Attack the Geek (13 page)

In fits and starts, the device unfolded and expanded, rocking from side to side as it wobbled its way to its full size. Totally expanded, the aerothopter was the odd lovechild of a Leonardo da Vinci design and a modern helicopter. It was all frame and engine, no fuselage, no weaponry, and no comfortable seating. And since Ree lacked natural posterior padding, it made the thing an incredibly uncomfortable ride. Not to mention the fact that she was still afraid of heights.

But they needed to catch up to Lucretia, or at least find a way out of wherever it was that they’d ended up.

“Are you sure you can’t install some seating? I’d take cardboard, honestly,” Ree said.

“I’m sorry, Ree, but I haven’t found a way to add any material that close to the core without ruining the folding schema. It’s rather like the Japanese tradition of origami, actually. Folds must be done in a certain order, to a certain degree, in order to preserve the integrity of the components and ensure the appropriate final shape.”

Ree shrugged, climbing into what passed for the passenger seat. “Well, if you get it figured out, I’ll make it worth your while. I am happy to reward innovation with milk shakes and crack fries.”

Drake made a typically masculine happy sound at the mention of the super-unhealthy delicacies. He may be a gentleman from an alternate Britain, but his palate had taken quite well to twenty-first-century American fare.

The inventor took the pilot’s seat, and started the engine. Ree held the rifle, which was more secure than tying it to a crossbar. Plus, it gave her a chance to play a rails shooter if anything nasty showed up.

The vehicle lifted off, rotor blades less than a foot from each side of the walls.

“Keep it steady . . . ” Ree said, her eyes glued on the walls. Running a rotor into the wall would go . . . poorly.

Drake pulled the aerothopter up and out of the hall, and Ree exhaled. They moved forward, and Ree took in the labyrinth below.

“Motherfrakker,” she muttered as the immensity of the maze opened up around her. The winding paths of hallways unfolded in all directions for at least a hundred yards. Free of the tunneling effect of the halls, the whistle of the wind grew, pulling her hair free of her braid and whipping it across her face.

“Where the hell are they?” Ree asked, turning to look in all directions as she put her hair back in order.

“I will scale farther for a better view,” Drake said, pulling the stick back and sending the aerothopter into a shallow climb. Their extreme lack of seat belts made steep climbs and dives “highly inadvisable,” as Drake liked to say.

They were about eighty feet up when Ree caught a glimpse of Eastwood’s green lightsaber near the far edge of the dome. “There!” she said, pointing across Drake’s seat to a pathway far to their left.

Drake guided the aerothopter toward the light, and Ree continued to scan the maze, looking for Lucretia.

“Let me know if you see Bitchy McStrega anywhere,” she said, craning her neck around to look behind them.

Out of the corner of her eye, Ree saw something that looked neither like Lucretia nor her errant geeks. It looked like a fireball.

And it was coming right for them.

Ree shouted, “Fireball at eight o’clock!”

Drake banked left, diving to gain speed. The flaming sphere soared past to one side, missing the rotors by several feet.

Two more fireballs arced toward them from two directions, set ninety degrees apart.

“Nine and six!” Ree called, serving as Drake’s rearview mirror.

Drake hauled back on the stick, pulling the aerothopter up out of the dive with the extra speed. They cleared one fireball, but the other shattered on the rotor. Ree leaned away from the explosion as licks of flame lashed out at the pair. The aerothopter rocked with the impact, and Ree wedged her feet between a set of pipes, holding on for gravity-defying life.

“Owfuckow!” Ree said, swatting at her burning hair with one hand.

The aerothopter went into an uncontrolled dive. Ree reached over and helped Drake haul back on the stick, even as the rotor groaned, one spoke white-hot as it melted toward the tip.

“Controlled crash?” she asked, her voice thin with panic.

Drake didn’t respond, straining against the stick with all his strength as the maze came up to greet them with thick concrete slabs of lethal collision.

The world slowed as Ree ran the math on chances of pulling up in time, dying in a mangled wreck, and dying if they jumped.

Hoping she’d made the right call as the bottom of the aerothopter skipped off a maze wall, she pushed herself up and over and rolled sideways, grabbing Drake as she went. They fell out and down away from the aerothopter as it crashed.

She held on to Drake for dear life as they dropped to the floor, then remembered her training and went limp save for tucking her head. She had no chance to take the fall with a roll. It was all she could do to go ragdoll and pray that they’d survive.

Ree hit hard, bounced, then rolled along the floor, kicking up a plume of dust.

A hundred pains scrambled over one another for attention from her mind, overriding any chance for thought.

She focused on breathing. In. Out. But of course, her ribs and back hurt too, so even that kicked her ass.

But somewhere along the line, she managed to get her eyes open.

Drake was in a heap a few feet away, groaning in pain.
I hear you, man.

She pulled herself into a ball, slowly, testing her injuries. Most everything hurt, but nothing felt broken. She might wake up dead the next day, but for now, it seemed like she could keep going.

“Drake?” she called.

The inventor coughed, spreading a plume of dust. “Present,” he said, his voice a pained croak.

“Well, that blew chunks,” Ree said, pulling herself up. A thin smoke trail pointed her toward the aerothopter wreck, and conveniently also served to orient her in the maze. Though as she remembered from the pulpy puzzle books she’d torn through as a kid, there was no guarantee that going vaguely forward and to the left would let them get where they wanted to be. She picked up Drake’s rifle as she walked over to him. He pulled himself to a kneel, accepting Ree’s offered hand.

She pulled him up, and they dusted themselves off. The ground was thick with sawdust, covered like the inside of a butcher’s shop.

“Why the sawdust?” Ree asked to no one in particular, looking both ways. The sawdust ended in one way, but in the direction headed toward the elder geeks, it continued through the bend.

Drake bent to pick up a handful of the dust. He held it up and smelled it. “Beech, perhaps? Or cedar.”

“I’m not sure how much that matters, but good to know,” Ree said, trying to stretch the kink out. It hurt, but after a few stretches, she felt better.

“I was merely attempting to assemble some thoughts as to the disposition of the sawdust. There are a number of possibilities that come to mind, several of them fairly unsettling.”

“Like we’re in the labyrinth’s butcher shop?” Ree asked.

“There is that. Also, the possibility that the labyrinth is under construction, and that there may be other beings present, perhaps even aside from those responsible for the fire blasts.”

“Yep.” They made their way toward the sawdust-y turn, moving as quietly as they could. Ree drew the
jian
, holding it in a low guard.

Ree peeked around the corner to see a one-room carpentry shop ahead.
That’s not so bad, right?
Benches were stacked high with light-colored wooden planks, flanked by a collection of half-constructed benches, chairs, and chests. Beyond those, a finished cherry folding desk that looked like it belonged in Colonial Williamsburg.

“More wood,” Ree said. Drake fiddled with his rifle, slotting a blue crystal in the chamber.

“Try this one the quiet way?” Ree asked. Drake nodded, and they hugged the wall of the passage, Ree in front, Drake over her shoulder, rifle at the ready.

They made it down most of the hall before someone crossed into view. The figure was about three feet tall, and wore a pair of faded denim overalls. He had a thick beard but short hair. He wore no shirt under the overalls, and was nearly as muscled as a romance cover model.

The muscular carpenter turned, and his eyes went wide as he saw Ree and Drake.

“More humans?” he said, sounding a little bit surprised and a little bit amused.

“More?” Ree asked as they walked into the room. “Who else has been here?”

The room was about thirty feet to a side, stocked with enough wood and machinery to fill a small warehouse with furniture. There were three workstations, but the burly little person was the only one around.

“Scruffy-looking guy in a coat and a rightly stout man with a polearm. They just passed through a few minutes back. Are you people using Spirit as a highway now, or what?”

Drake made the inhaling sound of realization at the same time as things clicked for Ree. That would do it. If they’d somehow crossed over into the Spirit realm through some subtle portal, that would actually explain a lot—why they’d been able to turn the corner and step from the sewer into a labyrinth, where all of those extra monsters had come from (Labyrinth, Minotaur, natch), and why there was a labyrinth in the first place.

“Can you tell us where they went?” Ree asked, skipping ahead to her objective. First they had to find the other pair, then Lucretia, and then it was time to put this night to bed.

The small man (dwarf?) pointed behind him. “But you humans can’t just wander through here like it’s a bazaar. There’s a reason I set up shop in a labyrinth. I don’t like being disturbed, you hear? I like my peace and quiet.”

Drake jumped in. Ree was happy to let him handle the diplomacy bits. “We’re terribly sorry, sir. We are attempting to rejoin our companions and quit this place, so that we might leave you and this labyrinth to your business.”

The small man nodded approvingly, stepping aside. “Get to it, then.”

They hurried through the workshop and left the diminutive craftsman to his work.

“Seems like that guy doesn’t get visitors very often,” Ree said.

“I imagine that if one was used to going weeks without being interrupted, then to be so interrupted twice in a matter of minutes, would be quite disconcerting. I recall you acting not dissimilar when I called during one of your writing sessions,” Drake said, wearing a knowing look he only got away with because of that smile.

“I was in the middle of the finale! It had taken me all week to figure out how to finish it up!

“But yeah, that’s fair.”

They reached a T-juncture. Ree looked both ways. One way had moss on the walls, ending with a turn to the left. The other had several halls branching off to each side.

“Where to, Captain Providence?” she asked.

Drake narrowed his eyes, evaluating each path. Then he stood with his eyes closed, breathing slowly.

Ree fidgeted, knowing that if she slowed down, she might not be able to get going again. She used to burn the wick at both ends plenty in college, but these all-nighters got a little harder every year.

Drake shook his head, then opened his eyes. “I feel nothing. If the universe is trying to guide me, I cannot hear it.”

“Well, crap.” Ree shrugged, walking down the hallway with the moss. “Lucretia really needs a shrink. I mean, overcompensation much?” Ree said, gesturing to the size of the room. “This is pretty elaborate revenge for losing out on an auction.”

“I imagine the depth of her emotion stems directly from whatever it was that she planned to do with the ring,” Drake said.

They reached the corner, and the maze bent around to the left, heading back in the direction Ree had dubbed “West” for sanity’s sake.

As she stepped to turn the corner, her foot sunk into the concrete, swallowing her to the waist.

Drake grabbed her under the arm and hit the ground hard behind her, stopping her descent. Her lower half started to burn, like her legs were all open wound and she’d just jumped into a pool of rubbing alcohol.

“Fuckity!” Ree said, pulling the sword out of the . . .
Ground? Acid? Whatever. Ow!

Drake grunted, scrambling back. “What madness is this?” he said through gritted teeth.

Ree bit her tongue at the pain, then stumbled through the words as her tongue stung, joining the waaay-too-hopping pain party.

She pressed down on solid stone with her free hand. Engaging her core, she lifted her feet out of the liquid lie of a floor. Drake pulled her over and out, and she rolled across the ground, her legs smoking. She stood as fast as she could, intending to shake off the burning goop, only to discover that her pants had become as holey as Swiss cheese. Her sensible shoes looked like they’d been nuked in the microwave, and the breeze told her that the Swiss cheese properties extended all the way around her pants.

Because showing her ass in public was a great add-on to searing pain.

“Oh, my.” Drake averted his eyes. Blushing, he’d gone red as a turnip. “Ms. Ree, I’m terribly sorry . . .”

“I know. Kind of naked-ish here,” she said through gritted teeth, furious at what was either a gelatinous cube or just a random trap.

Drake shrugged off his coat and handed it to Ree. “Please, take this.” She wrapped it around the borrowed buff jacket, which didn’t have nearly enough coverage for comfort. She belted the coat closed and looked back at the corner. The liquid floor rippled, covering just the 10 x 10 square of the corner, as best as she could tell. If they were lucky, they’d be able to jump the corner and keep going. But she wasn’t about to jump into anything without testing the waters.

She pulled out one of the pens from her apron and lobbed it underhand. The pen clattered on the ground and rolled about a yard before stopping.

“Thank Jeebus,” Ree said. “You good to jump that?”

Drake looked at the floor, and she saw the geometry wheels spinning behind his eyes. “Not a problem. But it may be best to mark this corner, lest we lose track and need to double back.”

“Good thinking.” Ree leaned down and ripped off a few inches of her shredded jeans, then tore the piece in half. She left one shred at their feet on the near side, then tossed the other around the corner.