'If who notices,' he asked. Nervously.
'The girl, Wilson,' I said, then I noticed the way he was staring past me. Back to where the girl was. Had been. Was gone.
'Oh, hell,' I whispered. I stood up. A room full of ghost machines and black shadows, the floor littered with the dry shells of bugs. 'Just get to the door. Go.'
'Jacob, this is getting weird fast. Maybe we should…'
'Go!' I yelled, pulling my revolver out and giving the anansi a shove. He stumbled gracelessly, then gathered himself and skittered off toward the galley door. His footsteps pattered and echoed off the high rafters. Another sound, too. Smooth, even, soft. Another set of feet. Hard to tell where it was coming from.
'Wilson, quiet for a second. Quiet!'
'What?' he hissed, loudly.
'Be quiet!'
He was. We stood twenty feet apart, immobile, but I could have sworn I could hear his heartbeat. Nearly as loud as mine. No other sound. Nothing. We stayed that way for a half-handful of heartbeats, then I nodded at him to continue. He crept off, much quieter this time. I could barely hear it. And then, footsteps. Over there.
I pulled myself quickly up onto the machine I had been hiding behind to get a better look. The girl's strange head bounced smoothly into view, moving along the far wall, one hand against it. I took an off-balance shot that got nowhere near her. She went down.
'Get her?' Wilson yelled from somewhere close to the door.
'No,' I yelled back. 'I think she knows we're here, though.'
'Yeah,' Wilson answered.
My eyes were getting used to the light of the factory. I squatted down and moved laterally, edging closer to where I'd seen our lovely pursuer. Away from Wilson, in case she decided to follow the anansi. Give me a chance to sneak up behind her. And if she followed me, then he had more time to get the door open. Quietly, I crept from machine to machine, my feet barely dusting the floor. I held the revolver in front of me and stepped around a corner, sighting into the darkness.
Abruptly, the revolver was no longer in front of me, and a moment later pain registered throughout my hand. The hand was no longer in front of me, for that matter, and then the pain was in my jaw and chest. Dimly, I recognized the sound of a pistol clattering to the floor and sliding some distance away. Also a boot, moving through the air in a way I usually associate with birds of prey. I was on my back, scrambling away like a crab. She came around the corner. In the darkness the lenses of her eyes glittered like lightning through distant thunderheads.
'Wilson!' I yelled, although it wasn't as loud or as urgent as I wanted. I tried to get to my feet while still retreating, and only managed to cartwheel flat on my back. Dust haloed around me and the breath left me. Twice in one day. Good times. I got the heels of my hands under my back and sat up. She stopped, just out of reach, weight on her back heel, the toes of her front leg barely off the ground. Like an insect, a spider, tasting the web. Waiting to strike.
The lights came on, accompanied by several rolling booms around the perimeter of the factory floor. Smoke rose up. I threw my arm over my head to shield my eyes from the sudden brightness. The girl didn't move, other than to cock her head to one side.
'Badge!' a machine-enhanced voice rolled out from all sides of the building. 'We have the room surrounded and all exits blocked. Come out and submit yourself to the Council's justice!' The words echoed through the building, crashing against each other and distorting in the high places of the factory. Carefully, I got to my feet, never taking my eyes off the girl.
She ignored me. As soon as the noise of the machine-voice settled down, a wave of crashing boots shuffled through dozens of doors that we couldn't see. They were in the building, all sides of it, from the sound of it. She gave up her fighting stance and stared at the ceiling for two heartbeats. I saw my pistol, under the fluttering sheet of the machine just behind me. Decided not to go for it yet.
The girl stared at the machine behind me, then the next one, then another. She walked to the last one with stiff determination. She ripped off the sheet that covered it, revealing an antique-looking control panel, all switches and valves and dials that looked like they hadn't been used in a generation. Without pause she began throwing switches, going from lever to lever like it was a memorized routine and she was being timed. The switches threw with a satisfyingly mechanical clack, like primitive musical instruments. She went through a half-dozen complicated motions, then put her hand on a throw-wheel and looked back at me. I had been going for the pistol. I stopped; she looked from me to the revolver, then back to my face. I couldn't read anything in that iron mask. I wasn't even sure she was alive, the way she moved. Like a routine, like a show. Finally she spun the wheel.
The factory roared into wild mechanical life. The sheets blew off the machines or were consumed and shredded, spewed up into the air like linen snow. The sound was tremendous, the tearing of cloth, the grinding howl of engines that hadn't been maintained, suddenly awake and shuddering with disuse. With a clattering moan, the track that crisscrossed the factory floor lurched into motion.
The engine that I was standing next to unfolded like a spider on its back. I rolled to the ground, scooped up my pistol and scrambled, face to the floor, away from its spinning arms. When I got to my feet, the girl was gone. The Badge, though, was everywhere.
They took the restart of the factory as some kind of initiation of hostilities, and were taking no chances. The tiny open space where I stood was pinned in on three sides by whirling machinery, going through the motions of assembling and production. The fourth side was bordered by the rattling assembly track. Beyond, I could see a unit of Badgemen advancing, shortrifles leveled, ballistic shields strapped to their arms. They hadn't seen me yet. In fact, they seemed to be advancing on a pile of crates that had somehow survived the animation of the engines around them.
I hunched below the lip of the assembly track, creeping as close as I dared without risking getting caught in its gears. The air was filled with shreds of linen, floating down like confetti. Some of them were alight, and there was a great deal of smoke billowing up from the floor. Either a friction fire, or exhaust from the primitive engines, I wasn't sure. A large section of sheet slumped to the ground near the patrolmen, temporarily blocking their view of the crates. The girl hopped out from where she had apparently been hiding, landed near the still collapsing sheet, and then charged through its fluttering edges and into the Badgemen. Chaos and gunfire ensued, and then she was past them, bounding between machinery to disappear among the burning linen and screaming engines. The patrol was a shambles, several of them down, more still trying to react to the sudden assault. They huddled like a tortoise, shields out, shortrifles flicking back and forth. Yelling. Lots of yelling.
'There's one here,' from behind me, and I turned. Three officers on the other side of the whirling spider- machine. 'Come on out, lad,' they said from behind the barrels of their weapons. I jumped up on the track, thinking to make it to the other side and try my luck with the frightened tortoise. But the track was not smooth, and not to be jumped on lightly by someone like me. The iron girl probably could have managed it. The surface was articulated, a series of thin levers that depressed and gripped whenever pressure was applied. I applied pressure with my foot, and the thing ate my leg up to the shin. I stumbled, went down, submitted hands and elbows and face into the hungry track. Metal pinched flesh and drew blood. Bullets sang off the track around me, and then something sharp and unyielding went into my ribs, stitched a line up to my shoulder. I finally got free, to see that I was in the process of being unmade by the newly awakened factory. The track had traveled a good bit while I was struggling with it, and the tortoise was too far away to be much more than a nuisance. It was the factory itself that I had to worry about.
This part of the track was the most heavily populated with machinery. There was no friendly shore to hop off, no clearance on either side of the track. Engine after engine lurched at me, some still wrapped in the burning remains of their covers, some so far out of balance that they were just twisting and thrashing at the conveyor. I ducked under an array of fitting arms and right-sizers. And then one of the machines downtrack of me stopped its assault, seized up and collapsed across the track. Like a branch across a river, and I grabbed for it. The metal was still hot, and bits of smoldering linen burned my skin, but I pulled myself free of the track and onto the machine. Gasping for my breath in the smoke-thick air, I slumped onto the factory floor and lay there, looking up at the ceiling and wondering how I'd gotten to this horribly uncomfortable stage in life. Wasted childhood, perhaps. I know there's some way to blame my father for all this. Surely.
Groaning, I pushed myself into a sitting position and looked around. I had no idea where Wilson had gotten
