Dale didn’t want a fight. “Well, I don’t think you’re getting one.”
Makali stepped between them. “Both of you, stop this. We’re losing Dash.”
When they closed in, Zack tried again, but with a change of subject. “Now that we’re out of your old habitat, where are you taking us?”
This time the Sentry answered. “Control,” it said. “Vessel.” Then, clearly unwilling to waste one more second communicating with humans, it ran on ahead.
Nevertheless, those were magic words, even to Dale. He wouldn’t mind having control over this vessel at all. He had just about concluded that for the rest of his life he was going to have to give up the dream that he would ever have a clear idea what he was doing, or why. It was as if he had left motivation or reason behind on Earth.
And he no longer had his Hulk medallion for protection.
Some time later, Dash stopped and began clawing at what looked to Dale like another pile of rubble. “What now?” Valya said. She had been so silent during the hike that Dale had thought to stop and search for her…she had always been following, but slowly and painfully.
“I think it’s another habitat,” Zack said.
With five creatures and eleven hands (Dale saw that Dash was still protecting its number three arm and hand), this cave mouth was cleared quickly.
They were able to pass through without difficulty, though Dale noticed that the air was stale, burned, almost dead. He had to take several breaths to assure himself that he was still taking in oxygen.
Dash seemed to be laboring.
“Well, good news,” Makali said. “We won’t have to paddle across this one.”
She was correct. This habitat was a giant void…a huge space lit only by scattered, yellowed glowworms that showed a barren, lifeless, blasted landscape.
RACHEL
Run.
Rachel Stewart’s entire existence, her fourteen years of life, all her dreams, hopes, fantasies, accomplishments, disappointments, everything she owned, all that she had heard and seen, all reduced to one concept.
Run!
She was fast. Rather, playing soccer, with rest and food, she was faster than most girls her age. Was she faster than this Long Legs?
Or, as one of her father’s oft-repeated jokes suggested, was she faster than one of the other potential victims? Faster than Cowboy?
She didn’t know. She couldn’t do anything about it, anyway—
But run!
Yvonne was the closest thing to a local guide. She had led them downstairs and out of the Museum of Lost Aliens and across “town,” toward the far side of the habitat. Rachel had wondered why she was going so fast. Even Cowboy seemed unwilling to keep up with Yvonne. The dog kept stopping every few meters and sitting down.
“What was that thing?” Pav had said, walking as quickly as he could while still looking over his shoulder. Rachel wanted to grab him and scream, Run!
“‘Long Legs,’” Yvonne had said. “But the name…whenever I think it, it makes me feel scared and sick.”
“We already suspected it might not be friendly,” Zhao had said.
“What would it want with us?” Pav said. “I didn’t think aliens ate humans.”
“No,” Yvonne said, “but it might want something we carry or have. Water. Energy. Matter.”
“Well, it’s dead, isn’t it?” Rachel had said. “Can’t we slow down?”
Yvonne looked at her with pity. “Oh, girl, that thing isn’t dead. It’s probably put itself back together already.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Zhao said. “It just fell off a three-story building!”
“It’s…it’s partly machine. It can…reassemble itself.”
“So you’re not taking us someplace safe,” Rachel had said. “You’re just—”
“—Getting you the hell away from the Long Legs.”
At that moment, they heard an anguished howl from Cowboy. “What is it?” Pav had said.
Looking around, Rachel could see no obvious threat…but, surrounded as they were by buildings, she couldn’t actually see very far.
“Up,” Zhao said, pointing.
The Long Legs—its upper torso still incompletely assembled—had apparently just leaped to the top of a building not fifty meters behind them.
“Run!” Yvonne said.
They entered a panting, side-aching world of twists, sudden veers down what appeared to be dead-end alleys that turned out to have narrow passages, sprints across open plazas, and near-dunkings in pools of colored goo.
It took only minutes before Zhao said, “We can’t keep running like this. We have to kill that thing.”
“With our bare hands?” Pav said.
“No,” Zhao said. “We need a weapon. A gun.”
Rachel didn’t believe a gun would be useful against the Long Legs.
“No!” Yvonne said. She stopped; they all did, even the dog. Yvonne looked frantic, confused. “I meant, no, we don’t use bare hands or guns. That thing is…it’s an electrical field that holds it together, puts it back together. Overload it and we kill it.” Yvonne closed her eyes, like a contestant on a game show trying, trying to remember some simple fact. “There are…God, the word…duplicators?”
“Plates?” Rachel said.
“Yes! That duplicating process requires huge amounts of power, so the plates are like…nodes. We need to find a plate.” When the others stared at her, waiting for more, she said. “To electrocute the son of a bitch.”
“And the on switch,” Zhao said. “Don’t forget the on switch.”
Yvonne led them quickly through one last cluster of squat, ugly structures. Cowboy kept racing ahead, and Rachel felt compelled to call him back.
“Why don’t you let him run?” Pav said. “He’s a Revenant. He may know more than we do.” Rachel was ashamed that she hadn’t thought of that. She kept treating Cowboy like, well, an ordinary dog, even though she suspected that, in his canine fashion, he could be channeling the Architects.
“City limits,” Zhao said. He was right; they were out of the mass of buildings and alleys now…hard up against the looming, curving wall of the habitat.
The smooth quasi-concrete ground surface gave way to raw, packed-down earth. There were even patches of greenery and some trees…everything looking old.
This wasn’t a walkway. Every few meters lay a cluster of pipes or other impediments.
“Which way?” Rachel said.
Yvonne had stopped and, eyes closed, arms outstretched, was turning in a slow circle.
“Great,” Pav said, “now she’s an antenna…”
This struck Rachel as both funny and true.
Yvonne stopped her turn with her arm pointed toward the south end of the habitat. “Somewhere along there,” she said.
“Question,” Rachel said, finding it difficult to talk with the endless exertion. “How do we get the Long Legs on the plate?”
“Bait,” Zhao said. “One of us has to be on the plate, I think. To make the Long Legs attack.”
“Zhao, I volunteer you,” Pav said. He was working his way under, then over, the pipes.
“I’ll do it,” Rachel said. It wasn’t nobility or the desire to sacrifice herself. One of them needed to be bait. She was smaller and quicker than the others. And it would spare her the agony of watching—
Then the Long Legs emerged from an alley—it was now between them and the plate.
Cowboy ran toward the Long Legs, barking furiously. Rachel was amused to note that the Long Legs treated the dog as a threat…backing away and moving to one side.
But they were still unable to reach the plate.
“Sorry, Rach, I don’t think we’re going to be able to use you as bait,” Pav said.
“Yvonne,” Zhao said. “What are you doing?”
The Revenant astronaut had her hands up against the nearest wall, running them slowly, as if searching for a minute crack in the surface.
“Time is our enemy, Yvonne,” Zhao said, his voice growing more agitated.