Chapter 4: The Northeastern Sector

The portal spat Layla out into smoke. It smelled of hot metal and real fire. The VR pods had never smelled of anything.

At the avenue’s end the dome came down to the ground, a wall of pale hexagons. Black claws raked it from outside. The hexagons cracked white where they struck.

In one place it had already given: a hole eight meters wide and two high. An Ender was forcing its head and shoulders through. Joe’s VR Enders had stood three meters tall. This one would have looked into a second-floor window. Its gray plates ground together, and the sound went into Layla’s back teeth.

People ran past her the other way. Her heart was going so hard she checked her hands. They were not shaking.

“I’ll take down the Enders!” she said, to hear how it sounded.

LaylaVoice line

“Good,” said Fanny, drawing a blade from the case at her hip.

Twenty meters ahead, Joe was turning the crowd into a side street with one arm.

“Everybody fall back now!”

A little girl in a red dress stood crying in the middle of the pavement. Her pink rabbit lay at her feet. People ran around her. Nobody stopped.

Joe did. He picked the rabbit up, knelt and put it back in her arms. He spoke to her softly, in a voice he never used in class.

The Ender heaved. The front of the corner building came down in a slab. Joe turned his back and covered the girl and the rabbit. The slab struck him across the shoulders.

A woman swept the girl up. Joe lay still, one hand open on the stones. The Ender had not even looked.

“Professor Joe!” Fanny was beside him before the name was out.

“You take Professor Joe somewhere safe,” said Layla, walking toward the hole. “I’ll kill this freak!”

“Wait! You won’t be able to take it out alone!”

“What’s your plan, then?”

“Cover me! I’ll look for a weak spot around its neck!”

Its chest was plated shut. By Joe’s rule it opened only when the thing struck, and nobody wanted it striking at the crowd. The neck was the only opening. Fanny was right. Layla did not intend to say so.

“No way! You cover me instead!”

Fanny looked at her for one breath. “Whatever, let’s do this!”

Roger, late out of the portal, got an arm under Joe’s shoulders and dragged him toward the side street. Layla saw it and kept walking.

Fanny went up on her hip thrusters, her cable unreeling in a shining line, straight for the thing’s neck.

Layla ran the other way, up the fire stairs of an office tower, three steps at a time. Fanny could have the neck. Layla wanted a line.

From the roof she could see only the Ender’s head. A second tower stood between them, and in front of it the big WELCOME TO TERRINIA billboard. The tower’s top floor was glass on both sides. Through it she could see gray plates.

She set the cannon on her shoulder. A row of cyan cells on the stock showed the charge. Her thumb found the dial and stopped.

The numbers looked right. They had looked right before. She turned the dial down two notches.

“Use the big shot!” Fanny’s voice said in her ear.

“I’m saving it!”

“For what?”

“For something big!”

Fanny was at its neck now, cutting at the seams. The Ender swung at her. As its arm came down, its chest plates split, and a core glowed through the windows.

Layla fired. The thin white bolt punched through the billboard, through both walls of glass, and into the core. The Ender’s chest blew open. It sagged against the dome and did not get up.

“See?” said Layla. “You covered me.”

“I was looking for its neck!”

“It was looking at you. That’s covering.”

More came. Black Enders with long thin limbs came down out of the orange sky onto the dome and in through the broken panels. Fanny went up to meet them alone.

She fought the way she drilled. Cable on a limb, swing, a blade into a joint, a kick of the thrusters, the next one. Layla shot whatever turned toward Fanny’s back.

That day was the first time the two had joined forces. Miraculously, they found they synergized quite well.

After the first call, neither gave an order. Fanny was never once in her line. Layla noticed, and did not like having noticed.

Farther along the wall, two bright figures hung in the air with wings spread and drones circling them in step. Roger had stopped at the corner to hitch Joe higher.

“That’s Guinevere and Vexana!” he said. “They’ve got the other end!”

“I know who they are,” said Layla.

Meet

Guinevere

Daybreak Halo

Proud, rich and loyal. She never gives up on a friend.

Everyone did. Their undefeated record was on the courtyard billboard. Layla’s was on a rankings board, in second place.

Guinevere was the pink-haired girl from Joe’s class. She fought up close with her fists, her two cat-eared drones circling her. Vexana hung above her with a staff.

Whatever reached for Guinevere’s back, Vexana’s magic hit it first. Neither of them looked around to check.

Meet

Vexana

Twilight Star

Guinevere's quiet partner, who carries a weight she does not share.

High in the orange sky, Fanny’s long blade swept through the last of the black Enders. Then there was nothing left on Layla’s side to shoot.

Layla came down to the avenue. The corner building where Joe had fallen was burning floor by floor. She stood in front of it with the cannon hanging from one hand. Somewhere in the smoke a man was calling a name, over and over.

Joe had taken that slab across his back for a child while she argued over who covered whom.

Roger had dragged him out of the street. She had watched, and kept walking.

These ‘Ender’ things, huh. What pushovers! That was this afternoon, in a pod that smelled of nothing.

Her hands were shaking now. She held the cannon tighter until they stopped.

The crowd went quiet. People stopped halfway into the side street. A man dropped the bag he was carrying and did not pick it up. Every face turned the same way, and Layla turned with it.

Through the dome, out on the sand, something gold stood up. It leaned its long head into the dome. The hexagons around its face lit white and broke. It spread its arms, and the dome came apart around it in a ring.

None of Joe’s three ranks had been gold.

Layla went through them anyway. Plain Enders, the small ones that killed the most. Super Enders. Ultimate Enders, the deadliest, which released the other two. The siren had said Ultra. Nobody had answered Roger.

It stood taller than the towers. Pieces of the dome came down around its feet, still glowing.

High above the avenue, Fanny had stopped in the air.

Light began to gather in its chest.

A child’s voice carried clearly from the front of the crowd.

“Mommy, what’s that?”