Zero Aculin's Arc

Chapter 8 of 8

Zero waited in the cleft while the horn died. The machine-men would sweep the slope again soon. To be taken, he first had to be found in the open, and no patrol would leave the walls without a lure. He needed bait that moved and screamed and pulled them out. Then he saw it clinging to the rock above Sythara's head. A long crawling thing, its body a mass of tiny shifting shapes. Its edges blurred and vanished, then sharpened again. A swarm bound as one creature. Zero had seen it flee light on the ridge. Light drew it. Light also drew the machine-men. "Do not touch it," Sythara whispered. "I need it," Zero said. He cut a strip from his skins and looped it over the creature's back. It writhed but did not bite. He hauled it down and carried it to the mouth of the cleft. He set it on bare rock where the cannons could see. Then he fired his blaster into the sky. The bolt lit the dark like a torch. The swarm-thing screamed, a dry chittering sound, and its bodies scattered wide across the slope, then snapped back together. It made noise enough for ten fleeing hunters. High on the black wall, blue eyes turned. The grinding horn woke again. The hidden gate ground open, and machine-men poured out in a cold straight line, guns up, racing toward the noise. "Now," Zero said. He dropped his blaster and his spear on the rock. "Weapons down. Hands open. We are prey." Sythara stared at him. "You are mad." "They take what runs. So we do not run." He stepped into the open with empty hands. The machine-men reached the screaming swarm and burned it apart. Then their eyes found Zero and Sythara, standing still, unarmed. The guns swung. Zero did not move. A machine-man seized his arms and wrenched them behind him. Cold metal fingers closed on his wrists. Another took Sythara. They did not fire. They marched the two through the gate into the dark city. Halls of native stone swallowed the sky. At the end sat a shape on a black throne. A shriveled old man, half buried in tubes and cables that fed his sunken face. A great dark dome hung above his head on metal arms. Drool ran from his slack mouth. The leader of the machine-men. A soldier set Zero's own blaster on a rack against the wall, among other trophies taken from the caught. Zero marked it. His weapon was inside now, close, waiting. The old man's throat clicked. "Two more," he breathed. "Cage them with the rest." Metal hands dragged Zero deeper into the stone. He had gotten in. Now the third core lay somewhere in this black warren, and he wore no weapon and no plan but the one that had just walked him into a cage.