The message came at midnight.
The young assistant stopped at the heavy wooden door that led to his boss’ private sitting room, pausing for a moment to steady his nerves before he knocked twice.
“A message… sir.”
His voice shook in time with his knees. He waited, wondering if he’d already made a mistake. If perhaps, like the last assistant had warned before rushing from the office, the monster had finally come out to play.
No mistakes, boy.
You do what he says at a moment’s notice.
You get in, you get out, and you certainly do not ask questions.
“Come in.”
The answer was more of an ordered bark, so he opened the door, shuffling inside with the small chip held carefully on a silver tray.
Friedrich Geisinger sat in a wingback chair by the glass wall that overlooked the entire city.A cup of tea sat untouched on the table beside him, surely gone cold now.
Beside it, two small black pills.
His second batch of the day.
“What is it?” Geisinger asked. He sat with his back to the door, staring out the wall as rain pounded on the glass, warping the view of the city beyond.
The assistant walked closer, holding out the transmission chip. “It came in just moments ago, from one of the jobsites.”
“I have plenty of them,” Geisinger said, voice teetering on the edge of anger and annoyance. “Details, boy. They make every story you’ll tell one worth being heard.”
“Dohrsar,” the assistant blurted out. “It came from one of your camera drones on Dohrsar.”
Friedrich plucked the chip from the tray, then slid it effortlessly into a small dock on the arm of the chair. Two taps of his fingertips across the top, and a hologram appeared before them, flickering against the glass.
It was a king, a veritable giant, standing amid a cloud of smoke. Soldiers in crimson suits stood around him, flames flickering in the distance.
“It is done,” the king said.
The transmission paused at a tap of Geisinger’s fingertips.
“Leave me,” he commanded. “I’m not to be disturbed until morning.”
The assistant left as quickly as he’d entered. Hours later, he still couldn’t erase the image of the alien king from his mind. Couldn’t stop seeing the grotesque, hollow socket on his face, where one of his eyes should have been.
Part Two
Metal
Chapter 16
Sonara
Darkness had never bothered Sonara.
In her earliest days in the Deadlands, she’d clung to it, for it was in the darkness that she’d honed her curse. Where she’d sat, for hours on end, pulling at the air around her, trying to decipher aura after aura; where each one came from, be it beast or man, and what they were feeling.
Jaxon and Markam had spent plenty of hours hiding out in the darkness with her, so she could train.
“Left,”Sonara would say,“twenty paces from me,”and Jaxon’s voice came from where he’d been hiding.
