Chapter 2

  Heidi Sheppard

  She missed the beach. The warmth of sunlight, the clouds and trees, the fresh smell of the wind and the jungle, the steady, comforting wash of the waves on the shore. And Alan. She wanted him here now. She was getting a little fed up with her moon, which was probably as different from her island as a place could be. The Metal Moon was cold, dark, loud, dangerous, and crowded with monsters.

  She could surf, at least. Her gift from Ruth, the board made of magic metal, could ride the gravitational waves flung out by the shifting lorn. It would have been considered a shortboard by most standards, though Heidi had to admit that for her personally it was edging into longboard territory. Heidi still could barely stay atop the board, even with a fabricated gravitational bond tethering her to its grainy grey surface. The waves came from all directions, for one thing. They were invisible, for another. But she had this going for her: that she could create her own waves, custom-made just like she always used to imagine at the beach back home. Even though her movements were awkward and erratic, sometimes dangerously so, it was faster and easier to get around through the air via surfboard than on foot.

  She went to see the Bleak Machine. Her first journey from that thing to the prison had seemed long and arduous, fraught with peril. She remembered the fear of trusting Bahamut in the dark, and the terror of that first rue. But now, with the board and better control of her powers, it was a journey of minutes–provided that the ever-shifting mess of lorn didn’t conspire to force her into a more indirect path. That was the thing in the Metal Moon: you never went anywhere the same way twice. You couldn’t. The world changed too quickly.

  She returned to the Bleak Machine, saw it shining its sickly golden light. The light seemed oily, a greasy radioactive radiance that flooded the vast cavern. The walls were a network of interlocking lorn, vast metallic spikes of blue and black and violet all jammed together. Shadows coiled and flickered over walls as the parts of the Bleak Machine circled and swung. And six hexagonal shadows slid around, cast by the six platforms that orbited the machine, one of which had a door. She tried the door. It still opened onto nothing. Apparently, she had a door somewhere that led to Skywater City, but if it was so, she hadn’t found it yet.

  A sudden surge of sideways gravity flipped her over on her way back from the Machine. She would have fallen again, had the powerful arms of Bahamut not caught her feet and pulled her gently back to the board. She stabilized the board before sitting down beside him.

  “At least I have you,” she said, blindly patting the area of glossy blackness at her side. She felt the cool, smooth hardness of his scales, but could not determine which part of him she was touching. The distant lights, purple and pink, the false stars made of bale thorn, glinted in tiny reflections on his body. Part of Bahamut extended from the mass and laid itself on her lap. It was the triangular viper-like form of his eyeless head, as big as hers. She patted it hard; he hissed softly.

  Heidi watched the distant lights, the slowly crashing lorn like drifting mountains in the distance. She listened to the cacophony, which by now she had begun tuning out. Balazar said there was a legend on Orpheus that the sound of the lorn might someday be beautiful. Heidi tried and failed to imagine that.

  The board rotated slowly in the air, but it didn’t matter. ‘Down’ meant nothing here. It was she, Heidi, Hero of Gravity, who decided what ‘down’ meant. She and Glaurung, apparently. Queen of the Rue. Heidi had no wish to encounter that monster again, whose eye shone like the Bleak Machine. And the same went for Abraham Black. Yet those two were both still around, as far as Heidi knew, and a dread certainty nagged at her that she would indeed see them again.

  She didn’t want to think about these things. She didn’t want to think about a mysterious prison—so mysterious that even the warden knew almost nothing about it. She didn’t want to worry about the safety of bizarre aliens, or make hard decisions, or be any kind of hero. She didn’t want any of this. She wanted Alan, and the beach, and everything as it had been only weeks ago. With the inclusion of Bahamut. If she could allow her fantasies to be greedy, she wanted all of that plus Bahamut.

  Bahamut, as if sensing her thoughts, snuggled closer against her. “If this is somehow all a dream,” she told him, “and I wake up from it, I’ll get a black lizard. But I’ll let him keep his eyes.” That reminded her of the eye-thief, Cazzie, still comatose with Vyrix, infested with bale thorns. What was she going to do with those two?

  Her phone vibrated. She checked it eagerly, and from the red text she at first thought it was Eric.

  It was not Eric.

  ??: hey

  ??: human

  HS: Hello.

  HS: Who are you?

  ??: I’m the burning god, of course!

  BG: The hero comes, and the hero is me!

  HS: Oh.

  HS: So was that you setting things on fire?

  BG: yep!

  BG: I can set more stuff on fire if you don’t believe me.

  BG: now that the connection is set up, I guess we can do more

  BG: like talk to you directly!

  HS: Connection?

  BG: don’t worry about it!

  BG: I’m on YOUR side

  BG: I’m your friend

  BG: you can trust me

  HS: So what do you want to tell me?

  BG: right to the point, huh?

  BG: I like that

  BG: then I’ll get right to it too

  BG: you need to talk to Black

  HS: Black?

  BG: yeah, Black

  HS: Abraham Black?

  BG: Yes, him! Who else? Come on, are you stupid?

  BG: I mean, I can read right here in your book that you’re not too quick, but I wasn’t going to make a big deal out of it

  BG: because I’m nice like that

  BG: because I’m your friend, remember?

  HS: Why do I need to talk to him?

  BG: what, don’t you trust me?

  HS: No.

  BG: wow

  BG: here I am, reaching out to you

  BG: ME, a GOD, reaching out to YOU, trying to help you, to be your FRIEND

  BG: well listen, you need to talk to Abraham Black because if you don’t he’s going to kill you and everyone else, how’s that for a reason?

  HS: I just need to talk to him?

  BG: yes!

  BG: finally the little girl listens to me

  HS: I’ll think about it.

  BG: better think hard! Or next time you won’t get away so easy

  BG: yeah I saw all of that

  BG: I even tried to warn you, remember?

  BG: if you’d listened to me, maybe your friends would still be alive

  BG: so listen to me this time

  BG: ooh, one more question

  BG: do you have any big tanks of combustible liquids just sitting around?

  HS: I don’t know.

  BG: you should check

  BG: in person, cause you can’t trust anybody

  BG: except for me, obviously

  BG: don’t talk much, do ya?

  BG: well that’s okay

  BG: I’m your friend, so I’ll overlook that

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  BG: just remember what I said, okay?

  BG: ...

  BG: I’ll take that as a yes

  They had drifted into the pull of a medium-sized lorn during the conversation. Slowly, gradually, their path curved down as gravity gained a heavier hold. Heidi pocketed the phone and stood when she decided that this “Burning God” had no more to say. Talk to Abraham Black? What would that accomplish? Not that she was about to trust anyone who could remotely set things on fire and told her to personally look for barrels of flammable materials.

  Ruth was a ‘godseeker.’ She would ask him.

  She coasted downward into the pull of the lorn and picked up speed into a full dive. At the bottom she turned gravity aside, which flung her into a smooth arc that shot her away into the light-speckled darkness.

  Minutes later, the unsightly mass of her home base, as charming as a pile of broken cinderblocks, came into view. Something was different about it. There was a new piece attached to the clunky mass of grey, clearly visible because it had green stripes, which probably made it the first green thing Heidi had seen in days. But what was it? It was like a large box, like a shipping crate with extra bits tacked on, and it was adjoined to the loading bay…

  Oh, it was a spaceship. A cargo ship, possibly unloading supplies to Orpheus because god knew they sure couldn’t grow their own food here. The paneling was of something that had probably once been white, though it was so dirty and pock-marked that little of the original color remained, and several thick bands of bright green, equally faded, wrapped around the entire vessel. Heidi could barely make out the name on the side as she braked to a casual speed alongside it. The Victorious, it read, although someone had added the word “Almost” above “Victorious” in blue graffiti.

  She swung around to the loading bay in front and coasted to a halt, riding a sudden fluctuation in gravity like a tiny residual wave on her way back to shore. She hopped off the board and grunted as she landed at the lingering pain from her many bruises. With a swift motion, she shrank the board to the length of her hand and stuck it in a pouch at her belt, where it clipped magnetically in place.

  A dozen guards of the prison, technically her underlings, worked to unload crates, boxes, sacks and barrels from the gaping stomach of the Almost Victorious. Almost every guard was monstrous, wildly different from the rest in some surprising and often unsettling way. She recognized only a few of them, though most of them noticed her arrival and paused long enough to offer some kind of anatomically appropriate salute. Balazar stood with a nervous clipboard-wielding figure that was not quite human (blue horns), yet was so much closer to human than anyone else on her moon that Heidi thought of him as kin automatically.

  A horrible noise approached from behind—slithering, skittering. Heidi gritted her teeth and steeled herself not to shiver at the sound. Someday she would get used it. She mentally prepared herself to hear Ruth’s voice.

  “Welcome back, Warden,” he chittered.

  She didn’t turn around. “Thank you,” she replied. She set off toward Balazar and the almost-human. Might as well say hi. “Anything interesting?”

  The sound of Ruth’s many legs scrabbling on metal followed her toward the docked ship. “I heard from Gretchel that we have been supplied with stygian arc-rods.”

  Heidi had no idea what that meant, nor could she guess from Ruth’s tone of voice whether this was a good thing. Being supplied with something sounded good, though. “Good,” she said, nodding.

  “Some passengers, of course,” Ruth added. Heidi already knew this. Passengers always came to Orpheus somehow. They stowed away, or bought passage, or cobbled together their own dangerous ships just barely space-worthy enough to sputter over to Orpheus from Ardia or another moon before crashing. One way or another, those called by Orpheus came. They shouldn’t. Heidi wished they wouldn’t. There was nothing here for them but danger, despair, and a Bleak Machine. They would die here, and bale thorns would grow from their bones, adding to the galaxy of false stars in the darkness of the Metal Moon. They shouldn’t come, but they did. Heidi tried not to think about how, somehow, this had become her responsibility.

  Ruth began to say something else, something about reports of Darkworlder activity, but at that moment Heidi reached Balazar and the man with the clipboard. Someone came into view around the corner of the ship as Heidi stepped up to Balazar, someone whose bright and colorful clothing caught Heidi’s eye like a disco ball in the darkness of Orpheus.

  It was Kate, bedraggled and dazed, leaning on Eric, whose attire by contrast matched the somber trappings of Orpheus. Heidi saw them before they saw her, but she was too stunned to react.

  Eric was the first to move. His head snapped up. Shades obscured part of his face, but his expression of revulsion and horror was easy to read. “Get down!” he shouted.

  Heidi flung herself to the floor with a clang from her armored coat, and she rolled as she landed in an attempt to identify what threat Eric had seen.

  Eric moved fast, very fast, but in a strangely disjointed way. He appeared suddenly in front of her, a sword in his hand sizzling with green energy. And now he was swinging it, though still Heidi could see nothing there but Ruth.

  Kate shrieked. The piercing sound made Heidi wince, and it echoed throughout the loading bay. All the prison guards dropped their cargo and sprang to action against an as-yet unidentified threat.

  It took Heidi a full three seconds of stupidly watching Eric assault Ruth before she understood.

  “No!” she shouted. “Stop, Eric!” He didn’t seem to hear. He had headphones on?! “Stop them, Bahamut!”

  Bahamut, who had coiled protectively over Heidi, vanished in a blink of darkness. Heidi reached out, made a spherical compass, aimed it at Eric, and yanked it viciously to the side. He should have fallen away instantly with the force of several Gs, but somehow he’d found the time to stab his sword into the metal paneling of the floor and hang on. Ruth, nearby, scrabbled for purchase as part of his scorpion/centipede body got caught in the influence.

  Heidi sat up. “Everyone, stop!” She shouted this for the benefit of those guards who had been rushing toward the scuffle, weapons ready. They stopped. Eric stopped. Kate, late to the party, came rushing past Heidi, bass guitar at the ready. Heidi reached out and caught her hand, yanked her to a halt. Kate collapsed on the cold metal with a squawk of surprise.

  Heidi stood, brushed herself off, and released the gravity alteration around Eric. He fell to the floor. She marched over to him and rolled him over with a heave of her foot. He’d lost his shades in the gravity fluctuation, and he blinked at her in surprise. She thought about kicking him, but she offered a hand instead, which he accepted. She hauled him back to his feet.

  Heidi stepped around Eric and positioned herself directly in front of Ruth. Ruth was clicking his huge, awful pincers nervously. His many little feet shuffled. He didn’t seem to be seriously harmed, but Heidi wondered whether the same could be said for Eric had the fight continued. She had seen Ruth in action. If Ruth were any less observant, patient, cautious, then Eric Walker might have been in several pieces by now.

  “Oh shit,” said Eric. He materialized a new pair of shades from mist and put them on. “My bad.” He didn’t appear very apologetic about assaulting her friend, but it was Eric.

  “Yeah, your bad,” said Heidi.

  Kate looked like she wanted to say something but could not. She was staring wide-eyed at the grotesque monstrosity that was Ruth. Heidi remembered her own initial reaction to meeting Ruth, and she decided to take it easy on them.

  “Eric, Kate, this is Ruth. My…my friend.” She stepped aside so they could face each other. “And Ruth, this is Eric Walker and Kaitlyn Carter. Also my friends.” Saying it, actually saying it like that in an introduction, sent an unexpected thrill running through her. She had friends now, so many that she could introduce them to each other.

  “N-n-ni-n-nice t-t-t-ni-nice t-t-t-”

  “Nice to meet you,” said Eric. He glanced at his sword still stuck in the floor panels, clearly thought about pulling it up, and just as clearly decided not to.

  Ruth bowed to them, and somehow even that , coming from him, was menacing enough that Kate flinched back, raising her bass like a shield.

  Awkward silence. The other guards nearby stowed their weapons one by one. A murmur rippled through them. Just a misunderstanding. Not a problem. Happens sometimes. That Ruth, you know…back to work. Eric was looking all around at the prison and scenery of Orpheus, and Kate couldn’t stop staring at Ruth, though now Heidi thought that fascination was rapidly replacing horror in her gaze. Soon Kate would start asking him questions about his biology.

  “Ruth,” said Heidi, “could you go and make sure that a meal and rooms are prepared for our guests?” They both looked like they could use some rest, especially Kate. She looked awful, actually—bloodshot eyes, bruises on her face, bedraggled appearance.

  “Of course, Warden,” Ruth said with another bow. His voice made Eric and Kate cringe away. Kate shivered. Ruth skittered away into the shadows.

  “Holy shit,” Eric breathed when he had gone. He began working his sword out of the metal platform, jamming it back and forth.

  Kate stepped up to Heidi, took her by the arm, and turned her away from Eric. Her big green eyes narrowed at Heidi in fierce concern. “Heidi,” she whispered, “w-w-why aren’t you w-we-wearing anything under your c-c-y-underyourcoat?!”

  Heidi looked down at herself. The coat had been so heavy and warm that she hadn’t put on a shirt or anything beneath. She wore only a swath of dirty bandages around her torso. And the coat had been unfastened, hanging wide open this whole time.

  Heidi bit her lip hard enough to hurt as hot blood rushed to her face. She reached down and fumbled at the clasps, trying not to think about how she had just helped Eric up from the ground. There wasn’t much for him to have seen, but she didn’t want to think about that, either.

  “And your f-f-fa-face!” Kate continued.

  “What’s wrong with my face?” asked Heidi. She reached up and touched right on the spot where Vyrix had struck her. She winced. Right. She probably had a serious black eye.

  “Listen, Kate,” said Eric as he approached. “I wouldn’t be talkin shit about anyone else’s face right now, you know?” He smiled to show he was kidding. But he was right. Kate had dark rings under her eyes, a bruise on her forehead, her hair was a mess, and she had something that looked like ink stains on her chin. And those bloodshot eyes…

  “What’s wrong, Kate?” Heidi asked. “Are you sick?” Orpheus was not a good place to be sick. Heidi knew that without anyone having to tell her.

  “Nah, she’s just hungover,” said Eric.

  Heidi punched him in the arm. He punched her back. Behind him, several of the guards paused in their activities, hands or hand-like appendages drifting to weapons. Heidi smiled and put a friendly hand on Eric’s shoulder to show it was okay.

  A strange noise turned Heidi’s attention aside to where Frisby Wiser was belching a tiny puff of white smoke at an impassive Bahamut. It fizzed with sparks like a little firework before fading. “I haven’t seen your angel yet, Kate,” said Heidi. “Where is it?”

  Kate looked around blankly. Then she zeroed in on Bahamut. “Hey!” she said. “You s-st-stop that, B-bahamut!”

  Bahamut opened his mouth wide. A white butterfly flexed its wings peacefully on his black-licorice tongue. Bahamut closed his mouth again. Eric doubled over, laughing.

  “You’re going to apologize to Ruth later,” Heidi informed him.

  He nodded. “Sure, sure. Hey, was that you with the, uh, falling sideways thing?”

  She nodded.

  He grinned at her. “Awesome.”

  She returned the smile. “Wait ‘till you see the rest of it.” She meant her moon, which she suddenly wanted to show to Eric and Kate. She wanted to show them everything. She wanted them to be a part of it. Maybe she was lonely.

  Heidi turned. “Come on.” She led them into her prison.