Welcome to the moon! I crowed silently. Let’s see how your five-hundred-year-old minds cope with one-sixth gravity.
I skipped toward them, taking great bounding steps. Before, I had been the clumsy one. Now the others stumbled as they tried to adjust to this new environment. I would have smiled, if my hinged jaw had allowed it. I landed hard, bending my knees to absorb my momentum and sliding into the closest automaton. It reached for my head, but I crouched lower, gripping it by the waist and hurling it skyward.
I wasn’t strong enough to toss it into orbit, but judging by the arc of ascent, it wouldn’t come back down for a good half mile or so.
Another automaton charged me. I dug my feet into the ground and braced myself as it slammed a wooden fist into my side. I skidded backward, but it was the other automaton that lost its footing, spinning in a circle from the power of its own attack. I seized it by the head and twirled, swinging it like a club against the next of its fellows.
Unfortunately, my makeshift weapon was already adapting. Hinged fingers tightened around my wrists, twisting hard enough to strain my joints. I raised it overhead and slammed it to the ground, but it refused to let go. Another automaton closed in, hands outstretched. I was still outnumbered, and once they got their hands on me, the moon’s weaker gravity wouldn’t stop them from ripping me apart piece by piece.
The automaton’s fingers dug through the metal blocks on my wrist, tearing several of them free. A strip of my wrist went numb as that spell died. I allowed myself to fall backward, raising both feet to my chest. The other automaton followed me down, and I kicked it in the neck with all of my strength. The automaton snapped away, spinning like a bicycle tire.
I fled, stalling as long as I could, trying to absorb every detail of the experience: the gentle pull of gravity; the way the dust dropped in a vacuum, every speck falling like a lead weight; the Earth hanging overhead, so large it gave the impression it could come crashing down on us at any moment. I scooped up another rock and held it as if it were more precious than gold.
They spread out to surround me. Two bounced through the air, while the third kept to the ground, looking like a slow-motion jogger. Interesting… different automatons adapted differently, suggesting they retained at least a little individuality and independence within their wood-and-metal shells. The fourth flickered into view to my left.
Ready for another ride?
How much time had passed since I arrived? Five minutes, maybe? It would never be enough. I stared at the Earth, mentally reorienting myself so that I was no longer looking up, but down. That was an awfully long way to fall.
The nice thing about this body was that I appeared to be incapable of experiencing vertigo. Fear, on the other hand, I could feel just fine.
I studied the Pacific Ocean, still shining in the sunlight. Another automaton flew at me. I jumped away, doing my best to estimate distances and calculate acceleration. I had to guess at both. The radius of the Earth was roughly 6400 kilometers. Using that as my guide, I picked a spot roughly 7000 kilometers up, activated the automaton’s magic, and disappeared.
Earth’s gravity began to pull me home from the moment I materialized. There was no air here, which meant I had no way to control my fall, and nothing to slow my acceleration.
For the first time, I noticed a significant design flaw in Gutenberg’s automatons: there was no way to close my eyes. I tried to lose myself in math instead. This high up, the pull of gravity would be fractionally less than 9.8 meters per second squared. Maybe eighty percent of normal?
The other automatons flickered into view around me, but I fell right past them. They vanished and reappeared, trying to get ahead of me, but each time they lost momentum.
I used my own magic to travel to a point just above them, shedding velocity in a brilliant flare of light. We weren’t quite close enough to touch each other. Light-speed travel didn’t allow for precision. One appeared directly below me, but I plowed through it like a locomotive, leaving it pinwheeling overhead.
After that, we simply fell together. For the moment, they seemed content to follow. Nothing could flee forever.
This body lacked the inner sense of balance and acceleration that would have allowed me to gauge our speed or how long we fell. Earth grew noticeably larger, and continued to expand below us. Given time and a calculator, I might have been able to estimate our height based on the apparent size of the planet, but that was beyond my ability to do in my head.
My thoughts began to drift. What would the Porters tell my parents? They couldn’t exactly head out west, knock on the door, and say, “We regret to inform you that your son was stabbed by a dryad, then lost his body when he entered a clockwork golem.”
They should make pamphlets. How to cope with the loss of a loved one: A guide to selective magical amnesia. I could have used some instructions back in college, for that matter. How to make your girlfriend believe you’re really not cheating on her, and you’re just a member of a secret magical organization called Die Zwelf Porten?re, founded by a guy who supposedly died in 1468.
Die Zwelf Porten?re. The Twelve Doorkeepers. Books were a doorway to magic, and the automatons were living books. I had passed through that doorway. Surely there was a way to pass back, to re-create my physical body…
Doorkeepers. Guardians.
I thought back to my first encounter with Hubert, in Detroit. Whatever had come after me in that book had felt like a living mind. Not a character, not a spell, but another presence, desperate and starving.
What if Hubert hadn’t sent that thing through the book? What if it had already been there, living in magic itself? Locked away. What had Hubert said? Everything comes down to locking the doors. Creating prisons.
It made sense. That was why Pallas had wanted to keep me under guard. I had reached too deep into magic, and she was afraid of what I might have brought back.
Turbulence jolted me back to the present. At this speed, even the thinnest air at the very edge of Earth’s atmosphere battered me harder than any automaton. I spread my arms and legs, tilting my hands like rudders to spin myself toward the closest automaton. The air below grew hotter as I flew closer.
It reached out to grab me, but this time I welcomed the attack. I wrapped the other automaton in a bear hug, wrenching us both around so it was beneath me. “Ever wonder why meteorites burn up in the atmosphere? Welcome to your first and last lesson in twenty-first-century physics.”
By now, we should have been traveling at many times the speed of sound. Our bodies compressed the air, superheating the gases below us until they reached temperatures hot enough to vaporize rock… or melt metal. Most meteorites burned up within seconds. My timing would have to be perfect.
I did my best to stay atop the other automaton, using it as my own personal heat shield. The metal skin on my exposed arms began to melt. The air around us turned to flame. I concentrated on the other automaton’s magic, watching spells snap and melt away. The wooden body began to crumble as its protections vanished. I could feel my own magic struggling to hold me together.
“Yeah, it’s a short lesson.” Praying this worked, I concentrated on the ground below and shouted, “Dixitque Deus fiat lux et facta est lux!”
I imagine I looked a bit like the Human Torch as I materialized above the parking lot, my arms blackened, my body covered in flame. I dropped a good forty feet, smashing through a Hummer that was too slow to drive out of the way.
My hands were useless lumps of coal, held together only by magic. The air rippled from the heat rising off my body. But I was alive, more or less. I rolled off the crumpled remains of the truck and climbed to my feet. The winged vampire who had been guarding the roof swooped toward me, then apparently thought better of it.