He was about to reassure her, but his cathor abruptly stopped moving. He kicked it in the ribs but it remained in place. Looking up, he saw a large gate in the dull gray wall around the Spires of Infinity not ten feet in front of him.
“We’re there,” he said in surprise.
“I guess we are.”
Studying the wall, Gabriel thought it had to be at least a hundred yards high, if not more. Regular watchtowers dotted the top, as well as huge guns built right into the wall itself. Dark shapes patrolled the wall tops, though they seemed not to have noticed Gabriel and Sam below.
“Hey,” Gabriel called, waving his hands. “Down here!”
The distant figures paid him no mind.
Looking to Sam, Gabriel found her looking back at him. With an uncomfortable
shrug, she gestured to the gate.
“Have I mentioned this place is supposed to be haunted,” she asked, eyeing the figures atop the wall nervously.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
“Then who are they,” Sam pointed upward. “This place was abandoned centuries
ago! Let’s leave, Gabriel. I have a really bad feeling about this place.”
“You know I can’t.”
Dismounting, Gabriel walked to the gate, leaving Sam to growl something very
unflattering about men that he was pretty sure she meant him to overhear. She dismounted and followed, still grumbling bitterly.
Pounding on the gate, Gabriel soon realized that the metal was far too thick for it to be heard on the other side.
“Look there,” Mister Mittens said, pointing with a paw. “That looks like the
control panels in the Haven. Perhaps your badge will open it.”
Reaching into his coat, Gabriel pulled out the golden plaque. His heavy duster was still stained with dark blotches, though he had washed it thoroughly. As much as he wanted to be rid of it, he didn’t have a spare and he would likely freeze to death without.
Though the blood had been washed away, he still thought he could smell it, and it felt like he was carrying everyone that he’d killed on his back.
His father’s voice ranted and taunted him about it continually, and it was getting harder and harder to ignore.
The blood made him think of his days as a lawyer, and all of the horrible things he’d done to maintain his reputation as the best. He’d lied, cheated, stolen things, sabotaged the competition, and worst of all, set murderers that should have been imprisoned free. How many of them had gone on to kill again because of him?
Whatever redemption he’d been sent to earn, maybe he didn’t deserve it. Maybe he was already in hell.
Sudden realization came to him. The Northern Sage had been trying to tell him something what seemed like a thousand years ago. He’d been trying to teach Gabriel a lesson, but he’d been too stupid and arrogant to see it. Whatever he did here at the destination wasn’t what would redeem him. It was how he’d changed along the way that was important. He’d learned many valuable things about himself on his journey.
Looking back, he supposed he was grateful for that. He’d never even realized what a bastard he was until he’d met Sam, and learned to care about someone other than himself.
The thought of having lived and died without ever seeing her face seemed so horrible to him.
He didn’t know what awaited him behind that wall, and he couldn’t see what the future held. Whatever happened, he could clearly see his past mistakes, and he wanted to make them better. He’d been given the greatest gift anyone could ever ask for. Sam had done so much to show him the error of his ways that he couldn’t imagine life without her now. He wanted to be a better person for her sake, even if it was too little too late. He’d been given a second chance even though he didn’t deserve it, and a love that he never would have known otherwise.
Gabriel was a different man than he’d been at the beginning of his journey.
The journey was over. His goal was just behind that wall. He only hoped that he’d learned what he needed to in order to face what he’d been sent to face.
“Hey,” Sam waved a hand in his face. “Wake up and open the door already. If
we have to go in, let’s get it over with!”
Turning the plaque around in his hands, Gabriel wondered where it, and the rest of his belongings, had come from in the first place. When he arrived on Ethos, his cathor was waiting for him with his saddlebags, and he’d been wearing his coat and gunbelts.
On top of that, looking into a mirror was like looking at the face of an older, much more rugged brother he’d never known he’d had.
Glancing at his wristwatch, Gabriel wondered, yet again, why he’d been allowed to keep that of all the things that he’d had on him at the time of his death. Did it have something to do with his mission?
“What is wrong with you,” Sam made an annoyed angry sound deep in her throat.
“This whole time it’s been ‘we have to go to the Spires of Infinity blah blah blah.’ Now we’re here and you’re hesitating? Stop being a pussy!”
“You’re the only woman I’ve ever heard call someone a pussy before,” Gabriel
said, his amusement pushing away some of his wariness and heavyheartedness.
Fumbling the plaque open, he shoved the USB connector into the port below the
control panel. At first nothing appeared to happen. Then there came the sounds of machinery rumbling deeply within the gate. Slowly it raised eight feet and stopped with a loud clinking.
Stuffing the badge into his pocket, Gabriel walked back to his cathor, grabbing the reins. Sam followed suit and the two of them walked their animals under the gate and into a large, somewhat empty courtyard. One of the eight fang shaped Spires was directly ahead. The ground was paved with cement, though it was in disrepair, with cracks and holes everywhere, and gravel strewn about. The gate closed ominously behind them.
There were several robots patrolling the courtyard. They were big, intimidating things with large guns attached to their arms where hands should have been, vaguely reminding Gabriel of the movie Robocop.
Two of the large robots came to a stop blocking their path.
“Please identify,” one of them said in a deep, electronic voice that Gabriel could have sworn he last heard repeating, “danger Will Robinson!”
“My name is Gabriel Reeve. This is Sam.” He held up his badge. “This got us through the gate. Is that what you want?”
“Invalid identification type. Please identify.”
“Look, is there some sort of boss around here we can talk to? I’m looking for someone named Allie, I was told she’d be expecting me.”
“That would be me,” a disembodied voice said from between the two robots. A
girl in her early teens suddenly appeared between them. She was completely two dimensional, appearing flat like someone on a TV screen, and Gabriel could see right through her to the pavement behind. With big green eyes, she examined him like a piece of meat, pushing a stray lock of dark brown hair out of her face and tucking it behind one of her ears. “I have not been expecting you exactly, but I have been expecting someone.
I suppose you will do.”
Yelping, Sam jumped behind Gabriel, hiding and holding onto large handfuls of
his coat for dear life. Looking down at her as she peeked around his arm, he raised an eyebrow in question.
“She’s a ghost,” Sam whispered fiercely. “I told you this place was haunted!”
Allie threw back her head and laughed merrily.
“No,” Gabriel said. “Not a ghost. You’re a hologram, aren’t you?”