I remembered that hideous goblin face smiling at me. “He said the same thing to me,” I told them. “It makes for maximum fuel efficiency.” I was glad no one could see my face in the dark.
“We hoped you would come back for us,” Jo said, “or that you’d get back to InterWorld and they would send out a search and rescue party. But as the weeks went by and you didn’t come, we started to lose hope. And when they took us to HEX Prime and put us on the Malefic, I think we all knew we were dead meat.”
I briefly explained what had happened—how HEX had used a shadow realm to throw us off the trail and how I’d been mustered out and mind wiped, only to regain my memory, thanks to Hue. Just about the time I finished, J/O said he saw light ahead.
It took another ten minutes of walking before the rest of us saw it—J/O’s cybervision was much more sensitive to light than ordinary eyes. But eventually we all came out of the tunnel and into the light, and stared down in awe.
We stood on a mezzanine overlooking what had to be the engine room. I’m still not sure how the Malefic flew, but if sheer size counts for anything, the engines had power to spare. They were gigantic. The chamber must have taken up the entire lowest level of the ship. Below us were enormous pistons and valves and rotating gears as big as the city rotunda back in Greenville. Steam shot from huge petcocks, and bus bars slammed together with deafening clangs. It reminded me of pictures I’d seen of the engine rooms on old ocean liners like Titanic—only those ships didn’t have trolls and goblins tending the machinery.
Then Jai touched my arm and pointed to one side. I turned, and saw what was powering the engines: a huge wall stacked floor to ceiling with what looked like large apothecary jars, or old-fashioned apple cider bottles, made of thick glass. In each of them was what looked like the glow of a firefly, without the firefly—a gentle luminescence that pulsed slightly in rhythm with the pounding machinery. They came in many colors, from firefly green to fluorescent yellows and oranges and eye-popping purples. A tube went up from the top of each jar to a huge pipe in the ceiling, which went down to the center of the engine.
“These are our brothers,” whispered Jai.
“And sisters,” added Jakon.
I touched the side of one cold jar with my hand, and it glowed a bright orange at my touch, as if it recognized me. Inside these jars was the fuel that drove the dreadnought: the essence of Walkers like me, disembodied, bottled and enslaved.
The glass, or whatever material it was, seemed to vibrate slightly. All I could think of was that scene from a hundred different horror movies, in which someone who’s been possessed has a moment of sanity and pleads, “Kill me!”
“That could have been us,” growled Jakon.
“It still could be,” rumbled Josef.
“It’s an abomination,” said Jo. “I wish there was something we could do for them.”
“There is,” said Jai. His mouth was an angry line. Jai had always seemed so gentle. Now I could feel his anger in the air, like static before a thunderstorm.
He furrowed his brow and stared at a glass jar far above us. I thought I saw it shiver. Jai concentrated harder, closing his eyes—and the jar shattered, exploding with a pop! like a firecracker. A light hung in the air where the jar had been, edging nervously about, as if it were unused to freedom.
I looked at the others. We were all in agreement.
The iron thing I’d taken from the rendering room looked something like a poleax, with a blade on one side of the head and a blunt hammer on the other. The right tool for the job, as Dad would say.
I stepped forward. I yelled as I swung it—a savage cry that almost drowned out the sound of it smashing into the jars. About five of them shattered with the first blow. The glows within those bottles flared brightly, enough to leave an afterimage.
The rest of the team went at it with just as much enthusiasm and more. The air was filled with flying glass and strobing lights. I stole a glance over my shoulder. Pandemonium was taking place down in the engine room. The huge pistons were stuttering, pumping out of sequence or stopping completely. Steam was venting more and more furiously from various valves and exploding from pipes. Goblins, gremlins and other kinds of fairy-tale rejects were scrambling around like rats on hot tin, panicked.
The great machine was stopping.
At the moment, I didn’t care. I just cared about freeing the souls of all the different versions of me from their glass prisons. As each bottle smashed and popped, I felt brighter and stronger. More complete.
More alive.
I realized that Josef was actually singing as he smashed. He had a high, tenor voice. It seemed to be a song about an old woman, her nose and a number of herrings; and it made me wonder what kind of world he came from.
And then I noticed something.
The lights weren’t fading, once they were freed from their bottles. They were hanging there in space. If anything they were getting brighter, pulsing their firefly colors. They were collecting just above our heads. I didn’t know if what was left of them could appreciate what we did or not. It didn’t matter. We knew.
Jakon smashed the final bottle; and it popped and cracked, and the soul inside was freed, and rose to hang with the others.
Everything was electric. I mean that literally—it felt like the air was supercharged: Every hair on my body was standing on end. I was scared to touch anything in case I might somehow zap it to cinders. And the lights hung above us.
Maybe we imagined it, but if we did, we all imagined it at the same time. I like to think that because, on some very real level, they were us—or they had once been us, before they were slaughtered and used to power a ship between the worlds—that what they thought spilled over to us.
They thought revenge. They thought destruction. They thought hate. And, observing us, they pulsed something that felt a whole lot like thank you.
The soul lights began to glow more and more brightly, so brightly that all of us except Jakon and J/O were forced to look away. And then they moved, and I thought I could hear the wind whistling as they went.
Down by the engines the trolls and goblins were bolting everywhere in terror and panic. They didn’t have a chance in hell—literally. As the lights hit them, each one of them burst into something that looked like an X-ray image that flared and then was gone.
The lights reached the engines.
I suppose that I’d hate those engines, too, if I’d been driving them with everything I had, everything I was. When the sparks reached the engines, they vanished. It was like the steel and iron and bronze and steam had somehow sucked them in.
“What are they doing?” asked J/O.
“Hush,” said Jakon.
“I hate to go all practical and everything,” I said, “but Lord Dogknife and Lady Indigo are probably sending more troops down that tunnel after us right about now. In fact, I’m surprised they haven’t—”
“Quiet,” said Jo. “I think she’s going to blow.”
And then she blew, and it was wonderful. It was like a light show and a fireworks show and the destruction of Sauron’s tower…everything you could imagine it could be. The Malefic’s engines seemed to start to dissolve in light, in flame, in magic; and then, with a rumble that grew into a prehistoric roar, they blew.
“That is indubitably an supereminent conflagration,” sighed Jai, a huge smile on his face.