Alcatraz Versus the Shattered Lens

Being a king is like getting your driver’s license. It sounds really cool, but when you finally get your license, you realize that all it really means is that your parents can now make you drive your brothers or sisters to soccer practice.

Like Genghis Khan said, ‘Zaremdaa, en ajil shall mea baina.’ Or, translated, ‘Sometimes, this job sucks.’ But really, hasn’t everyone said that at some point?

‘Zaremdaa, en ajil shall mea baina!’ Bastille said from way up high.

‘What was that?’ I called up. ‘I don’t speak Mongolian.’

‘I said, sometimes my job really sucks!’

‘You’re doing great!’

‘That doesn’t mean that this doesn’t suck!’ Bastille called.

You see, at this point, Bastille was balanced atop a set of stilts, which were in turn taped to another set of stilts, which were in turn taped to another set of stilts. Those were on top of a chair, which was on top of a table. And all of that was balanced on top of the Mokian university’s science building. (It was a large, island-bungalow-style structure. You know, the kind of place you’d expect to find Jimmy Buffett singing, Warren Buffett vacationing, or a pulled-pork buffet being served.)

‘Do you see anything?’ I called up to her.

‘My entire life flashing before my eyes?’

‘Besides that.’

‘It’s really easy to see who’s balding from up here.’

‘Bastille!’ I said, annoyed.

‘Sorry,’ she called down. ‘I’m just trying to distract myself from my impending death.’

‘You weren’t so nervous when I suggested this!’

‘I was on the ground then!’

I raised an eyebrow. I hadn’t realized that Bastille was scared of heights. She hadn’t acted like this before. Of course, other times she’d been up high, she’d been in a flying vehicle. Not strapped to three sets of stilts and balancing high in the air.

For all her complaining, she was doing a remarkable job, and she had been the one to suggest taping the stilts together to get her up higher. Besides, she was wearing her glassweave jacket, which would save her if she did fall. Her Crystin abilities allowed her to keep her balance, despite the height and the instability of her position. It was rather remarkable.

Of course, that didn’t stop me from wanting to tease her. ‘You aren’t feeling dizzy, are you?’

‘You aren’t helping.’

‘Man, I think the breeze is picking up . . .’

‘Shut up!’

‘Is that an earthquake?’

‘I’m going to kill you slowly when I get down from here. I’ll do it with a hairpin. I’ll go for your heart, by way of your foot.’

I smiled. I shouldn’t have taunted her. The situation was dire, and there was little cause for laughter in Tuki Tuki. The dome was cracking even further, and my counselors – the two kind of useful ones, at least – said they thought it would last only another fifteen minutes or so.

But seeing Bastille in a situation like she was – where she was uncomfortable and nervous – was very rare. I just . . . well, I had to do it. And that, by the way, is the definition of stoopiderlifluous: being so stoopid as to taunt Bastille while she’s out of arm’s reach, assuming she won’t get revenge very soon after.

As I smirked, Kaz rounded the building and trotted up to me, wearing his dark Warrior’s Lenses. He’d gotten two small pistols somewhere and wore them strapped to his chest. They looked like flint-and-powder models, perhaps taken from the Mokian stores.

‘Everything’s ready,’ he said. ‘Mokians all over the city are climbing atop buildings, looking for the first sign of Librarian holes opening.’ He glanced up at Bastille. ‘I see you found a way to get even higher,’ he called at her. ‘Reason number fifty-six and a half: Short people know when to stay on the ground. We’re closer to it, we appreciate it more. What is it with you tall people and extreme heights?’

‘Kaz, I’m a thirteen-year-old girl,’ Bastille called down. ‘I’m only, like, a couple of inches taller than you are.’

‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ he called back. Then he looked at me. ‘So, are you going to explain this plan of yours, kid?’

‘Well, we’ve got two problems. The rocks hitting the shield and the tunnels digging up. We can’t stop the rocks because there’s an army between us and the robots. But the Librarians are conveniently digging tunnels from their back lines up into our city. So one of the problems presents a solution to the other.’

‘Ah,’ Kaz said thoughtfully. ‘So those fellows . . .’ He nodded to the six Mokian runners Aluki had gotten for me. They stood in a line, ready to dash away, bearing backpacks filled with stuffed bears.

I nodded. ‘Usually, after the Librarians are fought off from the hole they dig, the Mokians collapse the tunnel. But this time, as soon as the hole is spotted, we’ll move everyone out of the area. The emptiness will make the Librarians think that they haven’t been spotted, and they’ll rush out to cause mayhem. These six men will then sneak down the tunnel and run out behind Mokian lines, then take down the robots. A single one of these bears to the leg should make the robot collapse.’

‘Wow,’ Kaz said. ‘That’s actually a good plan.’

‘You sound surprised.’

Kaz shrugged. ‘You’re a Smedry, kid. Half our ideas are insane. The other half are insane but brilliant at the same time. Deciding which is which can be trouble sometimes.’

‘I’ll tell you how to decide,’ Bastille called down. ‘Look and see which one involves me having to climb up a hundred feet in the air and balance on stilts. Shattering Smedrys!’

‘How can she even hear us from up there?’ Kaz muttered.

‘I have very good ears!’ Bastille called.

‘Here,’ I said, picking up a backpack. ‘I made one of these for each of us too. There are two of each kind of bear in there. I figure we should all have some, just in case.’

Kaz nodded, throwing on his backpack. I shrugged mine on as well.

‘You realize,’ Kaz said softly, ‘that the soldiers you send out to stop those robots won’t be coming back.’

‘What? They could run back in the tunnel, and . . .’

And I trailed off, realizing how stoopid it sounded. The Librarians might get surprised by my tricky plan – might – but they’d never let the Mokian soldiers escape back into the tunnel after destroying the robots. Even if all of this worked out exactly as I wanted, those six men and women weren’t returning. At best, they’d get captured. Maybe knocked out by Librarian coma-bullets.

I hadn’t even considered this. Perhaps because I didn’t want to. Go back and read the beginning of this chapter. Maybe now you’ll start to understand what I was saying.

I glanced at the six soldiers. Their faces were grim but determined. They carried their backpacks over their shoulders, and each held a spear. They were younger soldiers, four men and two women, who Aluki had said were their fastest runners. I could see from their eyes that they understood. As I regarded them, they nodded to me one at a time. They were ready to sacrifice for Mokia.

They had seen what my request would demand of them, even if I hadn’t. Suddenly, I felt very stoopiderlifluous.

‘I should cancel the plan,’ I said suddenly. ‘We can think of something else.’

‘Something that doesn’t risk the lives of your soldiers?’ Kaz said. ‘Kid, we’re at war.’

‘I just . . .’ I didn’t want to be the one responsible for them going into danger. But there was nothing to be done about it. I sighed, sitting down.

Kaz joined me. ‘So now . . .’ he said.

‘Now we wait, I guess.’ I glanced upward nervously. The rocks continued to fall; the glass’s cracks glowed faintly, making the dark night sky look like it was alight with lightning. Fifteen minutes. If the Librarians didn’t burrow in during the next fifteen minutes, the dome would shatter and the Librarian armies would rush in. Most of the Mokians – the ones I didn’t have watching for tunnels – were already gathered on the wall, anticipating the attack.

I blinked, realizing for the first time how tired I was. It was well after eleven at this point, and the excitement of everything had kept me going. Now I just had to wait. In many ways, that seemed like the worst thing imaginable. Waiting, thinking, worrying.

Isn’t it odd, how waiting can be both boring and nervewracking at the same time? Must have something to do with quantum physics.

A question occurred to me, something I’d been wondering for a while. Kaz seemed the perfect person to ask. I shook off some of my tiredness. ‘Kaz,’ I said, ‘has any of the research you’ve done indicated that the Talents might be . . . alive?’

‘What?’ Kaz said, surprised.

I wasn’t sure how to explain. Back in Nalhalla – when we’d been in the Royal Archives (not a library) – my Talent had done some odd things. At one point, it had seemed to reach out of me. Like it was alive. It had stopped my cousin Folsom from accidentally using his own Talent against me.

‘I’m not sure what I mean,’ I said lamely.

‘We’ve done a lot of research on Talents,’ Kaz said, drawing his little circle diagram in the dirt, the one that divided up different Talents into types and power ranges. ‘But we don’t really know much.’

‘The Smedry line is the royal line of Incarna,’ I said. ‘An ancient race of people who mysteriously vanished.’

‘They didn’t vanish,’ Kaz said. ‘They destroyed themselves, somehow, until only our line remained. We lost the ability to read their language.’

‘The Forgotten Language,’ I said. ‘We didn’t forget it. Alcatraz the First broke it. The entire language. So that people couldn’t read it. Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kaz said. ‘The Incarna were the first to get Talents.’

‘They brought them down into themselves, somehow,’ I said, thinking back to the words of Alcatraz the First, which I’d discovered in his tomb in the Library of Alexandria. ‘It was like . . . Kaz, I think what they were trying to do was create people who could mimic the power of Oculatory Lenses. Only without having to use the Lenses.’

Kaz frowned. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘My tongue moving while breath moves out of my lungs and through my throat, vibrating my vocal cords and—’

‘I meant,’ Kaz said. ‘Why do you think that the Talents are like Lenses?’

‘Oh. Right. Well, a lot of the Talents do similar things to Lenses. Like Australia’s Talent and Disguiser’s Lenses. I did some reading on it while I was in Nalhalla. There are a lot of similiarities. Shatterer’s Lenses can break other glass if you look at it; that’s kind of like my Talent. And then there are Traveler’s Lenses, which can push a person from one point to another and ignore obstructions in between. That’s kind of like what you do. I wonder if there are Lenses that work like Grandpa’s power, slowing things or making them late.’