“So you want me to do what, precisely?”

“Help me enter the factory,” Arachne said, measuring out a small dollop of patience from her near-infinite supply. Morgan Knight required such measured tolerance. Several years her senior, the warrior held himself as her equal in combat, her superior in wisdom, her model in compassion. Arachne had always liked Lyonelle’s strange friend, once they’d bridged the gap of worlds’ difference than lay between them.

He was not who she would have chosen to ask for help. But she would have chosen no one. That being folly, he was the next best choice. “And do what?” he asked, his voice still casual and noncommittal, the only sign of his interest that one quirked eyebrow he so readily lifted.

“I do not know. I was hired only to investigate it. What little I saw there spoke of hostility and pain, and danger that I could not handle alone.” Arachne spoke bluntly. Once she might have been afraid to admit anything was beyond her. Now she knew the weakness of strength, and the strength of weakness. Morgan would appreciate such a cryptically wise statement. Perhaps that was why she liked him.

“You can’t handle it, but you think I can?” Morgan smirked, not cruelly. His hair was long, as it often was; coupled with the smooth lines of his face and pale, flawless skin, he held more femininity in his appearance than Arachne herself did. He was unquestionably male, though, an impression she had no idea how he gave, but did nonethless.

“You don’t understand the limitations of my magic,” she said. “I draw off strength and vitality. My own, most commonly. The more I tap myself, the weaker I become, and as Arachne my skills are not suited towards putting swift end to violence in large numbers.”

“So you –“ He paused. “’As Arachne’? What does that mean? You are Arachne.”

“I am named for the rune,” she said, lifting her hand to show the rune on her palm and lower wrist, mate to the one on the back of her hand, all mirrors of the ones on her other arm as well. “I am the rune.”

Bright green eyes, always slightly startling to her, flicked from her hand to her face. Morgan opened his mouth, then bit his lip, melding confidence with uncertainty in a confusing mixture. “You really have to explain this whole thing to me.”

“I shall if I have leisure,” she said.

“So you want me to be a battery for you?”

Batteries – cells of power, which fueled the devices of metal and stranger substances so prevalent in this curious world. A fair analogy, if flawed. “You can refresh yourself, restore the flow of your own energy. Can you not?”

“Even my power has limits, Arachne,” he said, trying to hide a smile. “Besides,” he continued, “what’s in it for me?”

Arachne had no powers of words, no skill as a diplomat, no training in the art of persuasion. Yet Morgan was so straightforward, even she could ply his will. “The adventure and the challenge. The chance to exert yourself and wield a blade. Also, the chance to spend time around and help a martially-oriented woman.”

Morgan stared at her for a moment as if he could not believe her words. Then he smiled. “How did you know how to say all of that?”

“You are not a difficult man, Morgan Knight.”

***

They ran to the factory just because they could. He’d have preferred to ride Vector, but Arachne didn’t have a mount. What began as a walk became a jog and then an outright sprint as the two challenged each other in silence, as they always seemed to. Maybe that’s why he liked her.

Arachne kept pace with him readily enough, her long-legged stride eating up the ground. She’d traded the casual, Lee-inspired comfort of jeans and a tank top for silk clothing of the most exquisite craftsmanship – her own, her version of armor, pieced together with magic and skill. She might have been built like a bodybuilder, but Morgan liked muscles in a girl. If she hadn’t been so alien and untouchable, and both of them hadn’t been quite taken, maybe something would’ve grown there. Eh. She was nice to look at, anyway.

And good in a fight. Morgan allowed himself a smile. “So tell me about this factory, then. Everything, mind.”

Arachne didn’t question, nor did she fight. “You know what I do to support myself?”

“Mercenary work, basically.”

“Of a sort.” She shrugged broad shoulders, deep breaths spaced evenly amongst her words without strain. A pair of teenagers jumped off the sidewalk with startled yelps to avoid the two onrushing warriors, though Morgan would have cleared them by a foot at the least. Maybe they looked intimidating. Well, probably. “Espionage, if you will. Investigation. One of my talents.”

Morgan glanced upwards. Buildings towered above them, high-rise apartments mixed with towering offices, a perfect example of Rhydin’s chaotic nature. The sun was just now setting, so in this unnatural valley shadows skewed the pavement with crazy angles and pockets of darkness. “Hey, can we get on top of the buildings and jump from one to the other to travel?”

Her narrative broke, and Arachne turned to look at him with eyes that seemed far wider than a warrior-woman’s ought to. “What?”

“Never mind,” he said, mentally vowing to invite the woman over to watch movies with him and his dad sometime soon. “Go on.”

“This factory,” she said, gathering the threads of her story together to weave once more, “has been lost to its owners. Their security, sent to retrieve it, vanished; their observations spoke of silence, and of hostile… what is the word, Morgan?” She vaulted neatly over a puddle without breaking stride or a sweat, maintaining a thoughtful look all the while. “For mechanical men.”

“Robots?” he ventured.

“Yes. The factory makes them. Now they guard it.”

Morgan groaned, already envisioning the Three Rules scenario that must have taken place. “What are the odds of robots turning on their creators?”

“I do not know,” Arachne said, making Morgan vow to make her watch a half-dozen movies the very second they were free from this mission, “but these seem to. They come in two sorts of guards – potent ones, strong of arm and body, and swift ones, armed with a light that brings pain.” A swift memory of that pain crossed her face, though her body showed nothing. Her magic, Morgan recalled, could be used to heal as well. “In numbers too great for me.”

Morgan grinned, rolling his shoulders for the sake of feeling his sword’s weight shift in its scabbard on his back. Maybe this would be fun, after all.

“They look like battle droids,” Morgan said. “Are you sure we’re safe?”

Putting aside the issue of what, precisely, a “droid” was, Arachne pointed at the churned-up line of dirt stretching through the grass at their feet. “There was a fence there. It seemed to define the limits of the factory’s bounds, and as such, the limits of the aggressive range of these metal men.”

“Oooh, predefined limits. Do we have a cardboard box?”

“Morgan,” Arachne said very slowly, “I understand you are charming and witty and quite well-versed in this culture of pop you seem so proud of, but I do not have time to ask for explanations for every sentence out of your mouth. Can you distract them? Are you willing to?”

“Yes,” the man grumbled. Arachne had to suppress a sudden laugh. He got so sensitive when someone trod on his sense of humor.

Laughing before a battle. This world had dulled her edge and corrupted her most shamelessly. Perhaps the Arachne of months ago, Legionnaire and consummate agent, would have accomplished her mission without recourse to outside aide, swift and effective as ever she was. But that Arachne had not known how to laugh. “I need your left arm,” she said.

Morgan shrugged out of his coat, catching it in his right arm as he turned to offer her his left. She placed her right hand on his forearm, her skin positively dark in comparison to his. Warmth rose into her palm, radiated out from the slumbering potence of his relaxed muscles. As simply as opening her eyes, she reached for his strength.

He had a lot. More than she had expected, more than she had sensed in almost anyone else. Oh, Arachne had never questioned his fitness; the run here had cost him not even a deep breath, and she had seen him flip about a half-and-a-half sword for far longer than anyone should be able to, but the strength pulsing through him spoke of endurance and tenacity that strove with the limits of human potential. The runes on her palm, hand, and wrist spat out one tenuous thread of silk each. The three threads curled around his arms, spinning and knotting together in an intricate and near-unbreakable pattern. When she dropped her hand, the sense of his strength came with her, thumping in tune with his heart, once every two seconds or so.

Morgan lifted his arm to flex his muscles. The silk pattern stretched across his biceps but didn’t tear. “Should I be feeling something, here?”

“Not now,” Arachne said. “That binding will connect me to you and let me draw on your strength across intervening distance. I hope I won’t need it, since you’ll be distracting the sentries, but I don’t want to chance it.”

“Fair enough,” he said, shrugging his coat back on. “Anything else?”

The factory stood fat and squat amongst the scenic, well-shaped landscape that comprised its grounds. Once it has been a peaceful location for the manufacture of artificial labor, or so Arachne’s employers had told her. Now the cheerfully artificial terrain belied its new role as a factory of war and death. She took some consolation in recognizing that the factory was pure ugliness, bright steel without aesthetic adornment whatsoever.

Clustered around the massive double doors cut into the front wall, the dozen or so robots she’d snuck past the first time and barely escaped as she fled marched in patterns that seemed random to her nonmechanical brain. Long and slender of limb and body, they strutted like starved tinplated soldiers, heads swiveling independently of their bodies to track all they could see. Though Arachne and Morgan stood in plain sight by the long roadway that led to the doors, they were not yet within the mechanical men’s danger zone. One foot past the ripped-up fence…

“I can pass them,” Arachne said, “but the inside is quite full of them. And alerting one is as good as alerting them all. If I’m to sneak in, can you distract them and draw their attention, so that the ones inside do not notice me?”

“For how long?” Morgan said, studying the robots with a serious expression completely at odds with his usual mien.

“Until I can use the –“ Arachne frowned. Technological names escaped her far too readily for her taste in this land of machines and advances far greater than smelted iron. “There is a box that will control them all at once and stop them from performing their duties. I can use that to halt them.”
“Oh, well, that doesn’t seem like it will take long. Their weapons,” he continued, “what are they like?”

The mechanical men bore narrow wands of some metal she did not recognize. “They fire cylinders or bolts of light,” Arachne said, “of immense heat and great speed. I was able to dodge them for the most part.” The remaining part had been searing pain and blackened, smoking flesh, and that from simply being grazed. She set the memories aside.

“Oh, okay.” One of Morgan’s hands darted over his shoulder to grip the hilt of his sword. The dull-gold blade sang an odd note as he drew it. In the back of her mind, Morgan’s vitality surged and rose; to her mind, sensitive to magic in ways that surpassed or simply bypassed her senses, the sword and Morgan himself began to hum with growing power. He grinned as he spun the sword in a series of swift, sharply-curving cuts around his body, swapping the oversized blade from one hand to the other. “I have to admit, I always wanted to do something like this. Don’t tell Akude.”

“Who—“ But Morgan was already gone before the word escaped her mouth, a streak of black and gold racing for the doorway. In three steps he crossed the threshold defined by the churned-up dirt where the fence had once sat. Swifter than a human could even imagine, the mechanical men swiveled their torsos to fire their weapons in perfect synchrony.

Morgan’s blade leapt into the path of the bolts, shimmering like a heat distortion with the force of his magic, his chi as he called it. White-blue bolts of energy struck the sword and rebounded, discharging their force into the ground or arcing off into the sky. The robots discharged their weapons again; again Morgan intercepted and turned the blasts’ path aside. He did not move faster than a human could, Arachne realized, but reacted almost before – no, indeed, before the robots fired.

Another volley fired, another deflected. Another fired – but this time, some twenty feet away, Morgan leapt. The sword arced in shining circles high into the air as it left his grip, while beneath him the bullets chewed into the ground, melting the pavement into bubbling ooze where their concentrated fire struck. Higher and farther than a human should be able to go – but not using his magic! – Morgan leapt over the front line of robots and landed in their midst.

The warrior’s figure blurred. In an instant, Morgan seemed to be everywhere at once. A solid punch landed in the center of a robot’s torso; a sweep kick slammed into another’s legs; an open-palm strike hammered the artificial jaw of a third; a snap kick cracked the neck of a fourth – The images resolved before Arachne could process them all into one lone solid Morgan, still in his landing crouch amongst all the motionless robots. The illusion of stillness lasted only a heartbeat before the force of that brief, intense moment of violence blew through the mechanical men with explosive fury. The robots shot out and away, uneven accelerations shredding their spindly bodies so that only parts struck the ground in a neat circle some five yards away from him.

As Morgan rose, the doors burst open, two robots lifting their weapons to fire with alarming haste. Arachne lifted her mouth to shout a warning, but too late. Morgan simply opened a hand, turning it palm up at waist height.
The robots fired. Humming through the air as it spun through its descent, Morgan’s sword swept mere inches in front of him, reflecting the bolts in matching angles. As the hilt slapped into Morgan’s palm, the bolts slammed into the robots in white-hot sparing fury. Morgan let the momentum of the sword carry his arm back and around; as he slammed the weapon back into its sheath, the robots collapsed. Morgan stalked through the doors lazily, one fist raised in solemn triumph.

For a moment Arachne stared, mission utterly forgotten, as twin emotions warred within her. Anger, and amusement. This was not a game… but then, to Morgan, what wasn’t? And it had been a little impressive.

Laughing at herself – a thing she’d never have imagined oh so recently, and now felt such pleasure in doing – Arachne drew a minute sliver of her vitality through her runes, dropped into a light-footed crouch, and raced for the factory with crawling, predatory speed.

Arachne shot over the grass so quickly, so lightly, that the breeze of her passing disturbed it more than the tread of her feet. The silver-steel factory walls loomed large as she drew closer.

The runes of Arachne lay, physically, on her skin. She had six, when one alone would have sufficed to make her a Legionnaire; they could have sat anywhere on her body to enable her powers, though the tattoo wizard had placed them near her hands to make manipulating the spider silk they generated easier on her. The runes were, after all, far more than physical. They created an artificial bridge between her mind, her body, and the peculiar energy field that defined living objects, that spelled the difference between a person and a corpse, and that even the mightiest wizards could only call “vitality” or “life force.” Arachne could no more forget the bridge to that force than she could forget her own hearing, her own sense of touch. She reached for Morgan’s energy now. The runes on her hands and wrists prickled.

She reached the wall, kicked lightly off the ground to cling to it, then scrambled up it, all four limbs gripping its surface. Like a spider.

Having done this once before, she knew where to go. Within moments, she pulled herself atop the roof. Vents, climate control devices, low huts with important machinery of various sorts, and a plethora of stone and gravel lay atop the factory like some misplaced micro-city. Ten feet away, a large spiraling dome that looked like a demented cooking tool lay on its side next to the slim, tapered cone it had sat upon. Arachne grimaced as she strode over to it. These vent systems were not meant for human passage. She’d have preferred to go through a window.

Except the windows were wired to the alarm system, which would draw the attention of the mechanical sentinels. She took a breath, then forced it out along with every last dreg of air in her lungs that she could exhale. Arms above her head, she vaulted in a jump slightly higher than a normal woman could make, arcing into the tube like a diver into a pond.

Momentum and the slick grease she’d spread along the inside of the shaft on her first attempt carried her halfway down the six-foot drop. Rough metal scraped greedily at her clothing, where she’d before torn out a screen and a large fan to make good her entrance. The silk held against it, but her broad shoulders jammed against the sides of the shaft and brought her to a halt.

“Lee would not have had trouble with this,” Arachne muttered, though she knew that wasn’t true. She began to eel forwards, relying on the strength of her shoulder and back muscles and the grip her outflung hands gathered on the metal. Below her, as she craned her head back, she could see the rough opening she’d slammed through earlier. The sharp, artificial sounds of the robots’ weapons wafted up through the hole, along with bangs and clangs as Morgan kept up the distraction.

Last time, she had slipped out of the vent only to come under instant assault from the sentinels down below. Now, as she slid her arms, then with a certain amount of pain, her torso out of the hole, no bolts of light lanced through her.

Morgan’s voice rose above the tumult. “Die, demon robot!” A crash and slam, along with a flying limb, erupted from behind one of the great machines that stretched across the wide-open floor of the immense building.

Good. Arachne hauled herself out of the vent entirely, her hands and feet pressed gently to the ceiling. They ought to feel strained at the joints even a little, but between the magic and her conditioning, Arachne could have hung upside-down for days. Missions like that, though, she hoped were behind her. Necessary they’d been, pleasant they never could be.

To one side, on an upper-level walkway, a dozen majestic doors led deeper into the building, into offices or halls or rooms made for meetings. Her goal was the – the server farm, she remembered the term now. Smiling, she crawled across the ceiling.