“That’s an awful nice way of sayingkilled,” I mumble, looking down at my own murderous hand.
Yes, it was self-defense, and I’m sure that’d hold up in court—an Earth court at least. Heck…I have no idea what their legal system is like, or what’s going to happen. I have no control over the outcome of any of this and I just have to keep trudging along and complying.
“Hey.” Amyrah grabs my shoulder. “Breathe. They were never alive to begin with.”
I take a long, deep breath and clasp my hands together to stop them from shaking.
“What were they?”
“Outlawed protobots. You did us a favor.”
“Protobot?”
“Did you ever play the game The Syms?”
My gaze snaps to Amyrah and I scowl. “Yeah, when I was a kid.”
She nods, pushing me along toward a door that’s perpetually held open by white light. Beings are passing through it frequently, but I can’t see anything beyond the light.
“Think of those bots as Syms. They had programmatically generated personalities to blend in with their environment, and they would operate of their own accord most of the time. Then sometimes, the operator would give them commands to follow, or even inhabit them.”
“Master,” I murmur, remembering her words. “She’d said, you’re not making this easy on Master.”
Amyrah bobs her head. “There’s a particular offender we’ve been tracking who’s very good at keeping a low profile. Their interference with the protobots was minimal—until last night. That gave us the opportunity we needed to hunt them down at the source and take them into custody.”
“So, no more protobots?” I ask.
“Don’t we all wish.” She chuffs. “Just one offender down. There’s thousands of those things still out there.”
I close my eyes against the blinding light as we pass through the doorway. The staticky sensation against my skin fades, and I feel a change in the air. The constant, ambient hum is gone, replaced with chatter, footsteps, clanking, zooming, rushing, and beeping.
The sight that greets me when I open my eyes makes me woozy. Amyrah holds onto my elbow as I stare around the space. At first glance, it looks like a utopian hospital entrance. There are trees—albeit strange ones—in raised flower beds and butterfly-like bugs flitting about. Something brown scurries between bushes and up a tree. As I follow the creature to the top, that’s when my mind well and truly decides to do a manual shutdown.
My knees buckle as I take in the cavernous world above me and the beams of light shooting in between large towers that stretch up and down. The ceiling must be thousands of feet up and yet I can clearly see there’speoplewalking around the streets up there.Upside down!
“Caitlin, you should keep breathing,” Amyrah says.
I suck down a desperate gasp and the black closing in around the edges of my vision recedes.
“Holy shit!”
Some of the beings around me jump at the exclamation, looking at me warily. Something like a human, but gray-skinned with an extra leg, smiles at me with sharp teeth. I’m not sure if that was a friendly gesture…
“I know this is a lot for you, but we do have a schedule to keep.”
I blink and look at Amyrah. “Schedule.”
“Registration. Statement,” she reminds me.
“Right,” I say, remembering to keep breathing.
We walk away from the building and I try to get my bearings, try to identify the things I’m seeing. The ground is some kind of stone, but it ripples with magic everywhere we step. Our colors come bursting out with every foot—or tentacle—fall.
“Calculating trajectory,” the wall we’ve stopped at blares and I yelp in surprise.
Amyrah holds my arm steady as if I would try to escape.
“What is that?” I ask as the wall yammers out a series of numbers.
