She pulled herself onto the edge of the roof and jumped.
She landed on the corner, and thankfully it held her weight. She lowered onto the adjacent wall, and began to climb down, using the natural ledges formed by the windowsills for hand and foot holds. Horatio followed just above her, carrying Will on his backpack once more.
Rhea moved diagonally across that wall, away from the bioweapons, and kept an eye on Gizmo’s feed the whole way. When she was two stories from the ground, she decided that was far enough, and leaped the rest of the way down. Her servos whirred slightly in complaint, but otherwise she took no damage.
She raced across to the far side of the street and ducked behind the opposite building. Then she waited for Will and Horatio; when the pair arrived, Will leaped off of Horatio’s back, and the trio proceeded deeper into the city, at a sprint.
Gizmo pulled ahead, though continued to circle back to watch their rear.
A moment later the walls of Aradne appeared on Gizmo’s feed, along with those of the slums built upon its base.
Well, Rust Town is still there, and it looks intact, Will commented. So the advance scout theory wins out. Who knows, maybe the bioweapons aren’t coming after all.
They’re coming, Rhea sent.
They reached the lone sentry that guarded this particular approach to the city.
“There are bioweapons after us!” Rhea said without preamble. She glanced behind her nervously, expecting the Hydras to appear at any moment.
“The settlement defenses have been alerted,” the sentry said calmly. The robot’s golden body gleamed beneath the sun, as did the shaft of the energy pike it held at an angle in front of it.
Rhea searched the skies. “Well? Where are the hunter killers?”
“The settlement defenses have been alerted,” the robot repeated in that same deadpan tone.
“They take some time to scramble,” Will assured her.
The robot tilted its head to glance at each of them in turn. “Now state your business, Outlanders.”
Rhea let Will answer the questions. It was obvious he was just as impatient as her. All three of them kept gazing over their shoulders, and Rhea suspected Will and Horatio were eying Gizmo’s feed just as often as she was.
Finally, the questioning ended, and the party members darted onto the street that led to Rust Town.
25
Rhea dashed forward, pulling ahead of Will and Horatio in her eagerness to warn the city. She wanted to shout from the rooftops that terrible bioweapons were coming. She wanted to log into all the streaming sites and issue a dire warning to all the listeners. Except there was one problem: she didn’t have any followers on any of the streaming sites. And if she shouted from the rooftops, the residents would think her mad. Either way, no one would listen to her.
She had to talk to someone in charge. Someone who could orchestrate a mass evacuation.
Ahead awaited the four-meter tall Texas barriers that enclosed the city. She gazed past the slanted metal roofs that poked out beyond it, her eyes resting on the distant metal walls of Aradne, where gun turrets observed menacingly from the upper walkways. Aradne wasn’t going to protect its slums. How could she make the residents of Rust Town understand?
And yet a nagging voice at the back of her mind reminded her: what if Sebastian was wrong, or lying?
Rhea searched the skies. “I still don’t see any hunter killers. They’re not taking the threat seriously. Or they’ve been told to ignore it.”
“Have you ever considered, maybe there isn’t a threat after all?” Will said.
“I really wish you were right,” she said. “I do. That we came all this way for nothing. But seeing as we already encountered Hydras in the ruins, somehow I suspect that’s not true!”
“Good point,” Will agreed.
They approached the gap between the barriers, which was guarded by two golden sentry robots. The network icon flashed in the upper right of her display: she was able to log into the Net once more. She had the world at her fingertips again, and yet she was too distracted at the moment to care all that much.
“We need to see the mayor of Rust Town,” Rhea said while the sentry robots placed the weapons of her companions in cold storage.
“There is no mayor,” one sentry said.
“Then who do we report a coming attack to?” she asked.
“Crimes are to be reported to the sheriff’s office,” the robot replied. “They may be submitted online, or in person.”
“And how long does it take for online crimes to be processed?” she asked.
“Approximately one business day,” the sentry said.
“Then in person it is,” she said. “I’ll need an address.”
“I have it,” Will said.
But she received a share request from the robot at the same time, and when she accepted, a waypoint appeared on her overhead map, indicating a building composed of several cargo containers. It was labeled “Sheriff’s Office.”
Soon they were making their way across the streets of Rust Town, passing between the cargo containers and lean-tos that served as homes and businesses. The familiar buzzing of drones overhead, the playing children, the augmented reality hawkers competing for her business, all of it made her feel like she’d come home. These hallmarks of civilization offered the illusion of safety, a shelter from the dangers of the Outlands.
Remember, it is an illusion.
She kept her hood pulled low around her face, not wanting to alert the residents to her cyborg nature. She didn’t need to attract trouble, not now, not when she had such a time-sensitive message to deliver.
She tried a Net look-up on “Dagger of Khrusos” but found nothing. Perhaps the knowledge had been suppressed. She tried a search on “The Scorpion” as well but got nothing except a few unrelated video games.
They finally reached the sheriff’s “office,” a series of cargo containers spread out to form a sprawling compound. There was a distinct lack
