Feeling foolish, I dashed back after her. We got in, and she made the thing growl. It trembled like an animal coming awake.
“So it is alive,” I said.
“Sure, just keep thinking that, kiddo,” she said, shaking some of the rain from her hair. She made the vehicle move. Quickly.
I yelled and hung on to whatever handholds I could. We tore down the street, far faster than a horse could have galloped. But we also had—in my opinion—far less control. “Things in these States are so uncivilized!”
“Uncivilized?” she shouted.
“The handgun that destroyed the chain, now this. There’s no elegance, just brute force. Watch out for those people! Lords!”
She pushed us around a corner at a ridiculous speed. A good horse would never have let us get this far out of control, and my flying chariots were wonderfully precise. We skirted to the side of the robot, which was crunching its way through the city, still moving toward the building where we’d been dining. It didn’t see us passing.
He can’t track me directly, I thought. Something must have tipped him off to where I was.
Well, with the dinner reservation—and my face on the approved list to get in—I probably hadn’t been difficult to track. I pulled the handgun from its pocket inside my coat. “Can you make this work?”
“I don’t know that I want to be anywhere near you firing one of those,” she said.
“I’m not going to point it at your head, Sophie,” I said dryly. “Make it work.”
She reached over, touching it with her finger. I had a chance to regret distracting her as we almost plowed through a group of people fleeing the robot, but she turned the vehicle just in time.
“Done,” she said, removing her finger. “It is reloaded and fires real bullets now. A simple hack.”
“Yeah, well, someone noticed anyway,” I said.
The robot had turned its massive, red-eyed head our direction. This was by far the largest one Melhi had ever sent after me.
“Damn,” she said. “Your friend is probably monitoring this State for irregularities. Anything I do will alert him.”
I pushed my hand against the glass window on my side of the metal carriage. “Can I . . .”
“Lever on the door,” she said. “Turn it.”
The glass moved down as I turned the lever. Ingenious. I leaned out and pointed the handgun toward the robot, then took three shots in quick succession, my mental boosts kicking in on the first, slowing time for me.
Sure enough, the creature started to trudge after us, its eyes tracking our movements. Firing my weapon let it locate me; the weapons weren’t supposed to fire real bullets in this State, so shooting made a mark on the State’s fabric.
“What was that for?” Sophie demanded.
“I want it following us.”
“What the hell for?”
“Because if it’s coming back this way, it’s moving through the region it already passed, doing less damage,” I said. “Besides, I’ll need it close if I’m going to defeat it.”
I fired a few more times, making certain the robot was going to keep following. Indeed, it picked up its pace. I gulped, ducking back into the vehicle. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this . . . but do these vehicles go any faster?”
They did, apparently. Sophie grinned. I held on for dear life.
“There,” Sophie said.
Ahead of us—hanging about ten feet above the road and surrounded by city debris—was a shimmering to the air, a mother-of-pearl incandescence that obviously didn’t fit. It reminded me of the Grand Aurora, though it was shaped like a very large version of the portal I’d come through to get here.
Sophie stopped the vehicle. Or, well, she stopped driving it—but the vehicle didn’t totally stop. It slid across the ground sideways and slammed into a building. The jerking halt almost made me throw up.
“You are insane,” I said.
“I thought we’d established that,” she replied, crawling woozily from the metal carriage, but still grinning.
I followed her out on shaking feet. The robot was approaching faster than I’d anticipated, and unfortunately this area wasn’t evacuating as quickly as I’d hoped. There were families here, cowering in the wreckage of buildings, despite the rain and the dangers. A weeping girl, no more than four, asked her mother again and again why the ground was shaking.
They have to live in a world that knows only darkness, I thought. So that Liveborn can have a place to come play.
I stumbled away from them, following Sophie toward the rift.
“Give me your hand,” she said as we reached the shimmering.
I gave it to her, and she held on tightly as she went down on one knee, eyes closed.
I felt a tingling.
“I can’t change your code directly,” she said. “I don’t dare.”
“I have code?”
“Worried? I thought you felt Simulated Entities were equal to Liveborn.”
“I didn’t say that. I said Machineborn were people, and that killing them was wrong. Liveborn are absolutely more important.”
“Nice you have your own place in things straight.”
“Well, I am a God-Emperor. Why did you say I have code?”
“Relax. We all have code notations around our core selves; like footnotes added to a textbook by someone studying for exams.”
“What’s a textbook?” I said. Then, after a moment, “What’s an exam?”
“Don’t distract me. Hmm . . . yes. I can’t rewrite your magic without risking frying your mind entirely.”
“Don’t change the magic. Just make it work here.”
“I’m not sure that’s possible; I’d have to change the laws of the entire State. But maybe . . .”
“What?”
The machine’s steps rattled my teeth; I could make out its head over the top of a nearby building, those red eyes glowing in the rain.
“Well,” Sophie said, “all of the code notations that explain how you make your magic work are still there, attached to you. It’s all tied to your State. There’s some kind of intrinsic power source, I assume?”
“Yes,” I said. “You can’t change the magic . . . but can you rewrite the source of its power? Make something in this world capable of fueling my Lancing?”
“Hmm . . . clever. Yes, maybe. Give me a moment.”
The wind started to pick up, the rain turning from a mist to a light shower. My shirt was already plastered to my body, my hair and beard sodden.
The thing emerged upon us, rounding the building nearby, shaving stone from its side.
“Just a moment . . .” Sophie repeated.
“We’re running out of moments, Sophie!”
“Working . . . working quickly as I can . . .” she said. “Oh, this is going to be a patchwork job. Electricity. Maybe I can use electricity as a substitute for your aurora thing. . . .”
“Sophie!” I said. The machine stepped onto our abandoned vehicle with one large foot, crushing it. The rain grew stronger, pelting us.
“There!” Sophie said.
The tingling washed through me, colder than the rain. It left me awake, excited, changed. It had worked. I could feel that it had worked.
Sophie groaned, and her hand slipped from mine. She slumped toward the ground, but I grabbed her and heaved her onto my shoulder, then ran down the street through the increasingly terrible rain, trying to get some distance between us and the robot.
“Unhand me,” Sophie muttered, dazed. “I’m not some damsel from your barbarian lands. . . .”
I reached a sheltered alleyway out of the robot’s sight, and set her down inside. She was limp, her eyes drooping. “I’m not . . .” she said. “I don’t need to be saved, I . . .”
“Think of it this way,” I said. “Your inner feminist must be going insane at the idea of being rescued.”