Attack the Geek (15 page)

Drake had dropped his rifle and pulled out his
kukri
, waving it in a distracting defensive pattern. There wasn’t room for two humans, a monster, a sword, and a rifle all in the same square, so he’d decided to fight smart, letting her handle the melee portion of the encounter.

She stood with a thrust, burying the blade deep in the creature. It dropped like an anvil, straight on top of her and Drake. The three hit the platform, then rolled off. Ree kept her chest on the plaftorm, holding on with her free arm, thankful for the rough texture of the surface, which gave her half-decent handholds. She felt her back pop when Drake stopped himself by grabbing her around the waist. The bird slid off her sword to fall and impale itself on the spike pit, so at least she wasn’t holding up two whole other entities.

Mothergodddamnedfuckingow.

“Climbing would be good, thanks!” Ree gasped out, her fingers already shaking. At least she was wearing the thick leather coat, not him. That ten pounds distributed on her frame was a lot better than tugging at her hips.

She heard frustrated clambering, and tried to not take it personally as Drake grabbed his way up her body to pull himself onto the platform. What would have been terribly intimate touching in another context was just thoroughly uncomfortable and lung-crushing in this one, so it was easier to file it all away under “Not contributing to the life-as-CW-drama.”

Gloved hands wrapped around her arms, and Ree pulled herself up, with Drake’s help, leaving the pair to hyperventilate on the platform. Nearby, the skeleton rattled like a puppy whining for attention.

“Take a number,” Ree gasped, waving lazily with one hand.

They took a minute to catch their breath. Her lungs were bellows, sucking in air as hard as she could to remind her lungs that oxygen was a good thing. Ree sat up and looked at the eager skeleton. “How long have you been waiting to fight somebody?” she asked out loud. Grognard and Eastwood couldn’t have come this way, unless they’d evaded the skeletons (or they re-spawned). But since she couldn’t go back anyway, the only way out was through.

“You know what?” Ree said. “I’m done with this shit. It’s time to cheat.”

Drake raised an eyebrow but said nothing. She had a good rar on, and it was just as well that he not feed it by being reasonable when she was trying to rage.

Another trip to Jean Grey Lane gave her the magic to send the last skeleton flying, and they huffed their way across the pits to the end of the hall, where the walls dropped back to just over ten feet high.

“And now, we start getting sneaky,” Ree said. She called up
Spider-Man
on her phone and watched the first wall-crawling clip, her battery ticking down from 3%.

“We’re going up and then we’re going to roof-run our way through this maze until we find the guys, then we’re going to GTFO so I can go to bed. Sound good?”

“Certainly,” Drake said.

Ree felt the Spider-magic tingling softly in her brain. She had to get up and get Drake up in one go, since her phone didn’t have the juice for more than that.
Let’s just hope it’s enough.

“I’ll go up, then I’m going to pull you up with the rifle. I don’t have long, so chop chop.” Ree jumped at the wall and stuck with her hands and feet. She pulled herself up the wall, the increased strength making the task way easier than her last climb. She reached the top of the wall and reached back. Drake held up the rifle, and she grabbed it, pulling as he walked his way up the wall.

She pulled herself up onto the top of the stone as she felt the Spider-magic fading, and straddled the two-foot-wide wall as she helped Drake reach the top.
Don’t look down
, she told herself. Looking down would give fuel to that part of her brain that housed her fear of heights.

And that wouldn’t end poorly at all.

Ree sat up and saw the maze from above, looking out instead of down. She couldn’t see into more than a couple of rows on either side before the shallow horizon cut her off, but from a standing position, they’d be able to avoid the traps, and would hopefully be low enough to dodge whatever was sending the fireballs. They just had to avoid falling and cracking their skulls open if anything nasty did decide to come and get them while they were doing their Parkour act.

She got to her feet with the last of the
Spider-Man
power, then took a long breath as she steadied herself. There was no wind in the labyrinth, which was a rare blessing from the universe that she felt was otherwise hating her. Ree scanned around, looking for the green light of a lightsaber or the swishy crinoline of one of Lucretia’s voluminous dresses.

Don’t look down
fought with
You have to look down, idiot
, and she took several deep breaths before she let her gaze drift toward the labyrinth floor.

Off to one side stood a Dungeonpunk American Gladiators obstacle course in wood, concrete, and water, a steep ramp down into a dark pit sort of area lit only by glowing blue eyes, and to one side, a set of catapults manned (goblined?) by scaly green creatures with pointed ears that stuck straight out from their skulls.

“You got anything?” she asked, looking around.

“I’d suggest avoiding those catapults,” he said. Ree nodded to that. “The fireballs came from there,” he said, pointing again, “so I recommend we head this way. If we can find the aerothopter, I may be able to jury-rig it enough to fold up so that I can carry it away for later repair.”

“In that case, we go this way, right?” Ree said. Taking the high road would invalidate their chalk-based trail marking pretty damned fast.

They made their way along the narrow wall. Ree held the sword out for balance, and Drake used his rifle as a tightrope walker’s pole. They passed monsters, pits, and dead ends, and with every step, Ree felt better about taking the high road.

Several minutes later, they found the smoldering wreck of the aerothopter. It was not alone.

A pack of blue-skinned creatures with forked tails poked at the crashed contraption. They looked like Bamfs from
X-Men
, Nightcrawler-esque creatures the size of four-year-olds.

“That’s probably not good,” Ree said.

“Most certainly not. Those don’t appear to be gremlins, but there is no shortage of creatures able to ruin an already-damaged device.”

The hallway with the aerothopter wasn’t accessible on their wall, so they had to drop down and wind around several corners.

By the time they’d arrived, the creatures had grown in number, and the aerothopter was in even worse shape.
That’s not encouraging,
Ree admitted. Were these creatures born out of destruction or something? Gremlins that created and fed on atrophy?
That would blow chunks, and they need to stay very far away from my apartment. Place is enough of a pig’s sty as is.

“Melee to avoid damaging your poor contraption any more than necessary?” Ree asked, raising her sword.

“That would be preferable, yes.”

Ree strode forward, whipping her sword around and trying to make as much noise as possible. If these things were scavengers, maybe they were also cowards. She’d had her fill of fighting. Just moving was effort enough. Fatigue clawed at her eyes like sandpaper, and her limbs felt like lead.

Stay on target. . . .

One of the creatures hissed at Ree, its eyes glowing red, but its companions broke and ran, screeching as they padded away on all fours. The angry one saw that it was alone, and as Ree closed to stab at it, it jumped onto the unbroken rotor and swung itself up to the top of the wall, bounding over and out of sight.

“I’ll take fights like that for the rest of the night, thank you very much,” Ree said, sheathing the sword as she stepped up to the aerothopter.

It was still recognizable, which was a plus. But one rotor was broken, and nearly everything about the vehicle was folded, spindled, or mutilated.

“So, Doc, what’s the diagnosis?” she asked as Drake regarded the wreck.

Drake took several long breaths, his nostrils flaring. Drake was a pretty chill guy, even with all the swashbuckling excitement. He was several degrees more unflappable than Ree, putting him very close to the Helen Mirren side of the flappability continuum (the other side being eternally put-upon comic heroine Cathy, natch).

He knelt down and fiddled with buttons, levers, and something that Ree still couldn’t label anything other than
hoojab
. He poked and prodded, but nothing moved.

With another sigh, Drake stood. “It’s impossible. I cannot fix the aerothopter, not even enough for it to collapse.”

“But you can build another one, right? With enough time?”

Drake grabbed a pipe of the machine, holding on like he was in a boat tossed upon rough waters. “I made this during my tenure on the Lapis Galleon, using alloys found only in the deepest reaches of the aetheric sea. Barring another expedition into the outer reaches of Faerie, I fear that you may never again have the misfortune of squeezing determinedly into a Drake Winters aerothopter.”

Sympathetic grief on behalf of Drake outweighed a tiny bit of relief.
Without that aerothopter, we might not ever have caught the Aberrant Muse, and I’d have had a hell of a lot worse time getting away from Rachel MacKenzie.
And however useful it was, it was important to him, something he was proud of.

Ree put a hand on Drake’s shoulder and squeezed. She didn’t dare doing anything more, as punch-drunk blood loss and exhaustion had made her filters pretty thin, and that way lay madness and hurt feelings.

“We’ll get you the parts. Can you salvage anything?”

Drake said, “There’s a screwdriver in the coat. Third pocket from the left. Would you be so kind?”

Ree straightened up. She hadn’t felt a screwdriver in the coat . . . She reached inside the heavy coat and felt around. Lo and behold, a screwdriver.

“Huh,” she said, handing it to Drake. The world of magic never failed to amaze.

The inventor crouched down and fiddled with the ruined aerothopter. Ree kept an eye out for the Bamf-esques or anything else that might be wandering around.

“So how do we take out Lucretia if we find her before the others?” Ree asked as Drake worked.

“Overwhelming force, I rather imagine. Her Hexomancy can do only so much. Thus far, I’ve only seen her efforts directed at one individual at a time, or at an environment, with very specific effects, as seen in Grognard’s. I believe that if both of us were to attack at once, we’d be able to overcome her powers. And if we had all four assembled at the same time, it should be all the easier.”

“Just as long as the magic she uses to fuck with one of us doesn’t screw over the others. Friendly fire isn’t.”

Ree heard wind whistling along the hallway to the west, and she narrowed her eyes, one hand going to the goggles, wishing she knew how to change the filters.

“You got an infrared mode on this set?” she asked.

Drake stopped, then counted fingers on his left hand. “Third wheel from the back, on the left. Two clicks clockwise.”

Ree adjusted the wheel, and then her vision switched into
Predator
mode. The walls were cool blues and greens. She scanned through the hall, passing over Drake’s orange, red, and white form. The still-smoking aerothopter showed in cool oranges and yellows.

As she looked back to the far end of the hall, a blotch of white and red passed out of sight, bearing north.

“Drake, did you see that?”

“Alas, no. Should I be worried?”

“Something just passed that way. How’s it going here?”

Drake grunted as he stood up. “The only things worth salvaging can’t be salvaged. So for a memento, I have this.” She saw a hunk of cooling blue-green. She lifted the goggles to see a single lever, one that he used for pitch. Or yaw. She forgot.

“That blows,” Ree said, offering a sympathetic look.

She waited for a minute while Drake gathered his composure. She thought about how much he’d risked and sacrificed for her. If he did this much for his friends, she could only imagine how much he’d done for Priya.

“Let’s go check out who that was.” She dropped the goggles back into place, and started hustling down the corridor.

She stopped at the corner, looked in the direction the figure had come from, then peeked her head around the corner. Thankfully, this was a long hall, so she just caught the same figure duck around another corner.

“Follow me!” Ree said, setting off at a jog.

Steady bootfalls told her Drake was with her. She leveled her gaze to keep both floor and the end of the hall in view, just in case the mysterious whomever decided to double back.

“They turned there,” Ree said, gesturing with the sword.

“Understood. Could it be Lucretia?”

“Maybe. These don’t get great resolution at fifty feet.”

“My apologies. As a reserve set, they were lower on my schedule for upgrades and calibration.”

“I’m not griping, just saying. I’m a little bit totally exhausted. Sorry if I’m coming off snippy.”
Not that you’re ever snippy at your best,
a self-effacing voice said in her mind.
Shush
, she told herself.

They reached the end of the hall, and Ree peeked around the corner to see stairs leading down into a muddy pit of still water. Steps climbed back out of the water twenty feet later, but who knew how deep the pool was, or what sorts of nastiness might call that muck home?

And on the other side stood the figure, holding a long, cool cylinder.

“You see that?” Ree asked.

“See wha—” Drake was cut off as a shot rang out.

Drake collapsed. Ree dove down to cover him as another shot filled the hall. She heard an impact against the far wall, and when she looked up, the same heat signature vanished behind the cool blue of the wall.

“Fuckinggoddamnedhells,” she said, pulling the goggles off to look at Drake.