A New Night

Jade

I was, of course, awake when Romalla woke under the darkness of a cloudy night sky. The waves crashed on the beach, sending up salty mist that made me feel like we were home already. Before sleep, we talked about all that had happened. I was able to tell her everything that had happened on my end while we’d been separated, and she was able to do the same. Now, we just sat in silence as the stars eventually vanished and the sun rose. Scraa and Dro woke with the morning light.

We all got on our gliders and took flight with running starts. Of course, I was content staying twenty feet above the ground. Dro steered his high into the sky and over the sea. Maybe Romalla would have poked fun at me for this, but she was asleep again within minutes of taking off.

Even without her waking presence, I eventually ventured over the ocean. When I did, I saw purple ray-like creatures with circularly shaped bodies that I imagined would have probably surpassed the biggest whales of my time. Admittedly, I was keeping half an eye out for the dragons that Romalla had mentioned, but I saw no sign of them.

Romalla slept in the glider basket until about noon. By then, I could see the Island a few miles away. I think she sensed it coming too, because she woke groggily from sleep and remained remarkably silent.

Dro and Scraa got closer to us until they were flying right at our side. When I could see their expressions, I realized that they seemed more somber than usual. Did they sense that something was wrong?

I peered at the Island ahead, where something striking caught my notice. What I had initially assumed to be more dunes now looked more like massive mounds of soil and sand piled at the base of the Wall. A chill followed by a fever-like heat spread throughout my body. I peered closer. It took a minute, but I eventually saw that the trees on the Island had been cut down and uprooted. Mud and silt floated away with the waves like an oil spill that muddied the ocean.

What was more, the Island was uninhabited. The blood-bags were gone, and I couldn’t see any Night People. Replacing them was a mechanical rumble, which became louder as we continued our approach.

Romalla’s eyes began to water, and her jaw trembled.

I felt hollow and like I needed to throw up. It was like walking into a room with someone who was unmoving and not breathing, someone who had been just fine the day before. I didn’t want to believe what I was seeing; everything in my brain told me that what I was looking at was somehow impossible.

I slowly landed on the beach, right next to the surf.

Romalla lifted her wings to fly forward, but I gently caught her before she could.

“I …” I said, my hands trembling. Part of me knew that it would be a mistake for us to split up. The other part of me just didn’t want to be left alone. “I’m … scared.”

Romalla looked up at me for a moment and then tapped my finger gently. Instead of flying away, she hopped in the sand beside me.

We walked along the beach and could hear a sound vaguely like rain. It was only as I felt grains of sand ping off my glass face that I realized that it was a constant outpour of sand being tossed into the air. The sand was being thrown in a continuous stream from a hole adjacent to the Wall.

Now that we were closer, I could see that some of the trees had been stripped and cut down. These were now nailed together as frames to prop up the hides of the bloodbags to leather in the sun. Brown gelatinous masses of meat with protruding bones littered the beach, attracting flies and other bugs. Small birds picked pieces from these piles of gore.

“They ate so many … there aren’t any left,” Romalla said, her voice sounding tight, like she was close to choking. “And the nests are gone.”

I looked up.

The Wall had been stripped of vines and the little huts that the Night People had slept in. As for the caves that had been dug into the sand—the same ones where I had been buried—they were now nothing but craters.

I returned my attention to the hole and noticed something through the constant outpour of sand. There was writing on the Wall in my version of English, which only Jackie and the Immortal Golems shared. Each letter was the size of me, spelling out, “The Wages of Sin.”

I did not need a Bible to remember that passage. That verse had been ingrained in my memory through Dimitry, but not because of his experience in various religious traditions. I remembered because of the man with the gun … what he had said as I was strapped into the machine that had duplicated my consciousness to be placed in robot bodies. All this suffering was because of what I’d done to him. Because I’d left him to die in the flood waters.

Dro turned to me and asked, “What do these markings mean, Bassella?”

“It’s a message for me,” I whispered, still too stunned to move. A tremor was filling my body and taking complete control. Over and over, I could feel the bullet carving a path through my skull. The air around me suddenly felt very heavy. Sand flew up all around me, and then I realized that I had fallen to my knees. “The wages of sin are death, but the gift of God is eternal life.” This was truly what the man with the gun had given me … death and eternal life so that I could re-experience death forever.

“Bassella, are you alright?” Romalla asked. I became vaguely aware that she began slapping my glass face with her wings. Then, she tapped lightly on my glass face with her claw.

I tried to make words come out of my mouth, but nothing came.

“Are the markings hurting her?” Scraa asked as he stepped between the Wall and me. He hissed at the message and eyed it threateningly.

I shook my head repeatedly, feeling like air was trapped inside me and burning in my lungs. I couldn’t understand these feelings for obvious reasons, nor the tightening in my hollow metal chest. Was this a panic attack? I struggled to force words out in the form of whispers. Finally, I pointed at the wall and said, “He … knows I’m… here.”

Dro’s eyes narrowed in realization. “This message is like the tomes we took from the Alpha Predators. Except this person from Bassella’s nightmares uses his markings to assert dominance.” For a half-moment, I thought Dro would be impressed. But his ears twitched, and he glared darkly at the hole.

“Is … he in there?” Scraa asked, turning his threatening glare to the hole with the machine sounds.

“He may,” Dro replied. “But I have a feeling that he has sent slaves to do his bidding.”

Somehow, I hadn’t thought that the Immortal Golems would still be here. Of course, they wouldn’t have left some piece of machinery in a hole without someone working it.

On weak legs, I managed to stand and stagger toward the hole. Every step caused my tightness and shortness of breath to worsen. The excavation seemed bigger the closer I got to it. The project was held together by boards, scaffolds, and rope.

Before I knew what I was doing, I knelt on my hands and knees. Then, still trembling, I forced myself to look over the edge—into the pit.

The hole itself was about forty feet deep and much wider. It was in a place where the actual soil was not as deep as the sand, which I guessed made it easier for the machine. Within the hole were nearly a hundred of the Servants.

Now that they were close, I could really see their kinship to the human I had known. They were shaped like humans, except for quite a bit larger—both in bulk and height. They were perhaps double the size of New Humans and much taller. However, they did not carry themselves as such. Their heads were hunched over so that they did not stand perfectly straight. Their skin was a pale coloration that spoke of generations deprived of sunlight. They were chipping away at the Wall with pickaxes and stacking baskets full of rubble that seemed too large for the machine to throw.

Towering above them all with a bullwhip in hand stood an Immortal Golem shaped exactly like Steelface and the one with the gold mask. The mask was green and semi-translucent—carrying the frowning expression of Tragedy. I felt pretty confident that she was the one Steelface talked about. Her name was Jade, and she had a zoo. She stood on a platform made of the same scaffolding materials, overseeing the work.

At some point of staring at the Immortal Golem—probably because of the shadow I cast on the hole below—she noticed me and looked up. “Here I thought that this would be absurd; none of you have responded to our messages in millions of years. I supposed John’s inclinations are rarely wrong.”

A chill went through my entire body. John … he had to be the Immortal Golem with the golden mask … the man with the gun. I nearly blacked out from all the stress of what was happening and what it all meant.

No, I had to focus! I focused on Jade, playing an annoying tune in my head just to be safe, and asked, “Did you know that he killed Steelface?”

The Jade Golem gave a sharp chuckle. “John discovered his betrayal. That he was working with you … perhaps with the entire Triumvirate. John has a thing about traitors.”

“But Steelface was going to bring you all with him!” I protested, genuinely not understanding how she could be okay with someone killing one of her few remaining comrades of millions of years!

“He would have left … and likely carpet-bombed me and my zoo as he did. Steelface knew that I would never leave; he would have never even bothered to ask. But you … you went up the Wall, and then you came back,” Jade said and pointed up where my toe marks could be seen in the Wall. “What did you see on the other side? Animals that were not over here, I would imagine. Maybe some that … showed a higher degree of intelligence?”

I didn’t know how to respond to this, and my cheeks went pink briefly.

The Jade Immortal let out a gasp. “There are, aren’t there? I knew there had to be. We’ll need the cannons after all.”

“Cannons?” I whispered.

Jade nodded. “We used to send them out toward the Walls, back millions of years ago. Every time, they would be stopped—usually by drones with intimate familiarity of just where to put a bullet to best scrap the entire ship. But when John told me about what Steelface had planned, it gave me the idea to send one here as a test run. Sure enough, it made it all the way here without issue. So the Triumvirate are gone … or, at least, on their way out. I guess that means we no longer have to worry about this monotonous digging.”

Without warning, Jade reached into a satchel placed on a makeshift table next to her and pulled out some kind of short-barreled gun. She aimed it straight into the air and fired … sending a blinding green flare into the sky. She then looked down at the Servants and pointed up at the scaffolding.

The Servants immediately stopped what they had been doing and began to walk toward the ladder out of the hole. One of the Servants, who had previously been out of sight, wore something like the falconry gear that I had seen in my old life. On his gloved arm sat a Night Person.

It took me a moment to recognize Camolla and her light-brown fur. Her eyes were covered with a makeshift blindfold. Upon being moved, she raised her wings to balance herself. That’s when I saw that a segment of skin had been surgically removed from each wing and replaced by metal gages like I could remember some people from Dimitry’s time wearing in their ears.

I couldn’t speak or even cry. All I wanted to do was scream.

“Don’t look so disgusted,” Jade said. “It will be well cared for in my zoo. These animals are smarter than you’d think. I wouldn’t be surprised if their wild descendants someday reach something like sentience.”

“Mother!” Romalla screamed in her language. I now realized that she too was looking over the hole’s edge. I couldn’t react before she dove towards Camolla.

The Jade Golem looked up at Romalla and flicked her wrist to ready the bullwhip she’d been holding.

Without thinking, I dove straight down at the scaffolding that the Jade Immortal stood upon. There was nothing she could do as my falling metal frame turned the platform she stood upon into splinters. When I managed to stand and regain my bearings, I saw Romalla slashing wildly at the Servant at the top of the ladder. He still held the leather cords leashing Camolla as Romalla sliced at him enough to draw large amounts of blood. The Servant began to scream in terror.

Jade, however, also managed to quickly stand after her fall. Smoke billowed from her body as it seemed to go into a higher gear. She again readied her whip—this time as she stared at me.

I charged and dove into her with my shoulder. The thunderous noise of a whip cracked just over my head as I threw the two of us into the scaffolding that kept the walls of sand around us at bay.

Immediately, more sand began to pour on us.

I grabbed a broken piece of wood to use as a weapon.

Without hesitation, the Jade Golem smacked the piece of wood out of my grasp and charged with her elbow. Her elbow hit me solidly, dented my chassis, and picked me up off my feet. As I was carried and shoved through more scaffolding, I allowed my remaining machete to come free and began to slash at her head. Together, we broke every bit of scaffolding our bodies touched until debris and earth crashed on top of us and the digging machinery.

Then, everything was dark.

I … couldn’t move.