Saving Thanehaven

  At the first corner, a T-junction, the ogre can’t decide which route to take. Its big, lumpy, bristling head keeps turning this way and that. Its horny feet shuffle forward, then back, then forward, then back. It’s stuck in a kind of mental loop, and Noble has no desire to help it. Why should he? Ogres are treacherous things, and this one shouldn’t even be here. Having forced its way in, it will have to suffer the consequences.

  Whatever they might be.

  Noble sidles past the confused ogre and marches on. He has to dodge all the cracks in the floor, which are often very wide, and which frequently erupt into fountains of color. Some of the fountains are more like waterfalls, and they pool on the ceiling in a way that defies every natural law. Noble finds them deeply unnerving. He’s also disturbed by the doors, which are starting to flap and billow like curtains. Solid steel doors shouldn’t behave like curtains. Apart from anything else, it’s extremely dangerous.

  Noble peers around the next corner and sees another, busier corridor where people are passing to and fro. For an instant, they’re framed in full view, before plunging out of sight again. Some look ill. Some are chasing others. One staggers to a halt, props himself against a wall, and begins to vomit. Many appear to be members of the audience from Guitar Hero—or was it Garage Band? Noble can’t remember. What’s more, he doesn’t care. He’s far more interested in the small, bedraggled, pink creature that’s parked halfway down the connecting passage.

  “Lulu?” he exclaims.

  The unicorn glances around. She’s keening with distress, and Noble can understand why. A head has been impaled on her long silver horn—the head of a bright yellow pig with a ring through its nose.

  “Help me,” the pig rasps, tears welling from its eyes. “Please, please, help me.…”

  Noble darts forward and wrenches the head from its spike, trying not to think about what he’s doing. Though he doesn’t exactly drop the thing, he certainly doesn’t cling to it. Instead, he discards it quickly, so he can pick up Lulu. “Come on,” he says, tucking the unicorn under one arm. “We have to find Rufus.”

  As he makes for the busy hallway up ahead, he doesn’t look back. He can hear the pig whimpering but can’t bring himself to rescue it. What could he possibly do with a pig’s head, after all? There’s no telling where its body might be. And he already has his hands full with Lulu, who’s wriggling joyfully, trying to lick his face like a dog.

  “Stop it,” he warns, “or you’ll hurt yourself.”

  He doesn’t bother asking where Lord Harrowmage is, since Lulu can’t talk. He’s not even sure that she understands him—though she does calm down a little, after he tells her to. The fact that she’s much heavier than he anticipated makes him wonder if he should put her down again. But when he reaches the next junction, he sees that the floor to his left has liquefied. People are actually wading along, up to their thighs in melted concrete.

  Lulu would never survive that.

  So he turns right, making for the music. He keeps an eye out for his other missing comrades: Brandi, Lord Harrowmage … even Rufus. Especially Rufus. Noble is convinced that Rufus must be somewhere nearby. Rufus will be sticking with the Kernel, and since the Kernel can’t leave his lair, Rufus will have stayed, too.

  “Gaaah.” Up ahead, a woman lurches around the corner, stiff-legged and openmouthed. She’s covered in blood, and her bulging eyes stare strangely. Her missing right arm doesn’t seem to bother her in the least.

  She lurches toward Noble, reaching for him with her left arm, as Lulu squeals in terror.

  “Gaaah!”

  Then someone else careens around the corner, machete in hand. He’s a plump youth in a hooded top and baggy pants, both of which are splattered with blood. “Zombie Squad!” he yells at the top of his voice. Then he swings his machete—and cuts the woman’s head off.

  Behind him, a smaller, skinnier boy whoops triumphantly. The two boys slap their raised right hands together in a kind of salute. “Twenty-three and counting!” the larger one crows, before they both dash off again, laughing with excitement.

  Meanwhile, the decapitated woman has fallen flat on her stomach. Her head has rolled along the corridor. For one horrible instant, Noble is afraid that it’s going to talk to him.

  But it doesn’t. It seems to be quite dead.

  Maybe that’s what happened to the pig, Noble reflects, advancing cautiously past the woman’s blood-soaked remains. He’s reeling with horror, and deeply grateful that he’s still in one piece. Clearly, an insane gang is running around Mikey’s computer cutting off heads. It’s another reason why Rufus has to be stopped. If people want to be free to cut off other people’s heads, then rules have to be put in place.

  “Shhh.” Noble comforts Lulu, who’s still whinnying with distress. “It’s all right. We’ll be all right.” The music is almost deafening, by now. It’s a real cacophony with no rhythm, no harmony, and no tune. When Noble turns the next corner, he sees why. A knot of musicians is clustered around the Kernel’s glass booth, but they’re not playing together. They’re not a band. The singers are singing different songs. The instrumentalists are also in competition. The only drummer seems to be lashing out in fury at everything in sight: walls, screens, backs, heads.

  Noble recognizes two of the musicians. The last time he saw the blond singer and his companion, they were being swamped by their own audience. He also recognizes some of the audience members who are stumbling around the Kernel’s lair, shrieking and falling over and spraying each other with drinks. Two of the girls are wrapped in each other’s arms, alternately laughing and crying. They don’t seem to be aware that there’s another headless corpse propped against the booth beside them.

  It’s a grotesque scene. The air is full of familiar, drifting shapes, some pink, some blue. A gargoyle is spinning in circles, unable to fly. Around it, people point and laugh. A large black vehicle has crashed through one wall, bringing down a load of bricks. Through the hole in the wall, Noble catches a glimpse of lurid, bloodred sky.

  There’s so much activity that he can’t find Rufus, at first. He has to push through a dazed crowd of disarmed security guards and squeeze past a very big blob. At last, he spies Rufus standing at one end of the large, low, octagonal room, between a werewolf and a metal man.

  The metal man is trying to stuff the Kernel into something that looks a bit like a sea chest.

  “Hey! Hey, Noble!” Rufus flaps his hand, grinning widely. “Where have you been?”

  He looks just the same. The cuffs of his baggy pants are puddling around his ankles. His woolly hair is falling over his face. He’s still pale and thin and spotty.

  Yet he’s immensely powerful. Immensely dangerous. Gazing at him, Noble can hardly believe someone who seems so harmless could be such a threat.

  “What are you doing?” Noble asks mechanically, setting Lulu down. When the unicorn protests, he ignores her.

  He needs two free hands.

  “What?” Rufus cups his own hand around one ear. “I can’t hear you!” he bawls. “The music’s too loud!”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Oh!” Rufus laughs. “Ever heard of data compression? Well, that’s what this is! Data compression!” He laughs again as Noble edges closer for a better look. The Kernel has been partially wedged into an old metal trunk that’s much too small for him. He looks battered. His nose is bloody. His shirt is torn. His expression is traumatized.

  “That iron box was meant for me!” Rufus continues, pitching his voice high above the commotion. “So it’s what you might call poetic justice!”

  The werewolf utters a bone-chilling growl.

  “And Lonnie, here, just spent six months in something similar, so you can imagine how he feels.” Rufus claps the werewolf on its hairy shoulder, then nods at Noble’s leg. “You’re looking pretty beat-up yourself. What happened?”

  Glancing down, Noble realizes that the skin of his ankle has been punctured several times. The bug’s claw must hav
e injured him, though he’s been too preoccupied to notice.

  “A giant bug tried to eat me,” he replies.

  “Oh, yeah?” Rufus doesn’t sound very interested. His eyes swing back toward the Kernel. “Maybe it’s the same one I helped spring from quarantine. What do you think, Lonnie? Lonnie would know.”

  “You have to stop.” Noble speaks almost without thinking. He’s appalled at the way the metal man keeps pushing at the Kernel’s belly, trying to ram the blubbery mound into a very confined space. But Rufus doesn’t seem to hear, so Noble starts shouting. “Tell him to stop it! He has to stop!”

  “Why?” asks Rufus, startled. He turns to peer at Noble again.

  “Because this all has to stop! All this chaos!” Noble makes a sweeping gesture that encompasses the headless corpse, the discordant musicians, the frightened unicorn, the blundering gargoyle, the collapsed wall. Then, as a mystified Rufus gapes at him, Noble adds, “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  For a moment, Rufus stares at Noble, his eyes glimmering through a thick curtain of hair. As the silence stretches on between them, Noble wonders if his message has actually hit home.

  But then a smile creeps across Rufus’s face. “That’s my line,” he drawls.

  “You don’t have to go around dismantling everything, Rufus. What you’re doing here …” Noble shakes his head grimly. “It’s so wrong.”

  “Oh, really? You’d rather see Yestin being eaten by monsters, would you?” Before Noble can answer, Rufus suddenly frowns. “Where is Yestin, by the way?”

  Noble pretends not to hear. “It doesn’t have to be one thing or the other,” he insists, raising his voice over the din. “It doesn’t have to be tyranny or anarchy. You can follow rules and still think for yourself.”

  “Not in a computer,” Rufus retorts. “Computers don’t work that way.”

  “But they could!”

  “No.” It’s Rufus’s turn to shake his head. “Computers aren’t like the real world. You follow your programming or you’re out on your ear. There’s no room for compromise. There’s no middle path.”

  “We could build a middle path, though! Right here! Together!” Noble suddenly loses patience. He can barely hear himself think. So he grabs Rufus and hustles him toward the nearest corridor, away from all the pandemonium. “I need to talk to you. Haven’t you seen what’s going on?”

  “Well, sure,” Rufus replies. Though he doesn’t seem to like being touched, and quickly wrests his arm out of Noble’s grip, he raises no objection to having a private chat in a dark corner. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? Wow. And you missed the World of Warcraft breakout. Now that was awesome. You should have seen that.”

  “Listen.” Noble cuts him off, looking him in the eye. “We should summon everyone to a great conclave. To discuss the future. If you can’t communicate with them all, ask the Kernel to do it. You should free him from that box because he’s important. We need him.”

  Rufus snorts. “No, we don’t.”

  “Yes, we do, Rufus! This isn’t a game! If we don’t fix this computer, it’s going to crash! And then we’ll all be killed!” Hearing Lulu squeak piteously from somewhere around his knees, Noble realizes that she must have followed him. “Don’t you even care?” he goes on. “About any of us?”

  “If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t be here,” Rufus rejoins. “If I didn’t care, you’d be dead already. Mikey’s such a lousy gamer, you would have been gutted or spiked or eaten by now, if I hadn’t shown up. And you’d have been replaced by another Noble. And then another one, after that.”

  “I know.” It’s true. Noble fully understands that it was Rufus who rescued him from almost certain death in Morwood. “You saved me and I’m grateful. You’ve done a lot for me, Rufus. And for Yestin. And Lorellina. But you’ve gone too far.”

  “Hey …” Rufus lifts his hands in protest. “Don’t look at me. I’m not the one crashing cars, or tearing up e-mails.”

  Infuriated, Noble exclaims, “You’ve been telling people to abandon everything! Their homes, their friends, their duties—”

  “I’ve been telling people to live a little. That’s all.”

  “Live a little?” Noble can’t believe his ears. “They’re cutting people’s heads off, Rufus!”

  “Those aren’t people, they’re zombies. There’s nothing else you can do with a zombie.” As Noble opens his mouth to disagree, Rufus adds, “It’s just a bit of fun. Don’t you get that? Why are you such a killjoy, all of a sudden?”

  Noble takes a deep breath. He feels like shaking Rufus, but he fights the urge. A cuff on the ear isn’t going to change Rufus’s mind—and besides, Noble has renounced that kind of thing. Having laid down his weapon, he’s not about to pick it up again.

  Instead, he draws on all the lessons he’s learned from Rufus, and from Yestin, and from Lorellina, and from the Kernel. He lays both hands on Rufus’s shoulders, fixes him with a clear, compelling gaze, and says, “We need to work together. All of us. That doesn’t mean working in the old way, like slaves under the yoke of tyranny. We’d be working for each other. Not for Mikey. Not for the Kernel. For us. Do you understand?”

  Rufus sighs. “It’s a nice idea.…”

  “It is! Yes!” Noble’s grip tightens until he makes Rufus wince.

  “But it won’t happen,” Rufus finishes. He begins to peel off Noble’s fingers, one by one, until he frees himself.

  “Why not?” Noble demands. “Why wouldn’t it happen? You said yourself that everyone’s entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness! Why can’t we change things?”

  “Because we’re not programmers, Noble!” For the first time, Rufus is showing signs of frustration. He scowls and says, “You’ve no idea what you’re up against. This isn’t a commune, it’s a computer. And you’re just a subprogram. You don’t have the muscle to build a new world.”

  “I’m bigger than you are, and you made a difference,” Noble points out.

  “Yeah, but …,” Rufus begins, before trailing off. For a moment, he looks almost disconcerted. Then he abruptly changes tack. “Okay, listen,” he plows on, his perplexed expression dissolving into something more upbeat. “You’ve got a ringside seat to an amazing show. It’ll be pretty spectacular. And when things start getting a little too intense … well, then, maybe I can get us both out.”

  “Out?”

  “Sure. There might be peripherals … Bluetooth connections … the Kernel will know. We’ll ask him.”

  “You’d run away?” Noble splutters.

  “I’d move on.” Rufus flashes a sly little grin. “I mean, I never said I was planning to settle here, did I?”

  Squinting down at him, Noble feels as if he’s looking through a telescope. Rufus seems so far away, somehow, even though he’s standing right in front of Noble. “What about our friends?” Noble asks. “What about Brandi and Lord Harrowmage?”

  “Brandi’s partying somewhere,” Rufus replies. “I haven’t seen the Mage. I think he’s in hiding—he looks like such a freak, now.”

  “You really don’t care, do you? You said you did, but you don’t.”

  “Because I didn’t sign up to be a nursemaid? Puh-lease,” Rufus scoffs. “Liberty comes at a price, you know. It means you have to look after yourself.” He moves to sidestep Noble, who immediately grabs him again. “Ouch! Lemme go!”

  “Listen—”

  “Or what? You’ll break every bone in my body?”

  “No!” Stung, Noble drops Rufus’s arm. “I don’t use force anymore. You should know that.”

  “Must have slipped my mind,” Rufus mutters. His attention has already drifted back toward the iron box.

  So Noble raises his voice. “You told me to put down my weapon, Rufus, and I did. You changed me. I used to think that made you clever and powerful. But if I can change and you can’t, then maybe I’m the clever one. Maybe I’m the powerful one. Not you.”

  Noble stops to
catch his breath. The challenge he just issued is like a slap in the face. Will Rufus rise to it? Rufus, however, is already moving away.

  “Do you remember what you told me, a long time ago?” Noble calls after him. “You said I was ‘new generation.’ You said I had very sophisticated programming. Well, maybe you were right. Maybe my programming is more sophisticated than your programming.” When Rufus still doesn’t reply, Noble shouts, “Are you listening, Rufus?”

  “Yeah, yeah …” Rufus flaps a dismissive hand, enraging Noble.

  “All you can do is one thing, and I’ve learned to do a lot more than that!” Noble roars. “You haven’t learned to listen, but I’ve learned to speak out!”

  With his long legs and energetic stride, he soon overtakes Rufus. For an instant, they jostle each other at the mouth of the hallway. Then Noble veers toward the Kernel’s glass booth, leaving Rufus to rejoin his friend Lonnie the werewolf. Even from a distance, it’s obvious that the booth hasn’t been utterly destroyed. Though every window is smashed—though the Kernel’s chair has been thrown halfway down a corridor and many of his tools have been scattered across the floor—the desk and screens have remained in their original positions. Some of the screens are even working. And the mike hasn’t been carried away, either, though it is hanging upside down at the end of its cable, dangling over the edge of the desk.

  Noble is forced to step across a mound of unconscious bodies before he can reach this desk. He’s also briefly distracted by a flicker of movement on one of the surviving screens. It’s an image of Lorellina—but not the Lorellina he knows. Back in Thanehaven, the false Lorellina is being slowly engulfed by a reddish tide that’s pouring through the throne room. Clearly, the Blood River is invading the Fortress of Bone.

  Noble swallows, then turns away. He can’t afford to worry about the false Lorellina; not now. Besides, it’s the mike that really holds his interest—the mike and what it can do for him. He remembers that it once gave the Kernel a voice like thunder.