The Guardians of Zoone Read online

  “The machines?” Ozzie asked cautiously.

  Captain Traxx sneered. “We survived Creon. We survived the machines. It was the heartless treatment by the multiverse that destroyed us.”

  “Wh-what do you mean?”

  “I was still a girl when my family escaped Creon. We were one of the last families to do so, left to the end because we were poor. Just the rabble. Who cared if we escaped? But we did escape and . . .”

  Her words floated away into the nebulae. Ozzie worried that she would turn and leave. Only a moment ago, he had wanted to be left alone, but now he was desperate for her to finish her tale. He stared pleadingly at the imposing pirate.

  Captain Traxx sighed. “We tried to settle in other worlds, only to be rejected. Time after time. We were not considered ‘desirable’ citizens, because of where we had come from. I was only a child, but I felt their hate. I spent years in a refugee camp on Lattharyn before finally running away.”

  “What about your family?” Ozzie ventured.

  “All gone,” Captain Traxx said. “My parents, my brother . . . the ’verse chewed them up, crushed their spirits more heartlessly than any machine, and spat them out.” She whirled on Ozzie then, as if, somehow, he was the one responsible for their deaths. “Now do you understand?” she asked, brandishing her bloody fist in his face. “I bow before no nation’s whimsy. I am a citizen of the ’verse and I make my own way.”

  “B-but you harm others,” Ozzie stammered. “You’re doing the same thing they—”

  “I care for the citizens of the ’verse as much as they cared for me and my family.”

  Ozzie scowled. That was the sort of logic that Aunt Temperance called a good excuse to behave selfishly. But it was hard to say this when he could so clearly hear the pain and anger vibrating in the captain’s voice.

  “See them?” Captain Traxx continued, turning toward the deck. “They’re like me. Come from every corner of the ’verse. Rosa over there is from Innishu. Vindu escaped the genocide on Baelzadra. The late Mr. Burr? Found him in the labor camps of K’thung. Castoffs, exiles, refugees. With me, they’ve found a crew. A purpose. As I said before, this is our kingdom, boy. We do not need a world to call our own. And neither do you.”

  “I don’t want one world,” Ozzie grumbled, toying again with his key. “I want Zoone. It’s the world between worlds. Kind of like this place. But instead, we’re going to Creon. You’re going to abandon us there.”

  “That was your choice,” Captain Traxx said icily.

  “Not mine,” Ozzie insisted. “I got overruled. Everyone gets to choose except me. That’s my life. The entire multiverse is against me.”

  “Feeling sorry for yourself is not an admirable quality,” the captain chided. “If you don’t like the rules, then fashion your own. That’s what I say. Still, it seems to me your companions are willing to do the hard thing. I don’t agree with their choice to go to Creon, but I respect it.”

  Ozzie frowned. “Why?”

  “They’re thinking of Zoone—or, to put it another way, their crew. You should always look after your crew. Because, trust me, no one else will.” She stared at him intently. “Though . . .”

  “What?” Ozzie asked.

  “You,” she said emphatically. “You saved my life. Me, your enemy. I can understand the girl fighting the storm—that’s saving herself. Why did you save me? I intended to sell you as a slave!”

  She had asked him that before, right after he had done it. He hadn’t known the answer then, and he didn’t know it now. He finally settled on saying, “It’s not like you wanted to be rescued. You were angry afterward. So, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t count.”

  “It counts,” the enigmatic pirate told him. “The things you do without thinking about them are the truest of all things.” She jabbed a finger at his chest. “Trust your instincts, boy. But I’m not here to give you the gift of a traveler’s wisdom. I’m here to give you something else.”

  She reached into the pocket of her long peacock-blue coat and produced a small metallic orb. “Take it,” she commanded.

  Ozzie did—cautiously, because it reminded him of the robotic flying death bug. The orb had a tiny antenna, and a seam around the middle, as if it were capable of opening.

  “You saved my life,” Captain Traxx said. “Whether I wanted it or not, that puts me in your debt.” She scowled, causing her freckles to flicker like embers. “I do not like to be in debt.”

  “What is this thing?” Ozzie wondered, turning the orb over in his palm.

  “A beacon,” she answered. “Flip it open, hit the switch, and the Empyrean Thunder will heed your call. But only once, which means you must use it only when you are in the most desperate danger. If you use it the moment you land on Creon, I promise you: I will not come. Or if I find that you have misused it, then I will make you walk the plank and you can float here, in the heavens, until you starve to death or find yourself in the belly of a cosmic storm. Is that clear?”

  Ozzie looked up into the pair of lasers she called eyes and nodded.

  “Good,” the pirate queen said. She began to saunter away, only to turn and offer him one last piece of advice. “Stick with them.”

  “Who?”

  “Your crew,” Captain Traxx replied. “Everyone needs a crew, boy. And that includes you.”

  There was nothing sentimental about the farewell with the pirates. The Empyrean Thunder found a track leading to Creon and simply dropped Ozzie and his companions off. The ship didn’t even have to bore into the tunnel; it was already ruptured open, offering up its quiet and motionless track without protest.

  Not a good sign, Ozzie thought as Aunt Temperance led the way along the desolate path. Her hair was now tied into two tight ponytails; Ozzie noticed that they were both infused with gray, as if her one silver strand of hair had decided to multiply. That’s what stress will do to you, he grumbled to himself.

  Though, he had to admit, Aunt Temperance didn’t seem stressed. If anything, she had a determined glint in her eyes. In one hand, she clenched her locket and ring, while the other was gripping the strap of her canvas bag, which had swollen in size and weight as a result of the pirates providing them with canteens of water. If the burden bothered Aunt Temperance, she didn’t show it.

  They heard Creon long before they saw it. From the end of the tunnel came the faint clamor of machinery.

  “What’s going on over there?” Aunt Temperance wondered. “I thought Creon was supposed to be a dead world. I assumed that meant desolate and quiet.”

  “It doesn’t sound quiet,” Tug remarked, his ears flattening.

  With a shudder, Ozzie remembered Captain Traxx’s words: The machines took over.

  They can’t still be in operation . . . can they? Ozzie wondered.

  But there was no denying the mechanical din—it was growing louder with each forward step. They arrived at a gaping doorway that clung desperately to its frame by one mangled hinge. The door itself was made of thick metal with giant cogs and gears adorning its surface. Ozzie paused to spin one of the gears, but it was so rusted that it wouldn’t even budge.

  He followed the others through the doorway and into an abandoned station house. It was nothing like the cavernous and beautiful complex of Zoone Station. This place was tiny and dingy by comparison, the walls pitted with holes and the floor littered with rubbish. There were many empty archways, leading to bricked walls—dead doors, Ozzie knew. There were only three intact doorways: the one they had come through, one that was shut with a padlock, and one other that had been thrown open, a pair of conveyor belts trundling in and out of it.

  “It’s the conveyors making all the noise,” Fidget said. “Must be a loop.”

  She was right, Ozzie realized. The conveyor entering the door carried large, empty crucibles, but the ones on the outbound conveyor were filled with rock.

  “It’s ore,” Aunt Temperance observed. “For smelting into metal.”

  “Where do you think this tra
ck leads?” Ozzie asked as he wandered over for a closer look. “It has to be another world, right?”

  The door was made of weathered stone and featured a carving of a peculiar creature that looked like a bear with enormous teeth. Ozzie craned his neck to stare past the conveyors but could only make out a long black tunnel.

  “We don’t want another world,” Aunt Temperance reminded him. “We want this one. We’ll follow the conveyor belt into Creon.”

  “Is this really a good idea?” Ozzie asked.

  “I don’t think we have a choice,” Aunt Temperance said.

  Ozzie watched her tramp away, her bag bouncing on her back. I know I sure don’t, he thought. Sure, it was great to have a crew (to use a Captain Traxx phrase), but sometimes he wished he could just do things his own way.

  10

  A Maze of Machinery

  The conveyor belt led them across the station, through an archway, and to the top of a wide staircase. There was no smelter to be seen, just the landscape beyond—or at least, Ozzie decided, what passed as landscape.

  The ground stretching ahead of them was tiled with rusted metal plates, while above them, the air was so choked with ash and noxious green clouds that the sky was more or less a rumor. There wasn’t a speck of life—not even a weed poked through the seams in the metal tiles. The only movement was the pair of conveyor belts they had followed out of the station, vanishing into the hazy horizon.

  Tug instantly began coughing and wheezing.

  “Creon is even worse than Glibbersaug,” Ozzie quavered.

  Fidget scuffed her toes across one of the metal plates on the stairs, dislodging a cloud of rust. “W-we survived Glibbersaug. We can survive this place.”

  But Ozzie detected the uncertainty in her voice, teetering on the edge of panic—and he felt the same way. “Captain Cho rescued us from Glibbersaug. This time . . .” He shook his head, then turned to Aunt Temperance. “It’s not too late to turn around.”

  “Yes, it is,” Fidget said. “The pirates are gone.”

  “There’s that other door in the station,” Ozzie said. “It might lead to a safer world. One that can take us to Zoone.”

  Aunt Temperance sat down on the steps and grimaced at the landscape in silence.

  “My grandfather always said Creon was polluted,” Fidget said. “But I didn’t know it was going to be like this.”

  “The air here is terrible,” Tug moaned, his fur paling to a dull blue.

  “How are we going to survive here if we can’t even breathe?” Ozzie asked, seizing the opportunity to make his case. “We need to go back.”

  “We have to save Mercurio,” Fidget argued. “That’s what Lady Zoone said. We have to search this place, see if he’s here.”

  Tug purred in agreement. “Hey! I know—do you have any Breathe-Eazzy in your pack, Aunt T?”

  “Breathe-Eazzy?” Fidget echoed. “What’s that?”

  “There was a story about it on the TV,” Tug explained. “All you have to do is spray it and it freshens the air. It’s really cool.”

  “The stuff you’re talking about is just simulated fragrance,” Aunt Temperance told the skyger, snapping out of her thoughts. “I don’t think spraying more chemicals into the air will help this place.” She began digging through her bag. “I brought some headscarves. We can tie them around our faces.”

  Ozzie swelled with anger. “Are you guys serious?! We’re actually going through with this?”

  Aunt Temperance began tying a headscarf around his neck. “I won’t let anything happen to you, Ozzie. I promise. But I—I have to do this. If there was someplace safe for you to wait, then I’d leave you there. All of you.”

  “We have to stick together,” Fidget declared. “If we learned anything from our last dead world, it’s that. Right, Oz?”

  Ozzie only grunted in response. Overruled again.

  It took three headscarves knotted together to fit over Tug’s enormous snout, but eventually everyone was ready, and they began trudging across the dismal landscape, following the conveyor belts. There was no question of flying; the poisonous clouds were so thick and low that they wouldn’t be able to see a thing.

  “You could always lose some stuff,” Fidget suggested when she saw Aunt Temperance struggling with her bag. Aunt Temperance responded with a swift glare, prompting Fidget to quickly add, “Yeah, I know—everything’s essential. Here, I’ll carry the blender for you—at least the pitcher. That’ll lighten the load.”

  By a ton, Ozzie thought as the princess took the appliance. He knew the real reason Fidget wanted the blender—it would be as good as a club if they encountered danger.

  After an hour’s trek, shapes began to appear out of the gloom in front of them: industrial silos, gigantic pipes, and more conveyors, producing a clamorous racket. The thrum was so loud that Ozzie could feel the metal plates vibrate beneath him. As they pressed forward, the equipment became more concentrated until they found themselves in some kind of dense, open-air (or, as Ozzie thought of it, open-smog) factory city.

  The buildings were tarnished tanks, charred smokestacks, and cement towers streaked with grime. The streets were assembly lines and conveyor belts that crisscrossed in every direction, some of them suspended high above their heads. The sidewalks were narrow aisles that snaked through the maze of machinery.

  But there were no people.

  It sent a shiver down Ozzie’s neck. Even though Captain Traxx had described Creon to him, he hadn’t really understood until seeing the world for himself. As he glanced around, he couldn’t detect the slightest trace of human life—it was just the machines, running as if on automatic. Mechanical arms tipped cauldrons of hissing molten ore into molds. Giant rivet guns fired bolts into metal plates. Saw blades chopped through iron rods.

  “The machines really did take over,” he said with a gasp.

  “Don’t let your imagination run wild,” Aunt Temperance said with a frown. “These are just mindless machines. They’re not sentient. They have no will or purpose.”

  Ozzie wasn’t convinced, not based on what Captain Traxx had told him. “Something’s in control here,” he said.

  Even through his headscarf mask, he could detect the pervasive stench of oil, and that, combined with the whirring machinery, was giving him a headache. He slumped against the nearest wall, only to feel something buzz against his shoulder. He turned and found that the wall was actually a massive control panel, its surface animated with rattling gauges and flickering sensor lights.

  “Ouch!” Tug suddenly screamed, tossing his head and sending his headscarf mask flying. “Something just bit my tail!”

  “That something was a giant cleaver—be careful!” Aunt Temperance warned.

  Ozzie watched in horror as the skyger’s tail thrashed dangerously close to a line of overenthusiastic chopping blades.

  “TUG!” Ozzie cried. “Get out of the way!”

  Tug jumped—backward, closer to the machinery. Down came the ax blade, slicing off half the bushy tuft at the end of his tail. With a yowl, the skyger catapulted forward, bowling over Ozzie and slamming into the wall of control buttons. The whole structure crumpled with a sputter of sparks and steam. In a panic, the skyger sprang into the air, wings aflutter, only to immediately smash into an overhead pipe. Tug sank to the ground with a groan. All around them, like a giant ripple, machines began fizzling to a halt.

  “I told you this was a bad idea!” Ozzie growled in frustration as he climbed to his feet. He had to watch his step; the pipe that Tug had crashed into was spewing green liquid.

  Fidget shrugged. “If you ask me, the score’s Tug: one, factory: zero.”

  An earsplitting alarm bell began blasting through the city.

  Tug crouched close to the floor and tried to cover his ears with his enormous paws. “Just to tell you,” he mewled, “this is not my favorite world.”

  Aunt Temperance succeeded in grabbing his tail. “You’re okay, Tug; looks like just a bit of a haircut.” Then, h
anding the tail to Ozzie, she added, “Here, you better hold on to this the rest of the way. And tie those shoes! This is not the sort of place where you want to trip. Come on. I’ll get us out of this.”

  “Out of this?!” Ozzie cried as his aunt turned and began walking again. “You’re the one who got us into it! We could be in Zoone right now, enjoying a cup of—”

  Fidget slugged him in the shoulder, which made him drop Tug’s tail. “You just don’t get it, do you? You keep thinking Zoone is just like you left it. I’ve been telling you—it’s not. So, come on.”

  Then, snatching Tug’s tail and tilting her chin high, she marched after Aunt Temperance.

  “Princess,” Ozzie muttered as he rubbed his shoulder and reluctantly set off after them.

  They left the circle of dead equipment and eventually arrived at a wall of rough and weathered stone. It was too high to see over, but they only followed it for a short way before they came to a rusted wrought-iron gate, hanging apologetically from its hinges. It looked like a relic from a forgotten time—a time of people, Ozzie thought. But when he peered through the gate’s bars, all he could see were mounds of metal debris.

  “Looks like the place where old parts of the factory come to die,” Fidget said.

  Aunt Temperance tugged on the gate until it opened on its protesting hinges, then led them through. “Might be safer, if there are no working machines here—but remain vigilant. The last thing we need is someone stepping on a rusty edge and getting a tetanus infection.”

  They followed a twisting path through the heaps of junk, the alarm bell still ringing faintly in the distance.

  “Hey, look,” Fidget said. “There’s no metal or concrete on the ground here. It’s dirt.”

  With the toe of his shoe, Ozzie maneuvered a jagged end of a pipe out of the way so that he could get a closer look at the ground. He wasn’t sure if you could call it dirt. Perhaps once, but now it was a dull and powdery white, as if all its nutrients and moisture had been leeched away.

  Then he realized there was something on the other end of the pipe he had just moved, a sort of squat metal statue. It was so stained and rusted that he could barely discern what it was. But, if he had to guess, it was in the shape of a bird with some kind of saddle on its back.