A voice from far away, its speaker hidden in shadows, boomed, “Violence will not bring us closer to the Mystery. We are stewards only. Do not forget that our aim here is not peace nor comfort. Our final destination, our final home, is not this land we find ourselves in. Seek comfort, seek peace, and you will find yourself resting when you should have your eyes upon the Paradise to come. Do not succumb to the temptation to take arms up against the Crimson Queen. She is not our true enemy. She is but a distraction, a thorn, that threatens to steer us from our faith in the great Mystery.”
The Barlgharel nodded fervently in agreement. “Ah! Wisdom has raised its voice. I had hoped that at least one—”
He stopped speaking suddenly and scanned the space above them. She followed his gaze and was astounded again by how dark everything was. Dark streaks appeared on the rises around them. The beanstalk of the Jacob lift was covered in soot until it disappeared in the billowing dark clouds above. A flash of lightning erupted from inside the clouds, giving everything a sickly, yellow incandescence. In the strobe light, the bots around her were revealed, and she wished they hadn’t. These were not the well-functioning, maintained servants that operated in her Disc. This motley array was all battered, dented, and streaked. She fit right in. The amphitheater, revealed in a second strobe, was a collection of broken chunks. Something huge had destroyed this place, and much of the structure was split and splintered.
A third lightning strike strobed, and there, far above them, at the top of the assembly, seven large burlys stood.
The plunging darkness after the strobe seemed to reach to infinity. There was no sound except the far-off booming of the lightning. The speaker had stopped talking. The world froze.
Ralph, his high-pitched voice unmistakable, shouted, “Flee!”
Everything fell into chaos. The bots scattered, avoiding each other and streaking out of the assembly. The burlys rushed down upon the group, bellowing their harrowing shouts as they did so.
Syn leapt to her feet and scanned for Blip. “Blip, we have to…” She remembered Blip was gone, and the crush of the instinct and memory thudded against her.
The Barlgharel moved in front of her, shielding her from the burlys. “Hop on!”
She looked for an Ogun or something else. What was he talking about?
He was looking back at the portion of his body that slithered against the ground. On him. He wanted her to hop on him.
The burlys were still rushing toward them, but they were slower and less agile than they had been in the zero-gravity. She searched for the armless one, suspecting this ambush might be vengeance, but she didn’t see him. This set of them were new. How many were there? An army full? Was this who they were going to war with? If so, her answer to the Barlgharel would be to avoid the war and live.
She swung a leg up and over the Barlgharel’s back. Blip had forced her to ride a horse when she was younger. At first, she had been begging to do it. She had watched some movie where the knights fought on horseback and was intrigued. Yet, when she saw the horses in real life, with her own eyes, their fierce natures disturbed her in a way other wild animals hadn’t. They did not just seem like animals. They were like the thunder themselves in a thick hide. At that point, Blip had to cajole her to mount the horse he had chosen, the tamest of the herd. She had relented and found delight in the experience.
The Barlgharel took off, moving off to the left in a hurry. This was nothing like riding horses. There was nothing to grab hold of, so she pinched his sides with her legs and wrapped her arms around his dented metal carapace. His awful stench was all she could smell. Despite the odor of blood and sweat and vomit, the Barlgharel’s funk was invasive. The smell of the sewers he had been working in since activated permeated every bit of his shell. She was working to not vomit again.
A bot screeched and something flew over their heads. It was Ralph. He smashed into the wall ahead of them and shattered into a rain of pieces. Several small metal bits clinked off of the front the Barlgharel and a few struck her side. The Barlgharel twisted and moved up the rise just as a burly jumped from the shadows in front of them. Where had that one come from? She was confident they had fled away from the mass. Or was there a second flight? Had the raid been simply an attempt to divert the assembly of bots into flanking ambushers? Yes, that’s what had happened.
“Back to the corridor!” she shouted at the Barlgharel.
It turned back as it rose up. “No. They’re in that hall too.”
“You’re heading right toward them.”
“Yes,” he responded.
“What?” she shrieked just as they mounted the top of the amphitheater rise to see a line of the burlys blocking the gap ahead. “Stop!”
“Keep your head down.” The Barlgharel surged forward, “And hold on.”
A meter ahead of the raging line, the Barlgharel pulled back and then sprang up into the air. The two jumped up and cleared the entire set. His massive form flew over the top of the burlys. Below them, Syn spotted one of the burlys with her spear gripped in his hand. She screamed, “That’s mine!” In reply, it flung it toward her. The tip bit hard into her leg and stuck. She wailed in pain as the spear dug into the plate of the Barlgharel, trapping her leg. The two landed with a hard thud on a sand-covered patch of territory beyond the amphitheater. The impact sent a jolt of pain through her leg and she felt light-headed as the blood rushed away from her head. She cried out.
The Barlgharel shouted, “Are you hurt?”
“Go!” she screamed, glancing back at the pursuing burlys. “Go!”
Another stab of pain rushed up her leg, and then everything went dark.
20
IN A TWINKLING OF AN EYE
“Then the Lord God said, ‘Behold, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever’— therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to guard the way to the tree of life.”
When she woke next, they were out of the open air. Small, white candles flickered atop tables around her. The candle light danced shadows throughout the small room. Syn lay on a small bed covered in a pink-flowered quilt. A child’s room. A little girl’s room. Pictures of cartoon bears decorated the walls. Bright plastic cartoon pony dolls stood on shelves all staring out at her. Stuffed animals rested in a pile in the corner. The room looked perfect. There was no damage. No destruction.
Had she fallen asleep in one of the settlements? On her Disc? Had the other Disc been a dream?
“Blip?” she whispered. It must have been a dream. All of the madness of the carbon-copy world full of dumb bots that were now smart and wild men and ambushes and a burned-out corpse of a world. All of it was the fuel of nightmares, the very spawn of nightmares. It was more vivid than one she’d ever had before. But it was over.
“Blip?” She asked again as she swung her legs over the side of the bed. When her feet touched the ground, she buckled under the pain and collapsed onto the hardwood floors, crying and holding her leg. Under her fingers, she felt the soft touch of bandages. I was hurt. I was stabbed. By a burly. It was all real. The dread stole upon her. It was all real. Blip was gone. Blip was stolen, and she was in a nightmare version of reality.