Zero Aculin's Arc

Chapter 7 of 8

Zero rode two days into the mountains before the dark city showed itself. Sythara rode behind him on the saurian beast, silent since the crash site. She had refused to let him go alone. Now stone walls rose from the rock ahead, black and windowless, crowned with long cannons that swept the sky. He knew no gate, no path, no safe way past the machine-men. He had never crossed these peaks. A blind charge would end with both of them caught. "We watch first," Zero said. He slid off the beast and pulled Sythara down beside a boulder. "We learn how they come and go before we step in the open." Sythara gripped her spear. "You mean we walk into a nest and hope it sleeps." They crept along a ridge above the walls. Zero counted the cannons and found one dead corner, a slope of loose black rock the guns could not reach. He marked it. That was his way in. Then Sythara's foot slipped, and stone clattered down the slope. High on the wall, a shape turned toward them. It was no man. Its head was a smooth dark helm with one blue eye that glowed cold. Armor plated every limb. Red lights burned along its chest. The machine-man raised an arm, and the eye fixed on the ridge. Zero grabbed Sythara and dragged her flat. A beam of light cut the air where she had stood and burned the rock black. More lights woke along the wall. A horn sounded, low and grinding, and the cannons began to swing toward the ridge. "Move," Zero hissed. They scrambled back the way they had come. The saurian beast screamed and bolted before they reached it. Behind them, machine-men poured from a gate Zero had not seen, running in a straight cold line across the rock. Then the ridge itself came alive. Vines burst from a crack in the stone, thick as arms, their leaves lined with teeth. They had woken to the noise. One coiled around a machine-man's leg and pulled him down. Curling jaws snapped shut on his armor. The others stopped to burn the vines, their beams tearing green flesh. It bought Zero seconds. He pulled Sythara into a narrow cleft in the rock. They pressed into the dark while the machine-men fought the writhing mass behind them. The horn still sounded. The cold blue eyes still swept the slope. Zero pressed his back to the stone and breathed. He had his answer. There was no safe way in. The machine-men saw everything, and they did not tire. But he had seen the dead corner in their guns, and a gate that opened when they hunted. "They know we are here now," Sythara whispered. "Yes," Zero said. He watched a machine-man tear the last vine apart and turn its glowing eye back toward the ridge. "So we cannot come as hunters. We must come as prey they think they've already caught."