The First Book of Ore: The Foundry's Edge (32 page)

icah felt like a stupid little baby, and there was nothing he could do about it. He was crying and shaking, totally helpless. He was losing it.

Stuck in this tube with only his own horrible thoughts, every breath felt like work, like he had to keep reminding himself to inhale. He couldn't remember ever being this scared. His jelly legs wanted to give out, but he had nowhere to fall. And he was starting to see things. Weird things.

The wall was inches from his nose, and its texture swirled and swam before his eyes. The only other place to look was up, but each time he did, he could have sworn there was one less breathing hole in the lid. Were they plugging them up, one at a time, so that he'd suffocate? How did they know to only do it when he looked? Okay, no more looking up.

Closing his eyes was worse. The view inside his eyelids flickered like static on a Televiewer, like swarming maggots. He could feel them, too, covering his body, slithering around underneath his coveralls. It made him itch all over.

So this is what crazy feels like,
he thought.

That's when he saw it. A fine gray thread slowly descended from overhead like a web without the spider. He pinched his eyes shut, squeezed off the tears, and shook his head to chase the image away.

Still there. If it was a hallucination, it was a stubborn one.

The thread drifted to the wall and clung there, growing thicker as it continued down. When shiny beads dribbled and swelled at the end, he realized that it was some sort of silvery liquid. He watched closely as the thing trickled toward him. Then it reversed direction and ran back up.

Micah jerked back and banged his head on the wall.

The drip twitched, then retracted a bit more. It held steady, watching. The liquid pulsed to the rhythm of his breathing.

Not good. Was this some sick Foundry thing? Was it going to crawl into his eyeball and eat through his brain?

Suddenly, the strand split apart, separating into a bunch of thin hairs. They bent away from the wall, reaching toward Micah like writhing antennae.

He panicked, clamping his eyes and his mouth shut. Would it go instead for his nostrils and his ears? He tossed his head, thinking if he kept moving, the nasty silver gunk might not be able to get him.

But it would. Eventually.

Just a matter of time.

Floodlights blasted Jules in a blinding row, but he barely had the strength to blink. The Watchmen dragged him down a long, curved corridor of the detainment block, the sound of their footsteps merging with the hum of machinery. He had endured another two-hour interrogation and was racked with pain from head to toe, his bandages wet with fresh blood.

This subterranean sector was a network of passages like gloomy golden catacombs. The ceiling stretched thirty feet overhead, and the rocky walls were pocketed with roosts built for Kallorax's ancient aerial regime. Like much of the Citadel, this area had once housed extensive torture chambers, a testament to the megalarch's depraved imagination. The Foundry had repurposed much of the grisly sublevel for infrastructure, using it to house generators, banks of Computator servers, and vesper-to-water conversion tanks.

But the detainment block retained some of the old cruelties, just in case.

Jules was dragged past a hammered-steel elevator patrolled by heavily armed Watchman soldiers. His escorts turned down a dead-end hallway with high-security prison cells at the back. A titanium power grid stretched throughout the entire area, midway between floor and ceiling. It was a lattice of powerful floodlights, Omnicams, and deadly Dervish turrets that left no inch unmonitored. They whirred and buzzed, cameras tracking and four-barreled cannons pivoting, ready to open fire at a moment's notice.

Because the Foundry had little need for prisoners, this sector was rarely used. Jules could only recall a handful of exceptions, the most recent being a few years ago when an executive named Collins had made a reference to the M-level tunnel in Foundry Central during a Dialset call. After a week of “correctional rehabilitation,” he was back to work with a big empty smile and a vacant stare.

Now the detainment block was occupied by Dr. Jules Plumm. And the children. The thought of them in this dreadful place made him even weaker.

A dozen Watchman soldiers stood guard beside the cells, their eerie, duplicate features staring out from behind polished face shields. Jules looked up at the Omnicams and wondered if Goodwin was watching, gloating over the broken wreck his former Chief Surveyor had become. But the cameras weren't scanning. They were all pointing at the ground as if the motorized arms that held them had gone limp.

The Dervish turrets, too, were frozen in place.

In a rush, he understood.

Phoebe was curled in a ball. She hadn't moved in hours.

She was tired, but sleep would never come in this cell. Her bleary eyes stared at the harsh light tube above the door, its chatter grinding her down with every passing second.

Then with a soft pop, the light went out. Silence.

She sprang to her feet. Utter darkness.

“Hello?” Phoebe cried. “Is anybody there? HEY!”

The unnatural quiet made her feel like she had cotton in her ears. Were they watching her in the dark? Was this another part of the Foundry's twisted plan, to break her with fear like they had her father?

With hands outstretched, she felt her way over to where the Omnicam was mounted. She listened but heard nothing—no swapping lenses, no adjusting focus. But there was something else. A muted whisper from behind the smooth steel wall. She felt her way over and pressed her ear against it. Dull impacts, grunting. Wild metal footfalls.

Something thudded up against the wall. She jumped back. Adrenaline surged through her like an electric shock. Alone in the blackness, stuck in this cell, she had nowhere to run.

The muffled commotion stopped.

What was happening out there? For several unbearable seconds she heard nothing. Phoebe backpedaled and bumped up against the opposite wall.

Digital bleeps sounded, then a
THUNK
. With a slow scrape, the door was forced open. The hallway outside was dark except for red emergency lights buried in the floor.

A silhouette stood in the doorway, armed with a rifle.

“Daddy!”

She threw her arms around his frail body.

“Everything's okay, Phoebe. We're getting out of here.”

Only then did she register the other figures with him.

Glinting in the red-rimmed dark were four menacing mehkans. Some were low to the ground, others stood upright, but it was too dark to make them out clearly. There was power and violence in their every black curve, and their formidable presence sent a chill rippling up her spine. The red emergency lights showed splatters of dark grease on the walls, and the ground was scattered with decimated Watchman remains.

“We go,” commanded a clipped female voice.

The words were strange and fluttery, as if spoken through the blades of a fan. They came from a mehkan who held a convulsing Watchman soldier in her powerful grip. With a flash of her clacking arms, she slashed off the Foundry soldier's head and dropped his sparking, spurting body onto the floor.

The mehkan was lean and vaguely humanoid, rising to a towering height as she approached. Instead of a solid mass, her body was made of countless interlocking ellipses, ticking pendulums, and spherical astrolabes in constant flux. Sliders on her limbs calibrated, and needle pointers worked through some inscrutable algorithm. The folding rings and planes of her anatomy were scythelike and razor sharp, her face incomprehensible—not because of the dark, but because it was all shifting blades and wheels, devoid of any recognizable features. The red lights in the floor passed through the adjusting gaps of her strange form and cast eerie, flickering shadows.

Affixed to her fluctuating chest was a dynamo, dark red like dried blood.

Understanding crashed hard upon Phoebe.

The Covenant was here. In the Citadel. They were saved.

“We are in your debt, Orei,” her father addressed the strange figure.

“No time,” the mehkan trilled low. Fleshy cords vibrated in Orei's core where her throat should be, like plucked guitar strings. The twirling arcs of her body reached out to them, measuring and assessing something. “Weak, soft. Both of you,” she droned disdainfully. “Move.”

Orei vaulted into a sprint with the silent grace of a wolf. The rest of the pitch-black Covenant team raced after her. Rifle at the ready, Jules grabbed Phoebe's hand and pulled her along behind. Watchman pieces lay scattered, limbs torn from torsos, heads crushed like eggshells. Phoebe had to be careful not to slip in the puddles of viscous Watchman gore.

They ran past the prison cells and rushed down the corridor. The Covenant team kept a tight formation around the two humans, and she could smell their hot iron breath as they hurried along in deadly silence. Phoebe heard a swish and looked up to see another mehkan above, gliding along with the group like a shadow, zigzagging across the walls.

Jules clutched his side and winced, seized by a sharp pain in his ribs. Phoebe held on to him.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

Orei reversed direction, inverting her body in midstride to run back to Jules. The ellipses of her body spun dangerously in the red light, her slides and pointers evaluating Phoebe and her father, judging. Calculating.

“Too slow,” she said venomously. “Move faster or die.”

Phoebe decided she didn't like Orei, even if the Covenant commander had come to rescue them.

They hurried to the end of the hallway, where it intersected with another dim corridor. Phoebe startled as a mehkan appeared around the corner, scampering down the wall as if unaffected by gravity. The creature clung to the sheer surface like a gecko with what appeared to be magnetic paddle feet. It was all black, like the others, its lithe form clinking with sharp overlapping metal scales. The mehkan had a long pointed beak, and the back of its head flared out like a pickax. It scuttled around the corner and out of sight.

The team followed the gecko mehkan and came upon more brutalized Watchman soldiers, their bodies broken and scattered. The creature skittered down the wall, then stood on its hind legs beside a bulky companion. Phoebe's blood went cold when she recognized the brute as a crane-claw mehkan, just like the one that had detained her in the Gauge Pit. One of the beast's arms was riddled with Foundry bullets and petrified with white cement. But as soon as Orei appeared, the mehkan shrugged off his wounds and stood at attention.

This corridor was curved, winding out of sight on either side and making it impossible to see what might be coming. Everywhere was red darkness and silence, which meant the power had been cut throughout this entire area.

The Covenant had been thorough.

With Rattletrap orders from Orei, the team assembled in front of the hammered-steel elevator, which was propped open to reveal a yawning shaft. A blackened chraida emerged from the steel chute. Phoebe realized then that the mehkans weren't pitch-black—they had camouflaged their bodies. The chraida unspooled cable from its chest to weave a ladder that led down the shaft.

The Covenant gathered around their escape route.

Escape…

“No!” she cried, planting her feet. “We can't leave.”

The rest of the group spun to face her in confusion.

“Move,” ordered Orei, impatiently reaching for her.

Phoebe sidestepped the mehkan's grip and backed away.

“I said NO! We have to save Micah,” she demanded, looking at the rest of the motley team. “And Dollop. He's a mehkan, like you. We have to find them!”

Her eyes met her father's, his glasses flashing red in the dim light. He clutched his injured side and nodded.

“She's right,” he said. “I will not leave without them.”

In a blur, Orei grabbed Jules by the shirt. Her stiletto fingers tore holes in the filthy fabric as she yanked him close to the whirling rings of her face.

“We sealed an eighty-two-quadrit perimeter. Forty-seven enemy puppets trapped in lockdown, closing in. No time.” A slider on her chest tapped rapidly, and her swishing scythes blasted back the hair from his face.