Dance of Destinies (The Galactic Mage Series Book 5) (13 page)

“Want to work on my robot after we eat?”

“Okay,” she said.

They walked together down the hall toward the cafeteria. Pernie looked around as they walked, but nobody looked back at her. Nobody looked at anything. Everyone looked at their tablet screens or into the lenses of the small plastic visors that they wore. That was the first thing everyone did when she and her classmates left the classroom. The bell rang, and out came five tablets and thirteen visor sets. The kids with the tablets all walked along, staring down into their devices, smiling and laughing at them sometimes. Tapping this or that, as if they were doing work. But they weren’t, Pernie knew. They were just talking. Writing notes back and forth like people on Prosperion did with their homing lizards sometimes. Although these kids never stopped. Some were playing games, though mostly the boys.

The kids with the visors made Pernie want to laugh. At first she’d thought they all looked very strange, but now, after almost two full weeks, she thought they were funny. They rolled their eyes up to look into the narrow little visors of plastic that jutted out from above their eyebrows. Sometimes she could hardly see the color of their eyes. They reminded her of the stories Kettle used to tell her of zombies brought back to life by necromancers in the olden days. Pernie had always thought the stories of zombies were made up, but she laughed and thought they must have all moved to planet Earth.

The upside of having an entire hallway filled with people who weren’t paying attention to anything was that she and Jeremy could hustle right on through them all and get very close to the front of the lunch line.

“There she is,” said the lunch lady with the wide, fat cheeks and the smiling eyes. “How’s my tough little Prosperion darling doing today?”

“I’m not your darling,” Pernie corrected her yet again. She corrected her every day. She was fairly sure this round-faced woman was trying to be nice, but Pernie didn’t have time for it. If she stopped and tried to talk to the lady, the people in the back of the line got mad. They made snide remarks, and then Pernie wanted to break their legs. She couldn’t, though, because Djoveeve and Seawind had made her promise a hundred million times.

“Now why you gotta say that every time?” the lunch lady asked. “You all need to learn to be nice to folks when you come down here.”

“I am nice,” Pernie told her as she held up her tray. The lunch lady flopped a heap of white stuff on her plate that the menu on the wall said was supposed to be potatoes. Pernie didn’t know if potatoes on Earth were supposed to be the same thing as the word translated to for potatoes on Prosperion, but she sure knew that mashy stuff didn’t taste like anything that Kettle had ever made. The meat was worse, and the vegetables had no flavor at all. Pernie thought that someone during the war must have dropped a bomb that killed flavor from everything.

“Well, you go on, then, darling,” said the lunch lady. “You keep on being nice, and I’ll keep on doing likewise. Have a nice day now.”

Pernie stopped and frowned at her, and considered telling her again to stop calling her darling. Jeremy was just pulling back his tray. “Go on,” he said, seeing the look on her face. He’d only been her friend for twelve days, but he could already spot the little storms that got to brewing sometimes. “She’s just trying to be nice,” he repeated for the lunch lady, who was already talking to the next kid in the line. That kid pushed up against Jeremy with his tray.

“Get going, dipshit,” the kid said. “You’re clogging up the line.”

Jeremy didn’t look back, and tried to urge Pernie on.

Pernie turned her little brewing monsoon on the boy who’d pushed her friend. He saw her look at him and glared right back. She slapped the tray out of his hand so fast neither he nor Jeremy saw more than a blur of her hand. It clattered noisily to the floor.

The boy was beyond startled, and he recoiled spastically, flinching away from her and making a very embarrassing panic face for all to see. In the moment after, he glanced to the tray on the floor then back up at Pernie. She leaned her little face forward, her gaze predatory, inviting him to say or do something else pushy or mean. His eyes widened for a moment, then he bent and picked up his tray. He turned and lifted it up for the round-faced lunch lady without so much as another glance in the direction of Pernie or her friend.

When Pernie and Jeremy were finally seated, at the far end of a long row of tables and benches, Jeremy stared across the table at her, openly amazed and perhaps a little terrified. “He’s a seventh grader,” he proclaimed. “Are you crazy?”

“I don’t care,” Pernie said, grimacing as she took a bite of the mashy white stuff they called potatoes. “Size doesn’t mean anything. Neither does age. Not even weight or weaponry. Nothing does.” She’d killed the king of the sargosaganti; she knew for fact that this was true.

He frowned at that. He, unlike her, enjoyed the food here, and he ate heartily. “Why do you say that?”

“It just doesn’t,” she said. “And you shouldn’t be afraid.”

“But I am,” he announced, perfectly at his ease. “But that’s okay. I don’t come here to fight. I come here to learn.”

That’s what Pernie had said her first day on the bus. Nobody else had said that before.

“Well, you still shouldn’t let them push you. They’ll just do it again.”

“We’ll see how much they push when I make my android.”

That lit up Pernie’s eyes. “Really?”

“Oh yes,” he said. “I’ll make mine a full combat droid. I’ll program him so he can even wear the big battle suits. The Tesla-Matsura Six, even. Mine will be the first mech-pilot android. Mine will be so close to human that it will be able to control everything in it too. All the heads-up stuff and twitch controls. Then they’ll see.”

“Why don’t you just make a big robot like the arm in the robotics lab?”

“Because machines don’t have instincts. You have to have a human brain. That’s why I have to make an android. You have to get the human part. The skin, the nerves, the brain. It has to be human enough to hook into the mech, but machine enough to think a million times faster than we can.”

Pernie thought that made robots sound like elves. “Elves don’t have instinct either,” she said. “Maybe they are robots inside.”

“Elves?”

“Yes, they are a different kind of people on Prosperion. I know some. They are teaching me how to fight. But I’m not supposed to talk about that, so I can’t say anymore or they won’t teach me how to ….” She blanched and snapped her teeth together in an awkward grin. “Well, I’m not supposed to talk about that either.”

Jeremy looked like he really wanted to know super bad, but he didn’t make her say. That’s why she liked him. He didn’t make her talk about things she didn’t want to. Sophia Hayworth did. Sophia Hayworth was always asking, “What’s wrong, sweetheart?” and “What’s on your mind?” But that was okay. Pernie kind of liked Sophia Hayworth most of the time. She was teaching her a lot, and she never got mad. Pernie had even stopped thinking of her as “fake mother” most of the time. She was just Sophia usually.

Don Hayworth was nice too. Don said he would teach her how to play baseball this weekend. She didn’t know what that was, but Don said it was an old game that everyone loved to play. Playing would be fun. She’d been very focused on learning everything. The more comfortable she got with the computers and the devices the Earth people made, the more she learned—and the more she learned, the more she began to think that it might be harder than she thought to learn everything right away. She also thought Orli Pewter might know more things than Pernie had originally anticipated. And Pernie was very far behind. But one game of baseball would be okay.

And some time working on Jeremy’s robot.

When they were done eating, and Jeremy was done eating most of Pernie’s food, they headed to the science room to spend some time on just that very thing. Jeremy had to take the thumb apart, because it wasn’t working properly.

She sat watching him struggle with it for a time, and finally asked, “What are you trying to do?”

“I have to get this tensioner off. It’s like a ligament, holds the joints together. But it’s super tight. And if I nick it, it will tear right through.”

Pernie watched some more. Jeremy’s hands and face were trembling with the effort of trying to get the pieces apart. “It’s not supposed to be this hard,” he said.

“Are you sure you’re doing it right?” Pernie couldn’t know for sure if he was or wasn’t. She wasn’t trying to be mean. She just wondered. She had been watching him for a while, though, and she was pretty sure she knew what he was trying to do. The tool was very simple, and she thought it might just be that he was kind of weak.

“Yes, I’m sure. I don’t know why it won’t work.”

“Can I try?”

He looked up at her. She was absolutely serious. She could tell he was afraid she would break it.

“If I break it, I’ll buy you a new one,” she said. “I have money, you know. Master Tytamon sent me a lot of money. Or he had a lot of money made for me here.” She shrugged. She hadn’t figured that stuff out yet because it didn’t seem to matter and it was really boring.

Jeremy paused, and pulled his chin toward his throat. “You had money made?”

“Yes,” she said. “They did something with a heap of Tytamon’s gold back on Prosperion. He gave it to the man from the TGS office, who said he would turn it into money here on Earth.”

“Oh,” Jeremy said. He looked back at his project.

“So will you let me try it?”

His mouth shifted back and forth across his face.

“I won’t break it,” she said.

She was sure he was going to tell her no, and she was preparing her best pouty face, when he reluctantly agreed. “You’re sure you can get me another one if it does? At least the tendon and ligament? They cost a lot, you know. Eighty credits each.”

She smiled happily. “Of course I can. I have enough to buy that thing you said was where you park.”

“That what?”

“You said you wanted to buy something near where you park. In town, by your house.”

One eye closed as he scrunched up the left side of his face, trying to figure out what she was talking about. Then it dawned on him. “A townhouse by the park.”

“Yes, that was it. I can buy you one of those if you’d like.”

It was his turn to frown.

“Come on,” she said, reaching for the tool. “I promise I won’t break it.”

He was just staring at her, like he was trying to decide something. She reached for the tool in his hands, a small metal rod with a hook. He didn’t snatch it from her when she gently pulled it from his grasp.

She moved around the workbench to where he was, shouldered him gently aside, and quickly found where the joint was he’d been working on. She pushed the hook underneath the expanse of dark gray material that looked like polished string. She tugged on it gently, and found it to be on very tight. She pulled a little harder. Still nothing. She continued to pull harder until, just like that, it popped off.

She turned triumphantly to him, presenting him with the tool. “I told you I could—”

He was crying.

Chapter 14

T
he Earl of Vorvington sat at his opulent desk in his opulent offices on the top floor of the opulent Castles, Inc. building. Castles, Inc. was a construction and transmutation business the portly nobleman was forced to operate to augment the paltry earnings his earldom provided.

Still, his station gave him advantage in business, and he was privileged in his contracts, operating almost entirely for the Queen, who awarded to him almost every job his company bid on. In the aftermath of the war, he was making a fortune repairing damage to the city, in particular to the Palace walls, as he was one of the few people with access to any wizards at all these days. What the TGS hadn’t taken, Her Majesty nearly had, and with Her Majesty tied up in her own affairs more so now than at any other point in his memory, she’d given him all the more leeway to get things done. Which was good. Leeway provided a man of opportunity with, well, opportunities. And a man like Vorvington prided himself on his vision when it came to such matters.

Speaking of which, he was just stuffing a set of very special plans pertaining to a section of the Palace wall into an ivory tube when a knock came upon his door, announcing the arrival of a diviner from the temple of Anvilwrath. She was a young acolyte, very pretty, whose name was Klovis, as he recalled. He’d been expecting her. He opened the door and gazed at her, a smile creasing his fleshy face.

Her face was stern but comely, high cheekbones and a narrow nose above lips that likely did not smile much. But most noticeable about her was the scar, a long, straight line cutting from just below her throat down between her breasts and vanishing into her rust-colored robes. It was narrow and well healed, the slight rise of it only a shade paler than the rest of her flesh, but she made no effort to hide it, much less have it properly removed by a cosmetic healer. Rather, she seemed to wear it with pride, and his eyes were even directed to it by the copper spearhead medallion she wore suspended from a copper chain around her neck. His tongue crept out from between his lips, wetting them, as he thought about where that scar went.

“The Grand Maul says that it is done,” the young priestess said. “Your people have dug it out. He thanks you and assures you that you and he and … that everyone is on the same line of the prophecy.” She handed him a sealed envelope. “Here is what you asked us for in return.”