Sniper Fire • The Lector Dances • Slugs in the Garden • The Skeleton’s Name • Implosive • Zax in the Box

So, that didn’t go as planned. (Vicki says no battle plan remains intact after first contact, which they might have mentioned before.)

We saw the entry point to this world light up in a cascade of ordnance, and I thought, “Is that it? Is the Lector gone?” Minna and I were near one of the bunkers, so we dove inside and used our radios to contact the Pilgrim, who was on a nearby peak, armed with a sniper rifle, watching.

“Only one person came through,” the Pilgrim said. “They had blue fur, and they were holding some sort of great beast on a chain. They triggered the explosives.”

I groaned. The Lector must have gotten into the habit of sending scouts through first, in case Minna left traps again. He’d probably done it when he called for us in that place with the tiny people, too, and we just didn’t see it.

“More people have appeared since,” the Pilgrim said. “The ones you described. A skeleton… a slouching girl in a dirty jacket with a hood… six more soldiers and beasts… they are sitting up, moving out, securing the area, observing our defenses. Ah. Here he is now. Your Lector. I am lining up my shot.”

We could see the arrival point from our position halfway up a steep slope, and I thought I recognized the Lector, though at this distance he was just a black blur. Minna handed me her glasses, and I looked through them, the Lector leaping into focus – gesturing, directing his soldiers to head down to the fortifications in the valley, Polly and the torturer flanking him. Smoke rose around him, and the whole area was rubble and ashes, and, at a glance, he looked like a conqueror, come to bring death – except his wispy hair and steel-rimmed glasses were incongruous in that armor, like a professor playing dress-up for a party.

The Lector staggered backward, and a shimmering blue field lit up around his body. Twice more he staggered, and the blue shimmer flickered. The Pilgrim was firing his rifle, and whatever energy or projectile it fired was making a dent in the Lector’s force field.

Polly leapt in front of the Lector, and some invisible beam cut her neatly in two, a diagonal line running from her left shoulder down to her right hip. She fell to the ground in pieces and howled, then began dragging her torso toward her legs. She didn’t bleed, any more than a turnip cut in half would, but her body didn’t do much to stop the beam, either, which drove the Lector to his knees. “Keep it up!” Vicki crowed from my hand.

The Lector rose, rushed forward, and dove right off the cliff, plummeting to the valley floor below. I remembered his leap from a hotel balcony, and how he’d landed unscathed. I tracked down with the glasses to see him dusting himself off at the base of the cliff.

The torturer, meanwhile, was calmly assembling a tripod and screwing together lengths of cylindrical metal, activities which did not fill me with confidence.

“Minna!” the Lector’s voice boomed. “Are you ready to end this? Your little small potatoes revolution has grown tedious!”

“Inputting firing solution,” Vicki said.

The guns came alive. They focused their fire on the Lector, but also took the time to pick off his soldiers and their monsters, which snuffled and snarled on the end of their chains. The guns aimed for the skeleton, too, but he was down in the crater where the hut had been, and none of the weapons were angled quite right to strike him there as he calmly continued his work. A few of the drones went scuttling up toward him instead.

The Lector moved, impossibly quickly, a pale yellow shimmer in front of his face, dodging the beams and projectiles, somersaulting and dancing and spinning – and laughing as he came. “He has some sort of tactical heads-up display!” Vicki shouted. “And that armor is an exoskeleton, moving faster than his body could otherwise. He has some kind of system predicting the path of the attacks and dodging. Inputting randomization as a countermeasure. Pilgrim, can you hit him?”

“Not from this position.”

“Hrm. Then can you kill that skeleton?”

“Affirmative.” I watched as the skeleton’s skull exploded, onyx eyes falling to the ground… but the skeleton was not at all perturbed by this, and screwed the last bit of metal onto the tripod-mounted gun he’d been building.

“Can you take out the cannon?”

“I’m trying. It’s not as fragile as the skeleton. Shots are bouncing off.”

The skeleton reached down, patted blindly at the ground, and then picked up one of the onyx eyes and fitted it into a scope on top of the cannon.

“Minna, taunt the Lector please,” Vicki said.

We’d been prepared for this. She cleared her throat. “Lector! You have tried to kill me but you cannot kill me. I will always salt your ground, dig up your roots, burn your branches. I will raise armies against you and you will fall, in this world and every world. You are not smarter or better than me.”

Her voice boomed from the PA of the wrecked ship at the heart of the valley, and the Lector began to dance and pirouette his way toward that instead. Occasionally one of the beams or projectiles clipped him, now, spinning him around, but they didn’t stop him.

“I’ve met potted plants more dangerous than you, Daisy!” he called.

“Your turn, Zax,” Vicki said.

“Lector, it doesn’t have to be like this.”

The Lector stopped, and took a beam full in the chest, knocking him flat, but then he rolled and dodged before Vicki could concentrate more fire on him. He crouched behind a boulder, out of sight, but his voice boomed. “Zaxony. Your talking corsage found you, did she? I was perfectly willing to let you go. You’re a fool to let her drag you into her war. Now you both have to die. I am cultivating a great and glorious garden, and the two of you are slugs. And your little pinky ring, too.”

“Why don’t you come and get us? We’re right here, waiting.”

“Do you think I’m afraid to walk into that ship?” he bellowed. “Do you think I’m worried about whatever pitiful defenses you’ve set up in there, whatever ludicrous little traps you’ve set?” He paused. “Well, in point of fact, I am, at least a little. Alan, is the cannon ready?”

The skeleton clanged his knuckles against the shaft of the cannon three times in reply.

“Pilgrim, destroy that weapon!” Vicki cried.

The Pilgrim fired his sniper rifle, but the shots didn’t make much of an impact on the cannon, though they shattered Alan’s body further. The cannon was at least semi-autonomous, because it moved and pointed toward the wreck, onyx scope glistening.

“Blow them up, please,” the Lector said.

Minna and I ducked. The cannon fired whatever it fired, and the world went white.

The idea was, if all else failed, we’d lure the Lector toward the wreck. Once he was within the blast radius, the drones stationed inside would pull the failsafes and let the engine breach containment entirely, and then… an implosion, essentially, sucking everything within a hundred meters down into a bit of highly radioactive mass the size of a pebble. The cannon did a perfectly fine job of breaching containment and triggering the implosion. There was a flash, a brief hurricane of displaced air, and the ship vanished, along with much of the ground around it and several of our nearer gun encampments.

The Lector was a good ten meters outside the implosion’s range, though, and safe from the worst of the radiation, too. He stood unsteadily and laughed. “That was almost impressive! I don’t suppose you were in there, though, were you?”

“The best we can hope for, right now, is that he thinks we’re dead,” Vicki said.

More soldiers began to appear in the crater beside the cannon, waking up and fanning out. They were met by our drones, and small arms fire clattered. The drones might slow them down, but wouldn’t stop them.

“We have to reach the Pilgrim and escape,” I said.

Minna nodded, and we slipped out of the bunker and hurried, low to the ground and (we hoped) hidden by brush, toward the worst-case-scenario rendezvous point. The Pilgrim would meet us in the shade of a nearby boulder, equidistant between our two positions, and then we would give him a sedative and jump to the next world and figure out what to do from there–

That was the plan, anyway, but the soldiers had a flying machine, and they caught us instead, dropping an actual net on top of us, and then fired darts at us – not tranquilizers, or even paralytics, but stimulants. My eyeballs ached and my blood fizzed and I drummed my feet against the ground. I couldn’t have slept if I’d wanted to. I didn’t want to. I fumbled Vicki off my finger and shoved them into Minna’s hands. “Run, Minna,” I said. “Sleep away. Go, both of you.”

“Zax–”

“Go. I’ll find you, if I can.”

“Be… be safe, Zax,” Vicki said. “We’ll never stop fighting.”

Minna kissed my cheek, and then her eyes rolled back, and she fell asleep. No one can dose Minna with anything against her will. I’m a lot more adaptable than I used to be, but I’ll never be a match for her.

I hoped the Pilgrim was all right, that they hadn’t caught him, that he’d survived. He’d fought for us, knowing he might die, and I wished I’d gotten to know him better.

One of the soldiers uncapped and drank a tiny vial of something, fell over, and vanished before he hit the ground. Off in pursuit of Minna, no doubt. She could handle one soldier.

Two more of the blue-furred troops grabbed me and dragged me to my feet. I couldn’t stop babbling, the stimulants rushing in my blood: “We’re trying to help you, don’t you get it, we’re fighting him, you could fight him, you could stab him, or poison him, he doesn’t have armor on the inside does he, or maybe he does, but he took your world, don’t you want to stop him, you can never go home, did he promise he’d take you back, he’s lying, he doesn’t know how, he’ll ever know how, he will just eat and eat and eat worlds forever–”

“You’re very lucky we aren’t allowed to knock you unconscious,” one of them said, and tossed me over the back of the flying machine, and carried me away.

They were building a headquarters already, unleashing small machines that assembled the components for structures out of the dirt and rock around us. One of the first things they built was a cell, just a box of bars, and they threw me into it. The Pilgrim wasn’t in there, at least. Maybe he’d come break me out. That seemed like the sort of thing he might do. I walked around and around in my three-meters-by-three-meters of dirt, the sun sending the shadow of steel mesh across me and the ground, and I babbled.

They’d taken away my bag, and my journal, so I couldn’t even record my thoughts, and I had so many thoughts and they were so fast, thoughts of the Lector and his conquest and most of all his mind, his twisty, tricksy, deep, seeing-all-contingencies mind, his terrible mind, that engine of an empire, intellect without empathy, a diagnostic device that could apprehend almost anything except the terrible flaw at the center of itself, that mind that mind that mind–

When I started to stumble, they’d shoot me with more stimulants.

It was night when the Lector came to me.