Horizon (31 page)

They were in either a laboratory or a torture chamber, or possibly both. Tables with restraints connected to hulking machines that beeped and flickered with lights. Drains dotted the floor at regular intervals. A familiar horse stood chained to the floor, her legs splayed for support, her head hanging so low that her black nose almost touched the floor.

Vachir.
Alive.
Calli wanted to weep with relief, not just for herself, but for Aluna.

“Dashiyn!” cried Nathif.

Calli followed his gaze. In the back of the room sat three small cages. Two stood empty, their floors smeared dark with old blood, but the third cage held a crumpled, unmoving body that she recognized immediately.

“Dash!” Nathif called again. He put Pocket on the ground, then burst forward . . . into another invisible force wall. Odd yanked him back immediately, and the damage was slight. Nathif groaned and put a hand to his head.

“Another force wall. It’s blocking off the whole room,” Calli said. “We’re trapped!”

A small woman walked out from behind one of the massive machines. Her brown hair and glasses were unmistakable, but it was her cruel smile that Calli remembered most.

“Scorch,” Calli said.

Scorch wasn’t tall, but she carried herself like a great eagle, as if there were no predator in the world dangerous enough to be a threat to her.

“I can’t tell you how pleased I was to find Aluna’s beast and this pathetic boy practically begging to be captured,” Scorch said. “But you know me — I never settle. I want it all.” She walked crisply to the other side of the force field. “Thank you for complying.”

A trap
, Calli thought. It was all a stupid trap, and she’d fallen for it completely.

Odd ran back to the door and tried to pry it open with his fingers. Calli let him try, but she knew it was hopeless. Those doors weighed tons. They were stuck in five meters of empty space between the door and the force shield, and Scorch could do whatever she wanted with them.

Vachir lifted her head and let out a strangled cry. Calli winced. How she longed to run over and throw her arms around Vachir, to break the chains around her hooves and neck.

But Dash . . . Dash didn’t move at all. He lay on the floor of his tiny cell, and for the first time since they’d started this rescue mission, she realized that he might truly be dead.

“You’ve hurt them,” Calli said, her heart a painful rock in the center of her chest. “If you’ve
killed
them . . .”

“You will suffer if you have,” Nathif added, his voice anguished.

“Oh, the boy is not dead yet,” Scorch said. She smiled and tilted her head. “At least, not since I last checked. I wanted to catch a few more flies with my honey. Now that you’re here, well, I don’t need the boy or the horse anymore, do I?” She laughed.

Scorch walked over and stood in front of Nathif. “I remember you. You cured that fool Onggur and turned those ridiculous Equians against me. I might have to kill you first . . . after a little fun.”

Nathif’s face drained of color and he balled his hands into fists. Calli could see him struggling to hold himself together. He’d been tortured before, by Dash’s own herd. Even the mention of it seemed too much for him to handle.

“Leave the snake be,” Mags said. “You want to tussle, tussle with your own.” She motioned to Odd and Pocket and shoved her hands into her coat, no doubt selecting the perfect poison for the occasion.

Scorch ignored Mags and turned to Calli. “Ah, the girl I should have killed in the desert. Your entire race will be wiped out for what they did to my brother Tempest. Your precious mountain home is being sacked even now. When I see one of our people wearing feathers after this, I will wonder which one of your friends they killed.” She spat at Calli. Her saliva sizzled against the force wall. “I see you’ve won a few of the weaker-minded Gizmos to your side. What did you promise them?”

Calli glowered, but kept quiet. Anything she said now would only make things worse.

Scorch stalked back to Mags, ran her gaze up and down the Upgrader’s coat-clad body. “Actually, you look like a smart, resourceful sort of Gizmo.”

Odd lumbered over and stood next to Mags. He grabbed Pocket to his side and gripped his club in his other hand.

Scorch nodded appreciatively. “Big. Strong. And the boy has hidden talents, too, I suspect. So the question is, are you loyal?”

Pocket started to answer, but Odd clamped his huge hand over the boy’s mouth. Scorch smiled.

“We Upgraders need to look out for one another,” Scorch said. “The Aviars have never liked us. They live in their high towers and they hunt us! All of the splinters think they’re better than us. More deserving of respect. More worthy of life.” She leaned in toward Mags. “Whatever this Aviar is paying you, I will triple it . . . and guarantee that you’ll never go hungry or want for anything ever again.”

Mags narrowed her eyes. “We’ll be safe?”

Calli held her breath. Odd’s kludge had wanted this from the beginning — a reward for turning her in to Karl Strand and the promise of an easier life. How had she not seen it? They’d been working with Strand’s Upgraders the whole time. No wonder it had been so easy to sneak down the tunnel!

“You’ll all be safe, even the quick rabbit of a girl outside,” Scorch said. “You have my word.”

No. No!
Calli screamed, but the words stayed trapped inside her, like birds in a cage.

Scorch smiled and pushed her glasses further up her nose. “All you have to do is kill the girl and the snake-boy. Right here. Right now.”

W
HEN HE TURNED AROUND
, Hoku’s first thought was that they’d hidden in the trash room. Far overhead, stalactites hung from the natural cave ceiling, threatening to drop on their heads. Water trailed down the walls and dripped onto the towering piles of discarded items filling every centimeter of the vast cavern, except for the wide path leading from the door.

“What is all this stuff?” Aluna dragged herself to the nearest junk heap and lifted up a small cylinder made of glazed pottery.

Hoku told his Datastreamers to scan the item and cross-reference the image with the data he’d uploaded from Seahorse Alpha. The answer came back almost immediately.

“A vase,” Hoku said. “The ancients used to stick flowers in it.”

“Because . . . ?”

Data whirred in front of his eyes, telling him the object’s height, the circumference of its opening, and its probable weight. None of that answered Aluna’s question, so he took a guess: “So they could eat them later?”

Aluna snorted and put the vase back on the pile. “Let’s move away from the door in case they check in here,” she said, and began pulling herself down the path. “At least until the alarm stops.”

Hoku followed, his eyes filling with words he only occasionally understood: rocking chair, bathtub, sectional sofa, floor lamp, bookcase, mirror, alarm clock, refrigerator. His Datastreamers highlighted each item as it displayed its name. He struggled to understand the words, but something in here could be useful. Microscope, clipboard, telescope, centrifuge.

“Everything here is from ancient times!” he blurted out. He swept his gaze across two more piles. Data bloomed in his eyes. “Nothing here is less than five hundred years old, I’d guess. In such a wet room — I’m surprised it’s not all covered with mold.”

A clang rang through the cave. Hoku looked up and saw an eight-legged Humanoid creature about ten meters away, atop a pile of furniture. A Dome Mek! It seemed focused on cleaning the “dresser” in front of it. After wiping the whole thing with a cloth, the Mek lifted the large piece of furniture over its head, skittered to another pile, and gently placed the dresser amid a different collection of strange objects.

“That’s some job it has,” Hoku whispered.

“Is the Mek dangerous?” Aluna asked. “It doesn’t seem to see us.”

Hoku scanned the room for Meks, and his Datastreamers illuminated five more, all performing the same tasks. He read the Meks’ systems and found only one command echoing over and over again:
CLEAN
.

“Why is this stuff so valuable?” Hoku said. “There’s a little tech, but it’s too old to be reused. Most of this stuff seems functional, or maybe like art.”

Hoku wandered down the path and kept scanning. He told Zorro to do the same. He refused to believe that Karl Strand would keep a room full of junk that served no purpose. Aluna kept up with him, but her eyes were on the Dome Meks and the door, not the mishmash of artifacts.

“At least we know why there wasn’t anything in the house,” Aluna said. “Judging from the size of this cave, Strand must have scavenged every object from the entire citywreck.”

They wandered deeper and deeper into the cave. The Dome Meks buzzed and clanked softly as they worked, and the incessant
drip-drip-drip
of water from the ceiling had a comforting rhythm.

They should have known it was a trap.

In the back of the cave, a massive shadow shifted in the darkness.

“What is it?” Aluna whispered. “It’s huge.”

Hoku’s Datastreamers scanned the shadow and flashed
HYDRA
across his eyes, along with references to ancient mythology that he had no time to read. He took another step forward. His tech tried to make sense of the creature’s outline, but the wild images it threw in front of his eyes made no sense. Unless . . . unless he and Aluna had wandered into the prison of some ancient Above World monster.

The creature lumbered out of its alcove, its clawed feet scraping the ground, and Hoku gasped. It was big as a whale, but covered in shimmering scales of green and purple. Its wide body looked like a rhinebra’s, striped and armored and indestructible. Its four finned legs were bent at angles, like a lizard’s.

But from the hydra’s massive body sprung the real horror — seven sinuous necks, each thick as a tree trunk, each ending in a vicious, fanged reptile head. Fins flared out from its jaws and ran over the tops of its heads.

Most of the creature’s heads twined around one another, hissing and spitting. Forked tongues shot out and retracted. The three heads in the middle swayed back and forth amid the wild writhing of the others. The biggest head sprang out of the creature’s centermost neck and turned its terrifying gaze upon them.

“There’s something wrong with its heads,” Aluna said. “They look like lizards, but they almost look Human, too.”

Hoku used his Datastreamers to magnify the head in the middle and shuddered. Aluna was right. The hydra had unmistakably Human eyes. And when it opened its mouth to speak, a Human voice filled the cave.

“Welcome to my home,” the creature hissed, five of its seven heads speaking in perfect unison. “I am Karl Strand.”

Strand’s words echoed in the cave, and for a moment, all Hoku could do was listen and try to process what he’d just heard.

The monster was
Strand.
Strand, who wanted to rule the world. Strand, who had wanted to live forever, and had found a way.

Then Aluna screamed, “Attack!” and the world zoomed forward, as if Hoku had told Zorro to speed up a video. Aluna took off, her arms pulling her body and tail over the smooth rock of the path, straight at Karl Strand. Her Kampii body looked so tiny, like a dolphin swimming at Big Blue.

If Strand was inside the hydra somehow, then he must have used tech to do it. Hoku scanned the creature, looking for a computer connection he could exploit.

“Got it!” he said, and Zorro danced on his shoulder. Hoku’s Datastreamers connected to the monster and started to sift through the system, looking for vulnerabilities.

At the other end of the cave, Karl Strand laughed. Five of his heads tilted back and cackled, their forked tongues flicking between the daggerlike fangs.

“How many traps will you stumble into today, boy?” Strand asked.

“Barnacles!” Hoku said, and started to pull out of Strand’s network, severing connections as fast as he could. He wasn’t fast enough.

Searing pain shot through Hoku’s head.
His eyes!
His eyes burned as if they were burrowing into his brain. He screamed and fell to his knees. His fingers found his face, eager to claw away the flesh.

Aluna’s voice found him anyway. “Hang on, Hoku. I’ll try to subdue him as fast as I can. Don’t give up!”

Invisible flames engulfed his head. Hoku screamed again and dropped to the ground. He rolled, desperate to smother the fire, and smacked into a pile of artifacts. They fell on him, sharp and heavy, and such simple pain was almost a relief from the torture in his skull.

Tiny licks covered the backs of his hands. Hoku slapped Zorro away. He didn’t want comfort; he wanted to die.