied without delay. “But maybe I can convince them not to do it in
our
city.”

Marin watched the two technicians run down the tunnel as fast as their heavy loads would allow. Once the shuffle and scrape of their steps had faded away, she left her hiding spot. She checked her watch to confirm that she'd lost far too much time. She would need to send the update from there. Marin stepped inside the room where the female technician had found the peculiar cylinders. Just beside the door, she spotted a whole barrel of them.

“You never know when one might come in handy,” she muttered to herself, swiping one off the top of the pile.

The cylinder was smooth and silver with gold-accented symbols. She slid her necklace chain through a narrow sliver on one side of the cylinder, then clasped it back around her neck and tucked it under her shirt. Then she sat down to prepare her gift to the Helleans.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

~
Flying ~

526AX August 23, Blizzard’s Point

THE HARD PART was done. Now came the harder part: escaping the city without getting shot full of bullets.

Ariella peeked around the corner just long enough to see the man in white fire his pistol. The bullet burst forth, sinking into the corner of the wall right where her hand had been just a moment before. She didn't bother with a second glance. The light tap of silky smooth shoe soles against the hallway’s marble floor was evidence enough that the man was approaching. Silas could have pushed him back with a mind blast, but she was limited to more mundane means of dealing with unwanted guests. And right now, there were a lot of unwanted guests.

She looked back at Leonidas, who was fiddling with his gun. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to remove the laser sight off my Boar Hunter.”

Ariella seemed to remember the ‘laser sight’ was that demonic red light that shone out from his pistol. The one that Leonidas claimed allowed him to target faster. It sounded like cheating to her.

“Why?” she asked.

“It doesn’t work in the Wilderness, and when it’s mounted, it obstructs the gun’s normal sight.”

Ariella didn't ask him what sense there was in attaching something to his gun that didn’t even work all the time. He was clearly too attached to the flashy thing to give a reasonable answer.
 

“Hand me a knife,” she told him.

He nodded toward Starsoul. “You have a sword.”

“I'm not throwing my sword at the man.”

“Well, you already threw our only knife at that technician who was trying to climb down the ladder after us. Hit him right in the… Never mind, I don’t want to think about it. You’re becoming more and more like Silas by the second.” He shook his head. “Just do that ferocious sword-wielding strut of yours down the hall. If he has any sense, he'll turn tail and run.”

Ariella sighed. “If he had any sense, he wouldn't have chosen to walk unprotected down the hallway while his six comrades wait tucked away around the next bend, ready to shoot me full of bullets should I venture out to deal with that nuisance.”

As if to punctuate her point, the crack of the gun firing again echoed down the hall. Metal clinked against metal as a bullet hit the previous one, dislodging it from the wall. It dropped to the floor and slid between Leonidas’s feet.

“How do you know there are six of them? And that they're armed?” he asked.

“I can hear them breathing. And loading their guns,” replied Ariella.

Leonidas muttered something about ‘inhuman senses’, then stumbled as the floor lurched to the side. His eyes tracked the tiny dark cylinder as it rolled across the hangar’s smooth floor toward Marin, who was squatting in front of the outside doors. Beside her, cables and bizarre tools were overflowing out of a silver toolbox far too small to contain them. She'd been fiddling around inside the room’s various closets and boxes for the past five minutes.