“Fine!” Stefani shouted.
“We’re ready to go!” Carlee shouted back.
Jeff turned to see three new antigravity vehicles floating in the air next to Carlee. Weapons stuck out from the front and back of each, and the bikes pulsed with a faint interior glow. They looked like futuristic versions of a hover-scooter that Jeff had seen a merchant ride through Fifth Springs a few years prior.
“Yours is set to follow mine,” Carlee said as they approached their bikes. “Pull the triggers to shoot.”
“Right!” Jeff said.
Stefani fired off a few more shots before she joined them. Jeff was almost seated when the ground shook as a thirty-foot, stark-white Apostle landed right in front of them. The cloud of dust nearly obscured it from view, but Jeff could see the force-field wings deactivate as the human-formed Apostle stood before them. He instantly recognized it as the second Apostle that he had seen in Fifth Springs.
“Go!” Stefani shouted. Shots fired from her particle rifle in a flurry, colliding helplessly with the shields protecting the Apostle. Jeff struggled to hold on to his bike as it shot forward, snapping his neck back painfully. The Apostle started to move, but it suddenly found itself encased in force fields, which Jeff had no doubt were Carlee’s doing.
The Apostle’s fist glowed blue, and it somehow punched through the force-field barrier, where it was immediately greeted by a flurry of blasts from Stefani. Jeff wanted to scream to her, to tell her to get going, but they were already too far away, racing over the landscape. The Apostle didn’t even bother to shield himself as it moved toward Stefani.
“Hoods up!” Carlee said. Her voice echoed quietly behind him, coming from the hood that rested on the top of his cloak. “Pull your hood up!”
Jeff reached back with one hand and pulled the hood over his head. Somehow, it tightened, fastening to his head, and filled his ears. The rushing air was gone. And he could hear Carlee breathing. Other information appeared in faint outlines in his vision, and a tiny menu of text items became available.
“What is this?” Jeff asked.
“Leeches ahead.” Carlee ignored his question, just as little identifiers hit his eyes, showing him that what she said was true. “Be ready.”
“We have to go back for Stefani!” Jeff shouted.
“We can’t.” Her voice wavered slightly, but she didn’t question herself. “She’ll make it out.”
“Against an Apostle? She needs our help!”
“Stef is one the best vagrants I’ve ever met. She has a few tricks up her sleeve.”
The leeches appeared in front of them, and balls of unstable energy shot from Carlee’s bike, catching one of them before it could maneuver. A bubble of energy popped around the rolling leech, creating a small lightning storm that wasn’t over by the time Jeff whipped by it. Two more leeches came into view, and this time Jeff pulled the trigger behind his grips, shooting out energy from his bike.
The leech he was targeting dodged his attacks, but doing so slowed it down enough for them to race past it. His enhanced view didn’t show any more leeches up ahead, and they quickly outran the last ones.
“Good job,” Carlee flatly.
“We should go back.”
“No, the last thing we need is Stefani seeing us going back, trying to heroes again.”
“But—”
“Jeff, no. It’s not smart. Not as dumb as me pressing back there . . . I don’t know what I was thinking.”
The bikes were faster than the transports, and they flew by free-ranging cattle and crops faster than Jeff could process them. They passed a number of humans as well, and he was fairly certain that they were all naked. He didn’t see any houses or other signs of humanity, but they passed more than a few people.
“No clothes allowed in this part of town?” Jeff tried to change the subject for Carlee’s sake. It was clear she was blaming herself for what had happened.
“We’ve never been in this area before, but we know that Petra is big on preserving nature. It makes humans live as close to their animal origins as possible.”
“You didn’t mention that when you were planning on leaving me in Dallas.” He regretted the joke before it even left his mouth. It was no time to joke. Stefani might have laughed, but she was back fighting an Apostle on her own.
The farther they got from the site of the leech ambush, the slower Carlee set their pace. Soon they were moving only slightly faster than Jeff could run. The endless fields rolled by slowly now as Jeff tried to force himself to press. He wasn’t very successful, as his mind kept drifting back to Stefani. He couldn’t help but feel like they had just done to Stefani what Dane had done to him.
“Couldn’t you have just pressed the Apostle out of existence?” Jeff asked. “Just press in some air from a different reality where it was standing or something. Make it disappear?”
“I wish I could,” Carlee said. “But there are limitations to what we can do. To what I can do.”
“That sucks.”
“Life can’t be pressed either way. I can’t press something into the space life occupies in our reality, and I can’t pull in life from another. Most vagrants try to do it anyway at some point. It just gets . . . messy.”
“And an Apostle qualifies for that?”
“Apparently,” Carlee said.
“That really sucks. Those monsters aren’t alive. I don’t care how smart they are. They’re still not natural.”
“If we are natural, and we created them, doesn’t that make them natural?”
“I’ve never heard you call them natural intelligences.”
Carlee didn’t respond immediately, and Jeff didn’t rush her. They passed by a few children, all naked as could be, running around and chasing one another without a care in the world. They stopped and stared at their bikes as they passed, but they carried on a moment later. It was bizarre to see them so carefree, so simple, and so unaware that an army of leeches and Apostles was not far away, ready to rain destruction down on every living soul. But they seemed happy, and for that, Jeff was jealous.
But he knew he couldn’t give up and live a simple life. Not anymore. Not after everything he had been through and learned. For whatever reason, he was on a path that had given him a chance at revenge and much more.
“It’s harder to press things at a distance,” Carlee said. Jeff got the feeling that she was talking because she didn’t want to think about her friend, not because she wanted to teach him. It was fine with him. He didn’t want to think about Stefani either. “Lots of vagrants can’t even press anything unless they are close enough to touch it once it’s in our reality.”
“Interesting,” Jeff said. There were plenty of questions he wanted to ask, but he knew Carlee wasn’t finished teaching yet.
“And there is a complexity issue as well, which is related to the size issue. Basically, the bigger and more complex something is, the harder it is to create a connection strong enough to press it from one reality into another.”
“Transports are doable, but Apostles are too big? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Apostles are alive and extremely complex, and they also like to be massive. I think that one we saw back there was the smallest I’ve ever observed.”
“But what about parts of them? The parts that aren’t temurim? Couldn’t you just replace one of their legs with a bomb or something?”
“And that’s the final limitation. You can’t press parts of things. It has to be an entire object. Half-leg bombs probably don’t exist in any reality anyway.”
“So, it doesn’t seem like there is any quick way to kill an Apostle,” Jeff said.
“There is no way to kill an Apostle. That’s why we don’t try.”
“Stefani sure did.”
“No, she didn’t.”
“What do you call that back there, then?”
“Distracting it so we could get away. She’ll be fine.”