Another explosion shook the city. Aluki, of the royal guard, grabbed the queen by the shoulder. “We must go. Leave the Smedrys to do what they do best.”
“Save the world?” Grandpa asked.
“Get into trouble?” Kaz asked.
“Run around screaming?” I asked.
“Draw fire,” Aluki said, towing the queen away, her guards going with them.
Grandpa grinned, then led the way, finger thrust forward as he ran down the hallway. We joined him, Kaz moving the most quickly since he’d put on his Warrior’s Lenses. My own Lenses were in Grandpa’s care for the moment. Since I’d been resting from my ordeal the day before, he’d taken them to be polished and inspected for chips.
We charged down one corridor, then another, and eventually spurted out a large doorway and onto a field full of enormous glass animals. Vehicles, after the Free Kingdomer style. A sly raven, a proud griffin, a majestic eagle, and … a penguin.
“You’re going to pick the penguin, aren’t you?” I said with a sigh as Grandpa started running across the field.
“Of course, lad! It’s the most elegant of the choices.”
Right. Well, I’d been looking forward to flying to the Hushlands, but sailing would probably work too.
Rockets fell from the sky over the collection of retro huts and wooden structures that made up Tuki Tuki. Each rocket trailed a plume of smoke as it roared down past the broken remnants of the city’s protective dome. A nearby explosion shook the ground and I stumbled, angry. First the siege, now this. The Librarians couldn’t even let the people of Tuki Tuki mourn their fallen friends and family. Instead they launched an air strike the day after the siege broke—evidently with the attitude of, “If we can’t have it, we’ll just blow it up.”
“Wait, Grandpa!” I yelled. “My mother! We’ve got to take her.”
“I’m not convinced of that!” Grandpa yelled back.
“We’re bringing her,” I said. Yes, she was a Librarian. Yes, Grandpa was right not to trust her. But my mother was the one who had guessed where my father would go next; she knew him better than even Grandpa did.
My Truthfinder’s Lens had confirmed she wasn’t lying about my father. She’d been working to stop Attica for years now. My instincts said we’d need her before this infiltration was finished. As a side note,* my life involves some of the strangest lines of dialogue you’ll ever read. Case in point:
“Fine,” Grandpa said. “You fetch your evil Librarian mother from the jail. I’ll go warm up the giant penguin!”
“I’ll join you, Al,” Kaz said as I bolted through the town toward the jail—or, well, the improvised jail that we’d set up for my mother.
Tuki Tuki had once been an idyllic place of flowers, green grass, and smiling faces. Now it was mostly broken-up ground, pieces of fallen glass, and trampled flowers. The missiles added smoldering craters for variety’s sake.
The evacuation into the shelters seemed to be going well though, as large masses of people were disappearing safely into underground bunkers. Before too long, we were running through an almost empty city. Well, empty save for death missiles dropping down upon us. I was pleased to find that I’d been through so many crazy situations like this that I almost wasn’t panicked by that idea.
“So,” Kaz said, keeping pace with me easily because of his sunglasses, “any idea when you’ll be able to … you know … bring the Talents back?”
I shook my head.
“You sure?”
“I—”
I cut off as a missile dropped in our direction. We dove for shelter beside a wall as the missile hit right beyond us, then bounced before coming to a stop. We waited, tense, but no explosion followed.
“A dud,” Kaz said. “Let’s go.”
I followed, passing uncomfortably close to the missile. Something odd about it struck me. “The entire back half is made of glass,” I said. “So much for the Librarians avoiding the use of Free Kingdomer technology.”*
“A lot of them do avoid it,” Kaz said. “But then again, a lot of them think that only they should be able to use stuff like this. Remember, being a Librarian of Biblioden is all about control. They don’t want unworthies to have access to things like glass. Those missiles fly farther and lighter using brightsand to power their engines—but the explosives are probably all Hushlander TNT or some such, which is a lot cheaper than the silimatic equivalent.”
“Hypocrites.”
“Yeah. The only things the Librarians haven’t ever been able to steal from us are the Talents.” He hesitated, and then obviously couldn’t help pushing a little further. “So, what exactly did you do, anyway? Maybe we can figure out how to bring them back by looking at the way you broke them.”
I grimaced. “I don’t know what I did, Kaz. It was like … I grew tired of trying to control the Talent, and I let it go. Let it do what it wanted.”
“You make it sound alive,” Kaz said, turning down another desolate street.
“It kind of feels that way.”
Kaz shook his head. “The Talents aren’t alive—no more than your conscience is alive, or your anger is alive. You may feel like these things have a life to them, but that’s dangerous—it makes them external, Al. Like you don’t have responsibility for them. Your Talent is a piece of you. I have a feeling that if we’re going to get the Talents working again, you’ll need to understand that.”
“I suppose,” I said.
“Good. Also, missile.”
I leaped for shelter in a ditch as a missile came spiraling down toward us. This one wasn’t a dud—it blasted into a nearby hut, and the sound of the explosion nearly deafened me. I looked up, dazed, to find Kaz beside me. A large piece of metal had been thrown by the blast directly into the wall of the ditch not an inch above his head. He looked up at it, measured the distance—quite minuscule—and raised an eyebrow behind his sunglasses toward me.
“Going to tell me how short people are more remarkable than tall people?” I asked, dusting myself off and standing up.
“That’s a misunderstanding,” Kaz said, leading the way again. “Short people aren’t, on average, any more remarkable than taller people. In fact, I’d say that the remarkability in me is about equivalent to the remarkability in you.”
“That’s very good of you to admit.”
“Of course … my remarkability is packed into a smaller container, so it’s more concentrated. Like the difference between lemon juice and citric acid. So my remarkability is more effective, you see.”
I snorted. “You’re a loon.”
“Yes, and fortunately my looniness is also more concentrated, like—”
I held up a hand, stopping him. We’d just turned a corner to look straight at the jail, which was really a small vacation hut with the windows nailed shut and the doors barred from the outside. The Mokians weren’t big on actual prison facilities.
A missile had hit beside the structure, blasting open the wall.
My mother, if she was still alive, was free.
Chapter
Norton
I wonder why I keep writing these chapter introductions. I spend a lot of time in these stories not actually writing these stories. There must be something to it. Something I don’t want to admit.
These are another delay. To keep myself from writing the inevitable. As long as I’m waxing fanciful about bunnies and bazookas, I don’t have to make progress toward the ending.
I don’t want to get there. Despite claiming I’m writing these autobiographies to set the story straight, I don’t actually want to do it. Deep down, I’d rather think of myself as a hero.
Of course, I’m probably too much of a coward to include this section in the book.
I took a deep breath, then stepped up to the improvised prison and peeked through the broken wall. My mother, Shasta Smedry, sat inside on a little stool, reading a book. She wore a plaid skirt and tight vest over a white blouse—typical Librarian clothing—with her blonde hair in a bun. She had on horn-rimmed spectacles and seemed completely unconcerned that a missile had ripped this room in half.
“Ah, there you are,” she said, spotting me. “About time. I hope you aren’t adopting some of your grandfather’s proclivities, Alcatraz.”
“Why are you just sitting there?” I asked.
“Where else would I go?”
“You could have escaped.”
“I don’t want to escape. You are currently my best bet at reaching Attica before he does anything stupid.” She stood up and tossed the book aside—a callous act for a Librarian. But then again it was merely a fantasy novel, so nothing that important.
Looking at her felt like getting punched in the gut. I still saw her as Ms. Fletcher—the social worker who had watched over me as a child. She’d been with me through most of my life, and had taken every opportunity to berate me, tear me down, and undermine my every success.
I’d spent my life feeling abandoned, alone, and worthless—and all the time my mother had been there, never telling me who she was, never offering a moment of comfort. Everything could have gone so differently if this woman had been willing to show me an ounce of kindness.