The Machine God

Chapter 276

Red and Gold

A couple of people helped carry the old man between them, shuffling through the rubble of what had been the Marquess Estate. Alexander watched them go, then turned and looked back.

The house was gone. Timber and stone and broken furniture lay in heaps where the building had come apart. Further out, scattered across the surrounding grounds, the metal alloy plates that had been hidden inside the walls and floors caught the moonlight. The building’s real skeleton, stripped of its disguise and revealed for what it had always been.

A containment facility dressed up as a mansion. At least ever since the explosion that had taken the previous Marquis.

Droney floated above, casting a beam of white light down through the dark. The little drone had been lighting the path from the basement stairs to the breach in the estate wall, guiding the rescued prisoners through the debris. The moon was bright, but the grounds were a mess of broken stone and twisted metal, and Droney’s spotlight had kept people from breaking their ankles on the way out.

Almost a hundred people had gathered at the shattered section of wall. Civilians from the surrounding streets, drawn by the noise, the collapsing building, the lightning in the sky. They stood in clusters, torches and lanterns in hand, watching.

Alexander rose into the air. Droney settled into position over his shoulder, still casting light.

Beyond the wall, in the ruins of a building the younger wizard had been punched into, movement caught his eye. She was stirring. A pair of guards knelt beside her, helping her sit up. Her staff lay in the rubble next to her.

Alexander considered it. Another staff for the collection. But she was barely conscious, and there were a lot of people watching. Killing an injured woman in front of a crowd of civilians just to grab a piece of wood would send exactly the wrong message.

They’d think he was a thief or something.

Below, the last of the rescued prisoners were making their way through the breach. They stumbled out onto the street in ones and twos, blinking against the torchlight, wrapped in whatever clothing the crowd had offered.

A woman staggered through the gap, barely upright. Someone in the crowd screamed. A man shoved past two others and threw his arms around her, nearly taking them both to the ground.

More followed. A young man emerged and an older woman rushed forward, clutching his face between her hands. Two girls, neither older than sixteen, came through together and were swallowed by a knot of people who pulled them into a crush of arms and voices.

Alexander pressed outward with his Will, searching for the sensation he’d learned to recognize. He tuned out the familiar ones. The ones that pointed home, faint, but somehow still connected despite distance and being in another reality.

There.

Fresh golden threads. Over a dozen, most of them stretching from the people recovered from the pods. A couple came from guards, now standing among the civilians with empty hands where wands had been. And as the reunions played out below, more bloomed into existence. He watched one form in real time as a man clutched someone he’d recognized stumbling out of the breach. The thread materialized between them and Alexander, warm against his awareness.

Two threads near the edge of the crowd caught his attention. Anyah and Ruyah. The boy was pointing up at him, face bright in Droney’s light. His sister stood beside him, one hand on his shoulder.

Alexander couldn’t tell if they recognized him.

There were two others of note. Red threads. He’d never seen them directed at himself before. One from the Tier 2 wizard, who had managed to stand and was staring up at him from the rubble, visibly shaking. Her red thread pulsed in jagged beats. The other came from one of the two guards helping her to her feet.

Before Artensah, he hadn’t even known it was possible. Nobody else he’d seen before had possessed both red and gold.

The question was why. Why now? What had changed? He hadn’t even hit the wizard that hard, as evidenced by the fact she was still breathing. And the worst thing he’d done to the guard was borrow the guy’s wand. He’d probably be assigned a new one in a day, if he were a loyal—

Alexander froze. Both mental threads zeroed in on the idea. That was it. It had to be. Loyalty. Alexander, Maximilian, and Damien were each such different people, with wildly differing ideas and goals, but they shared one thing in common.

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They wanted to help people.

The Lost Prophet hadn’t seen people like that at all. He’d wanted to dominate and control and terrorize everyone.

And Artensah, He Who Whispers, Exalted of the Stars, saw the Empire as his people, while the people living under it, with some obvious exceptions, were something else. Trash. Lesser beings.

The rest of this world’s Exalted were probably the same.

The truth was right there. He saw the Empire of Stars as a slaver nation that deserved to be destroyed. They were not his people, and they never could be.

And so he’d earned his first red thread in the woman whose face he’d smashed in. Because he terrified her, and perhaps, deep down, because he’d meant to hurt her more than was necessary to win the battle. The guard, then, must see himself as Empire, even if he was nothing more than a lowly conscript. His own belief system made him an enemy.

He almost laughed. Killing them would have been a cleaner outcome. It would have bypassed the existential crisis.

Alexander sighed. Then he reached out with Metallokinesis and collected his chains from where they’d fallen across the lawn. The links raced through the grass and vanished into the ring. Then he grabbed sections of the scattered wall plating and stored those too. The floor pieces were too large. He clenched his fist, and each one compressed into a dense ball of alloy with a grinding shriek before disappearing into the ring.

A wave of gasps rose from the crowd. People were pointing behind him.

Alexander turned.

The bow of a warship cut through the cloud cover, moonlight reflecting off its hull. It slowed to a stop well in the distance and hovered, the dark alloy plating flashing faintly with geometric runes along its flanks.

It had arrived fast. Or he’d taken too long.

But it didn’t approach. It was probably waiting for reinforcements, or for Tier 2s to teleport aboard. It was also possible they were trying to figure out how to track him. That’s what he’d be doing if he were a wizard with a dumb collection of spells that didn’t work on anyone but wizards.

Developing superhero tracking magic. Or hexing. Or cursing. Either way, he wouldn’t be just sitting there.

“Guess that’s our cue,” Alexander said. “We’ve overstayed our welcome.”

Droney beeped.

“I was not a bad tenant.” He paused. “They had rodents. It’s not my fault I had to clean the place out.”

Alexander began to rise further. Then he stopped and turned back to the crowd below. He reached into the ring and pulled out every coin he’d collected the night before. Bronze, silver, and one gold piece.

He flicked them into the air.

The coins spun outward over the crowd, dozens of them, catching Droney’s light. They spread wide over the crowd, then began to fall, slower than gravity wanted, before Metallokinesis released its hold.

There were more gasps. Then shouts. Followed by hands reaching up, snatching coins from the air, grabbing them off the ground, holding them up to the light.

Alexander laughed.

Droney cut the light. The world below plunged back into moonlight and torches.

Alexander wrapped the little drone in Metallokinesis and put on speed, arcing into the sky. The city shrank beneath him. The warship hung in the distance, watching.

Then the clouds swallowed him, and Harborhill disappeared from view.

He closed his eyes and let Droney’s vision fill the gap. The little guy couldn’t see much either, just shifting walls of vapor and the occasional darker patch where the cloud thinned. But it was better than his own eyes, which were, as Annie had reminded him about Flashpoint’s, squishy and organic.

One mental thread maintained his Domain. It thrummed against the air, pressing outward, reminding reality that the Machine God was here. That even when flying mostly blind through a cloud bank, it was his Will that mattered.

The other thread turned inward.

Alexander cycled Electrokinesis through his Core, then pushed it outward through every system in his body. Blood, muscle, bone, nerve. He ramped the output steadily, past the comfortable threshold, past the familiar warmth, until his own resistance to lightning faltered and the current started to burn.

He held it there.

It was the same technique he’d used to burn out the wizard’s paralysis magic when they’d rudely interrupted his battle with Flashpoint. Raw current through every system. Nervous system, muscle fibers, tendons. Anything foreign broke down under sustained electrical discharge. The difference was that back then he’d been tearing it out in a hurry while avoiding being shot from the sky.

This time he could be thorough.

Because if the Empire was smarter than he’d given them credit for, they might have slipped something quieter onto him. A tracer. A marker. Some magic cast into his clothes or his armor or his skin that he couldn’t see and Droney couldn’t detect. The kind of thing a civilization that had been tracking people by magical signature for centuries would absolutely know how to do.

The burn intensified. Every nerve ending protested.

But he found nothing. No foreign energy broke apart and dissolved. Which meant either he was clean, or they were better at hiding things than he was at finding them.

Alexander eased back. The burning faded. He let out a slow breath into the cloud. He’d take the first option but stay paranoid about the second.

Droney beeped. The sound distorted, disappearing into the wind and dense moisture as they raced on.

But he’d never needed to hear Droney to understand it.

“Yeah, let’s find a nice mountain to take a nap, first. Kill a day or two and make sure we don’t have a tail. Then we’ll head back to the clan and see if we can’t convince Wargah and Minlah and her granny to do a little revolution with us.”

Droney beeped again. Excitement.

“Me too, buddy.”

Now he just had to figure out what the hell to do with a gateway to a world full of grinning Nightmares.