Michaela only spent a minute or so talking to Kalea, before she got to work tending to me. Like Kalea, she was also new to the Knights. What little I knew about her was that she was young, British, and had a Doctorate.

  Since I was so hurt, I had Morrigan open up like a shell while I lay on my back. I felt exposed, but I also really wanted my hip fixed. I focused on her eyes. Her eyes were a sparkling blue, but kind — and in a way I couldn’t explain — human. I watched her watch me, her eyes flicking across my body as she searched for injuries past what she had been told.

  I won’t go into detail of what it was like getting my leg reset. It sucked. The rest of my injuries she was able to heal in moments with the serum. She was a true savant. And very pretty.

  Her hair was done up in a succession of small blonde buns, almost like a mohawk. Her cheeks pinked flush, and her ruddy skin shone with just a bit of sweat. She wore makeup, pink colored lipstick highlighting her youthful lips, and a sharp cat eye eyeliner, and a sparkly smokey eye look that made it seem like she’d just come from clubbing.

  She wasn’t out of her armor yet, but I could tell she was hot as hell.

  It seemed interesting to me that she thought to take such care in her appearance. I guess it was a ‘women in the military’ thing. Even out here at war, we all wanted to feel like a woman, yeah? That or she really had come from a night of clubbing. None of us had been expecting this.

  “I think I’ll go wash up,” I said.

  She just made a wordless noise, and turned her attention to Kalea, who tried to wave her off. I was able to walk to the bathroom with ease.

  The Black Serum was miracle stuff. Why weren’t we all Knights? Or why didn’t Knights spend more time on humanitarian work? Maybe they did.

  It was something to think about.

  In the bathroom, I took my long hair out of its bun, washed my face, and did a bit of work to make sure I was a little more presentable. Or maybe I just wanted to feel a little more human. I wasn’t as nervous as after my first fight. But I was exhausted.

  After washing up, I put my hair back in a bun, tighter this time, so hopefully it didn’t slip out in combat. I get why people cut their hair now.

  Coming back out into the cafe, I saw Michaela out of her armor, sniffing Kalea’s flask. Her underlayer was typical of a human Knight, tight and with conductive areas so the neural assessors had good contact. With her relatively thin arms, and her chest compressed by the suit, her legs stood out. They were sprinters' legs, muscular and lean. I tried not to stare. So, I looked at her suit.

  It was a marvel. Clearly a runic class like mine, with large nanite canisters on one arm, and the other free. It was very asymmetrical. On the hip opposite her canisters was a mess of plastic fletching, the ends of arrows. Couldn’t see a bow but presumably, it was folded neatly in a compartment. The handle of a knife stuck out of the plating on her chest.

  Everything about her kit seemed odd. I couldn’t quite figure out what it was about.

  “It’s water,” Kalea said.

  “Can I have a sip?” Michaela asked.

  “Only if you want to trip balls.”

  “From the water?”

  “From the saliva.”

  “Right! Alien.”

  Michaela handed it back over.

  “Feel better?” she asked, looking at me. There was some kind of interest in her eyes I couldn’t place.

  “I feel fine,” I said.

  She made another pensive noise, and turned her attention back to Kalea.

  “See?” Kalea said, “she’s tough.”

  “Certainly,” Micheala replied, “but that doesn’t mean she’s the chosen one.”

  “Prophesied Knight,” Kalea corrected.

  “Right. Not sure I believe in all that. They said Captain Parker was the chosen one too.”

  Kalea just hummed her assent.

  I grabbed a chair, and sat at the table with them. Morrigan stood like a sentry. Or maybe like an action figure at a tea party.

  “Shouldn’t we be leaving, so that they don’t find us?”

  “We’re fine for right now,” Micheala replied, without ever taking her eyes off Kalea.

  “Good. Then let’s get back out there,” Kalea said.

  “Certainly. But where shall we go next?” Michaela said. “I was under the assumption that this was a rescue mission. I’m here, I’ve patched the young lass up, and we can fall back to join the army.”

  Kalea scoffed.

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “The army?” the alien said. “I have as much faith in their line as I do in the sturdiness of the clouds.”

  “Nice figure of speech,” I said.

  She harrumphed.

  “Then maybe they can provide transport to the Dreadnought?” Michaela provided. “The only reason it’s not on the horizon is that it would be seen as an act of war. Ambassador Dara is wary of losing more Knights to war when we may need them for this new front. Is it a new front?”

  “It looks like it.”

  “Damn. I heard about Paula too —”

  Kalea held her hand out.

  “Well, she was someone I always looked up to,” said Michaela.

  “I need to get my brother,” I stated.

  “And where is he?” Michaela asked.

  “Across the river,” I said.

  Michaela sucked air through her teeth.

  “It’s that bad, huh?” I asked.

  “They have large bore gun emplacements all down the river. And we can’t tell how many, but aerial imaging shows silver on the roofs of buildings. Elites, dozens of them.”

  “We need more firepower?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure we’d have enough with half a dozen more.”

  “I have to get to him,” I stated.

  Michaela looked to Kalea, who just shrugged.

  “She’s insistent. And I think we can do great things together. But I mean to make my death matter, and dying from overwhelming fire before I can even raise my axe doesn’t seem like it’s going to cut it.”

  “She’s right,” Michaela said. “We need Knights, and we need a plan.”

  I grit my teeth.

  “The longer I wait, the more it becomes likely that Matt —” I cut myself off. “We need to get across the river. This takes precedence over everything else.”

  “I hear you, kid,” Michaela said. “But we can’t drink from a dry pond.”

  I stood and paced. This was going nowhere. I finally had another Knight with me but it didn’t change things at all.

  Micheala got some things from her pack. When I sat back down, we each had pair of sandwiches, and a cup of tea. Michaela had a shot of whiskey.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Little hair of the dog,” she said.

  “Isn’t whiskey bad if we’re about to head into combat?” I asked.

  “Nah,” Micheala said. “Not one shot.”

  I looked to Kalea, who shrugged.

  She downed the shot.

  “Ah. Goes down smooth. Doesn’t taste like a hundred pounds, though.”

  “A hundred pounds?”

  I drank the sports drink and ate the egg sandwich. It was decent. In moments, I had an empty plate.

  It didn’t start all at once. It took its time, but when I was done with the sandwiches, the dread had wormed its way in. I felt it snake around my stomach like some kind of diseased hand.

  It wasn’t in the song. It was in me.

  “Hey, kid,” Michaela said. “Are you doing alright?”

  “I guess, I guess I’m just nervous,” I said, downplaying the feeling.

  I really didn’t want to go back out there. I knew I had to fight, but the thought of fighting again seemed impossible. I didn’t know what I was doing. They were going to kill me.

  “What are you worried about?” Kalea asked.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing. I build Morrigan with these big tanks on the side, but I don’t know how to use them. I can’t even make those barriers.”

  “I can teach you,” Micheala said.

  “Really?”

  Some of the tension subsided.

  “Preparation is the key to relaxation,” she said.

  I laughed.

  We talked. She showed me the idea of Bardic Structures. The idea that you could represent the Applications through music, or carefully drawn pictographs, or however you wanted to structure it. But you could also borrow the structures from others. The NAABS walls were relatively easy, and stronger protections would need to be made bespoke from my own work.

  I grabbed a small Black Serum decanter, and hummed a trill. A small wall the size of my hand appeared. I punched it, and bruised a knuckle.0

  Before anything else could happen, something on Morigan’s neck chirped. I went up to it, part of its Aural Sensory Array attached to the neck had a flashing LED. I took it and and as soon as I did, an earpiece jut from it. I put it in my ear.

  “Finally got through to you!” Saanvi said.

  “Hey, Saanvi!”

  Kalea was placid. Michaela seemed puzzled.

  “Glad I got a hold of you. I’m patching her in.”

  “Who?”

  “Howdy girlie!” came an enthusiastic feminine voice on the other line.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m coming in like a gawd-damn missile, and I need y’all to make sure I ain’t overrun when I land.”

  “What? Who are you?”

  “Tex.”

  “What?”

  “Name’s Tex, I’m a Scout Class Knight riding on top of a plane without wings, and I just pinged you. Come get me!”

  The line went dead.

  “Well,” I said in a rush, “don’t just stand there, we got to get 10 blocks down and rescue a Knight!”

  I slammed my back into Morrigan. By the time my VP and Aural Sensory Array spun up, the others were suited too.

  “Can we make those speed boosters?” I asked over comms.

  “Way ahead of you,” Micheala said. “Just give me the ping.”

  Morrigan had already marked Tex’s expected landing zone on the map, and I focused on Michaela’s armor. Morrigan flashed a letter symbol that blinked away.

  “Got it!” She said, pulling a contraption from under a plate on her back. It unfolded into an arrow.

  As soon as we were out the door, Micheala had three arrows hovering in blue mist next to her compound bow. I counted six wheels on it. I’d never seen a knight use one. More blue mist puffed from the tanks on her arm, that shifted into black.

  She shot the first arrow through the mist and it caught fire, speeding through the air. She shot three more in rapid succession.

  “Just follow the rings,” she said.

  I saw that the arrows did indeed leave a trail of gold circular sections of mist behind.

  I ran. The first gold ring I hit gave me that weightless, frictionless feeling. My feet left the earth. When I hit the ground, my boots churned earth.

  I hit the next ring, and the next, running faster, ever faster.

  “Y’all gotta run faster than that!” Tex said over comms.

  “I got it!” I yelled back.

  In the sky I spied flaming debris exit a cloud of smoke.

  “Is that you?”

  “No idea what you’re looking at, baby! I’m in a ball o’ fire!”

  I ran faster.