“Oh!" Aydee said, squealing and running over to snatch them up.
“Aydee!" I said, standing. "Wait! Those are grenades!"
"I know,” she said enthusiastically. "I love grenades!"
Yes, she's a Smedry all right.
"How many do you have?" I asked.
"One of each of the main three kinds," Kaz said.
"So, six?" Aydee said.
"Uh," I said. “Actually, one plus one plus one is . . ." I trailed off as, suddenly, Aydee was holding not three, but six bears.
"One plus one plus one," she proclaimed. "Six, right?"
I blinked. She’s bad at math. . . Her Talent, it appears, had forced the world to match her powers of addition.
"Don't correct her, Al," Kaz said, chuckling. “At least not when her bad math is in our favor. Nice work, Aydee."
"But what did I do?" she said, confused, handing back the exploding bears.
"Nothing,” Kaz said, tucking the bears in his pack.
Aydee was young enough that she hadn't learned to control her Talent yet - and I couldn't really blame her for that, since I barely had mine under control myself. Her Talent would be hard to control anyway, since she could only make mathematical miracles when she legitimately calculated wrong in her head.
"Alcatraz, are you all right?" Bastille asked.
I nodded, still feeling tired but forcing myself to my feet. "Come on. I want to see what we’re up against.”
Kaz led the way over to the ridge. We walked up to it, looking out of the jungle over a daunting sight.
Beneath us, the forest had been trampled to the ground. The black tents of an enormous army were pitched amid the stumps of trees, and the smoke of a hundred fires rose into the sky. The army encircled a small hilltop city made entirely of wooden huts, with a wooden-stake wall around the outside. It looked small and fragile, but it had some kind of shield around it - a bubble of glass, like a translucent dome. That glass was cracked and broken in several places.
The army was bad enough. However, the things that stood behind it were even more daunting - three enormous robots dressed like Librarians, holding enormous swords on their shoulders.
"Giant robots," I said. "They have giant robots.”
"Er, yes," Kaz said. "That's what threw the rock at us."
“Why didn't anyone shattering tell me they had giant robots!"
The others shrugged.
"Maybe we're fighting for the wrong side," I said.
"We're fighting for what is right,” Kaz said.
"Yeah, without giant robots."
"They're not so tough," Bastille said, eyes narrowed. "They're nearly useless in battle. Always tripping over things."
"But they're great at throwing rocks," Kaz added.
"All right," I said, taking a deep breath. "Grandpa needs us to sneak into the palace and call from inside, using the queen's Communicator's Glass. Any ideas?"
"Well," Kaz said, "I could use my Talent to -"
"No!" Bastille and I both said at the same time. I still hadn't gotten all of the dragon stomach snot out of my hair.
"You tall people," Kaz said with a sigh. "Always so paranoid."
"We could steal one of those six robots," Aydee said, thoughtful. "I might be able to pilot one. My training includes Librarian technology."
"That's an idea," I said. "Maybe . . . Wait, six robots?"
I looked again, and indeed, where three of the enormous machines had stood, there were now six. A group of Librarians stood around the robots' feet, looking up, seeming confused at where the extra three had come from.
Aydee's Talent, it appeared, could be a hindrance.
"Great,” I said flatly. "Let's ignore the robots for now.”
"How are we going to get in, then?" Kaz asked.
I bit my lip in thought. At that point, something deeply profound occurred to me. A majestic plan of beauty and power, a plan that would save us all and Mokia as well.
But, being stoopid, I forgot it immediately. So we did something ridiculous instead.
CHAPTER 144
For my plan to work, we had to wait until it grew dark. It was a cold night, chill, and I stood, a lone sentry atop a stone shelf, lost inside my mind. The ghosts of my past seemed, in that caliginous night, to crawl up from the bowels of the earth and whisper to me. At their forefront was the image that I'd once had of my father, my dreams of what he would be when I finally discovered him. A brave man, a man forced to abandon me because of circumstances, not lack of affection. A person I'd be proud to have as my sire.
That man was just illusion. Dead. Killed by the truth that was Attica Smedry. But the ghost whispered at me for vengeance. Whispered at me to . . .
. . . stop being so pretentious.
The above paragraphs are what we authors like to call literary allusion. That's what we do when we don’t know what else to write, so we go and read some other story, looking for great ideas we can steal. However, to avoid looking like we're stealing, we leave just enough clues so that someone who is curious can discover the original source. That way, instead of looking like thieves, we instead appear very clever because of the secret meaning we've hidden in our text.
Authors are the only people who get in trouble if they steal from others and try to hide it but get praised for stealing when they do it in the open. Remember that. It'll help you a lot in college.
So, to repeat the previous phrase without the literary allusion: I sat on a rock, waiting for it to get dark, thinking about my stoopid father and how he didn't live up to my expectations. It wasn't actually cold out - Mokia is in the tropics, unlike Denmark. My stomach rumbled; the others were eating some bread and cheese that Kaz had brought, but I didn't feel like eating.
A rustling sound came from behind, and Bastille walked up to my rock, Warrior's Lenses tucked into her jacket pocket. Below, the besieging army was getting ready to camp for the night. I was wearing my Oculator's Lenses - which were also called "Primary Lenses," I'd come to learn.
They had a reddish tint, and allowed an Oculator to do some very basic things: see auras around types of glass and fight off other Oculators. Sometimes they let you see other kinds of auras as well, little hints about the world. I wasn’t good at using them for that sort of thing yet, though.
Right now, they showed me that the dome around Tuki Tuki was made of a very powerful type of glass. It was in even worse shape than it looked; my Lenses let me see that the aura was wavering. It pulsed with an almost sickly glow. Whatever the Librarians were doing to break down the dome, it was working.
"Hey," Bastille said, sitting down. "What's reflecting?”
"Huh?"
"Free Kingdoms phrase," Bastille said. "It just means 'What are you thinking about?’”
I shrugged.
"It's your parents, isn't it?” Bastille asked. You always get the same look in your eyes when you think about them.”
I shrugged again.
“You’re wondering what the point was in rescuing your father, since he didn’t end up spending any time with you.”
I shrugged, my stomach rumbling again.
Bastille hesitated. "I'm not sure I understood that one. My shrug-ese is kind of rusty."
"I don't know, Bastille," I said, still looking at the city. "It's just that . . . well, I've lost them both again. For a few moments, we were all there, in the same city. And now I'm alone again."
"You're not alone," she said, sitting down on the rock next to me.
"Even when I was with my father, I wasn't with him,” I said. "He practically ignored me. Every time I tried to talk to him, he acted like I was a bother. He kept sending me off to enjoy myself, offering to give me money, as if the only thing he had to do as a father was provide for me.
"And now, they're both gone. And I don't know what any of it was about. They were in love once. When we were captured a few months ago, I watched my mother talk about me to the other Librarians. She said she didn't care about me, but the Truthfind
er's Lens said that she was lying."
“Huh," Bastille said. "Well, that's good, right? It means she cares."
"It's not good,” I said. "It's confusing. It would be so much easier if I could just believe that she hates me. Why did they break up? Why did they think a Librarian and a Smedry could marry in the first place? And what made them change their minds? Whose fault was it? They were together until I was born. . . ."
"Alcatraz," Bastille said. "It's not your fault.”
I didn't respond.