The Guardians of Zoone Read online

  Aunt Temperance leaned over his shoulder. “That looks like it belongs on a seesaw—oh.”

  She was slowly turning around, as if taking everything in for the first time, and Ozzie followed her lead. It was only then that he noticed familiar fixtures poking out of the heaps of industrial refuse. There were park benches (most of the wooden parts had rotted away), an old water fountain (thick with grime), and what looked like a large rubber cog with a frayed piece of rope tied to one end.

  Creon’s version of a tire swing? Ozzie guessed. He wondered if Captain Traxx had ever swung on it, but it was hard to imagine her as a kid, having fun.

  “This was a city park,” Aunt Temperance murmured. “Now it’s just a junkyard. A garden of rust.”

  They wandered farther ahead, climbing over a massive steel girder that was lying haphazardly across the path, until they arrived at what might have once been a duck pond. Now? It was a swamp, with all sorts of things half sunk in the stagnant muck: bloated garbage bags, corroded oil cans, the arm from a plastic doll. A film of grease coiled around everything.

  “This is water in Creon?” Tug asked, wrinkling his nose. “What are we supposed to drink?”

  “The water in our canteens,” Aunt Temperance advised. “We’ll have to drink cautiously and conserve our supply if we—where’s Fidget?! She’s the one who said to stick together!”

  Ozzie cupped his hands to his mouth. “Fidget? Where’d you go?”

  “Quoggswoggle!” came a reply from somewhere beyond a colossal pile of scrap metal. “I’m over here. Come see what I’ve found.”

  11

  The Garden of Rust and Ruin

  Ozzie led the charge around the heap of rusted metal to find Fidget standing in front of something that looked completely out of place in the desolate ruins.

  “A tree!” Tug exclaimed.

  Or what’s left of one, Ozzie thought.

  The tree looked like it had once been strong and beautiful, maybe hundreds of years ago, before the pollution of Creon had sunk its claws into it. Strips of gray bark were peeling off its trunk, revealing patches of raw, exposed wood. The branches drooped solemnly and were completely bare of leaves. The roots were gnarled and twisted and pulling up from the ground, as if the tree was trying to stand on tiptoe on the toxic soil.

  “It’s dying,” Aunt Temperance said forlornly. “Too many contaminants have leached into the soil and the water. Now there’s nothing good for the tree to draw from. Only poison.”

  Fidget sighed. “I bet there were a lot of trees here before.”

  “Perhaps,” Aunt Temperance said. “Back when this park was alive with people. With children. Everything must have died.”

  “It’s the first scrap of life we’ve seen in this entire world,” Ozzie said as he stared at the tree’s stark branches. “Maybe this is it. The last tree of Creon.”

  “Why would Mercurio choose to be left in this dreadful place?” Aunt Temperance wondered as she slowly circled the dying tree. “It makes absolutely no sense. I think there’s something that pirate wasn’t telling us.”

  Maybe, Ozzie thought. But he also figured Aunt Temperance was just trying to blame someone else for them ending up in the middle of a wasteland.

  He watched her wander away from the tree, back to the path, where she dropped her canvas bag to the ground and sank onto it. “I could use a cup of tea,” she murmured.

  Uh-oh, Ozzie thought as he and the others gathered around her. He had been ready to rub an “I told you so” in her face, but he couldn’t do that now. Not with her staring blankly into space, teetering on the edge of an emotional cliff.

  The alarm bell, which had been ringing in the distance the entire time, abruptly turned off. Somehow, that didn’t seem like a positive turn of events.

  Tug nudged Ozzie with his huge snout. “Ozzie? I think someone’s coming.”

  “Where?” Fidget asked, turning with the blender raised above her shoulder like it was a weapon.

  Tug’s fur turned even paler than before. “Everywhere.”

  “Hello?” Ozzie called out, lowering his headscarf mask. The sting of gasoline was so strong it made him cough.

  Aunt Temperance rose shakily to her feet. “Anyone there? Mercurio?” Her tone was crisp with hope.

  But when a reply came, it wasn’t a human one. It was a chorus of mechanical voices, all speaking in unison, reverbing through the garden of rust: “Do not worry, friends. Help is on the way.”

  “Help?” Ozzie wondered. “What kind of help?”

  Robots began emerging from behind the scrap heaps. They all looked completely identical, with multiple legs and burnished cylinders for bodies, covered with lights, switches, and gauges. There were more lights on their heads, along with gyrating scopes and antennae.

  “Motos,” Fidget gasped as the robots began forming a circle around them. “Just like the ones patrolling Zoone.”

  “What are they doing here?!” Ozzie cried.

  “I don’t know!” Fidget told him.

  The motos began to close in. Their hands were large and shaped like clamshells, without individual fingers, and they were tilted upward at their wrist joints, as if offering a sign of peace.

  “Do not be afraid, friends,” they said. They spoke flatly, without fluctuation in tone, but Ozzie immediately had the impression that they were trying to sound kind and caring, maybe even compassionate—if that was something robots could do.

  “We’re looking for someone named Mercurio,” Aunt Temperance said. “Do you know where he is? We were told he came here. To Creon.”

  “Creon is no more, friends,” the machine men answered as they continued to approach. “Now there is only Moton.”

  “Moton?!” Aunt Temperance cried. “I knew it; that pirate took us to the wrong place! She betrayed us. She—”

  Ozzie cut her off with a gasp. “They’re the same!” he exclaimed as the realization struck him. “Creon and Moton. This used to be Creon, but now . . .”

  “You mean the motos came from here—like, originally?” Fidget asked.

  “They . . . they must have,” Ozzie said as the truth sank its teeth deeper. “The motos are the ones running this world. Machines running machines! They took it over, they . . .”

  “Poor friends, you are only flesh and bone,” the motos droned, inching ever closer. “We will save you.”

  Their clamshell hands clicked open, revealing all sorts of sinister attachments: flashing scalpels, whirring saw blades, and two-pronged forks with arcs of electricity between them. The motos were basically life-sized robotic flying death bugs—well, if your life happened to be sized six feet tall. Which, incidentally, Ozzie’s was not.

  “Where is Mercurio?!” Aunt Temperance implored as they all huddled together in the middle of the quickly closing moto circle.

  Suddenly, something hot and wet sizzled against Ozzie’s arm. He rubbed frantically at his skin, then peered upward. The toxic clouds were spitting bullets of green water. “What the . . . ?”

  “Acid rain!” Aunt Temperance gasped.

  “We’ve really got to get out of here,” Fidget said, pushing her scarf over her head. “This whole world is trying to kill us.”

  “Do not worry, friends,” the motos chorused. “We will save you.”

  “Do not worry, friends—we will run away,” Fidget mimicked, brandishing the blender.

  “Maybe we should try escaping on Tug,” Ozzie suggested. “You know, before you do anything rash.”

  “I don’t think I can fly in these clouds,” Tug whimpered, nudging his enormous head into Ozzie’s armpit, as if he might somehow hide there. His fur had turned a sickly green.

  Even as the skyger spoke, another drop of acid rain splattered against Ozzie’s ear, and he winced. “Yeah, you’re right,” he agreed.

  He closed his fingers around the beacon in his pocket. Was this the time to call Captain Traxx for help? She had warned him not to use the beacon unless the situation was absolutely desperate, b
ut what could be worse than being surrounded by an army of psychopathic robots with can openers for hands? But he realized just as quickly that calling the pirate queen would be useless. By the time she arrived, the only thing left for her to do would be to mop up the mess.

  “I’ve got this,” Fidget said.

  With both hands wrapped around the blender handle, the brazen princess stepped forward, swung, and clobbered the nearest moto so hard that its head whirled clear off its shoulders. The other motos didn’t even react. They just kept clicking systematically forward—except for the decapitated moto; without visual sensors to direct its course, it veered and took out the moto next to it, leaving a wide gap in the circle.

  “Hmm,” Fidget grunted, lifting the blender to examine it with sparkling purple eyes. “Maybe this thing is essential.”

  “Run!” Aunt Temperance yelled.

  They dashed through the newly cleared opening in the moto circle and down the nearest path winding through the junk. They couldn’t go back to the entrance of the park—it was blocked by motos—so they went straight ahead, deeper into the scrapyard. As he ran, Ozzie glanced over his shoulder and found the motos in pursuit, though they were moving at the same slow, consistent speed.

  “I don’t get it,” he said. “They’ll never catch us going that slow.”

  “Good!” Fidget said.

  They had soon left behind the motos, as well as the last remnants of the park. Now it was just more garbage, mountains of industrial scrap that seemed to have no end: tangles of wire, abandoned control panels, twisted rods of iron sticking out of crumbling slabs of cement, like hands waving for help in the drizzle of acid rain.

  Unfortunately, that drizzle was quickly maturing into a shower. Soon, each drop felt like the peck of a sharp beak.

  “We need to find shelter!” Fidget cried.

  There was still a pathway ahead of them, but it was narrow and meandering. Suddenly, they arrived at a junction. The path branched in three separate directions.

  “It’s like a maze in here,” Ozzie complained. “Which way do we go?”

  “I pick this one,” Fidget said. With her free hand, she pushed aside a sheet of scrap metal to reveal the mouth of a giant industrial pipe poking out of the nearest mound. “Come on,” she said, scurrying inside.

  Everyone followed; the pipe was so big that even Tug could fit.

  “We can’t stay here,” Ozzie warned. “The motos will find us.”

  “We can’t go out there,” Fidget countered. “We’d get melted alive.”

  Ozzie couldn’t really argue with her. The rain was now pounding the metal outside, causing a racket. Water, red with rust, was spilling over the opening of the pipe.

  Aunt Temperance sighed. “I could really use a cup of tea.” In the darkness, the pulsing of the stone on her chain was even more pronounced, casting a flicker of light on everyone’s faces.

  “This pipe keeps going,” Fidget said, probing ahead. “Maybe we can follow it.”

  “Just wait!” Aunt Temperance called, but the princess had already disappeared into the darkness.

  “Someone’s back there,” Tug mewled, his ears twitching.

  “Motos?” Ozzie asked in alarm.

  “No,” Tug said. “I think it’s—”

  Fidget shrieked from the depths of the pipe. Ozzie tore after her, but a loud thump brought him to a halt. Then a light switched on behind him—Aunt Temperance had brought a flashlight, he remembered—and there was Fidget, standing with the blender raised above her head, ready to swing again. A giant shape was stirring on the floor in front of her.

  A human shape.

  “Who are you?” Aunt Temperance demanded.

  The figure groaned, then rolled over to reveal his face.

  “Quoggswoggle,” Fidget gasped.

  Lying at her feet was none other than Cho Y’Orrick, the captain of Zoone.

  12

  No Sort of World for Sleeves and Swords

  “Ch-Cho?” Fidget stammered, quickly thrusting the blender into Aunt Temperance’s arms. “I’m sorry—really sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” came the wheezing reply. “You just knocked the wind out of me, lass.”

  “You’re Captain Cho?” Aunt Temperance gasped as the titanic man slowly sat up, massaging his stomach. “I thought you would be more . . . captainish.”

  Ozzie understood what she meant. Cho didn’t look like the strong and vigorous man who normally patrolled Zoone. He seemed a mere specter of his former self—gaunt, pale, and bedraggled. Gone was the long turquoise coat of his uniform; in its place, Cho wore a stained undershirt. His hair, usually styled into a tidy topknot and two braids, was hanging loose and wild around his shoulders. Black bags sagged beneath his eyes, obscuring his scar and tattoo.

  It was only those eyes that gave a hint of the noble man Ozzie knew so well. There was still a flicker of warmth in them. It was the type of warmth you wanted to huddle around on a cold winter’s night—or when there was poisonous rain hammering down outside. Ozzie and Fidget dropped to their knees and hugged the fallen man, while Tug gave the captain a sloppy lick with his blue tongue.

  “You’re here!” Ozzie exclaimed. “How did you find us?”

  Cho tousled Ozzie’s hair. “I heard the alarm going off, then I spotted you from my lookout, fleeing the motos. I didn’t mean to startle you, Fidget.”

  “It’s okay,” the princess said. “But how did you get here to begin with? To Creon?”

  “Creon?” Cho echoed in surprise. “This is Moton.”

  “That’s just what the motos call it,” Ozzie said.

  Cho exhaled. “Let me guess—you’ve already been figuring out the mysteries of this place. Just like old times, hmm? A skyger, a purple-haired lass, an Eridean traveler—”

  “And an aunt,” Tug interjected.

  “Ah, yes,” Cho said, rising to his feet and holding out one enormous hand. “You must be the infamous Aunt Temperance. You have a whiff of magic about you.”

  Aunt Temperance wrinkled her nose at him. “I don’t know what that is supposed to mean, Captain. You have a whiff about you—but I wouldn’t describe it as magical.”

  “No,” Cho conceded. “I’m afraid I’ve not had much opportunity to bathe in this wretched world.”

  “Cho can smell magic,” Ozzie told his aunt. “That’s what he means.”

  “I smell like magic?” she said skeptically.

  She looked to Ozzie, but he only scratched his head. Cho had said something similar to him when he had first arrived at Zoone, but he had always assumed it was because he had been carrying his aunt’s key—in fact, he was still carrying it. As for Aunt Temperance? Well, she was wearing a glowing orb around her neck. Maybe it was magical, too.

  “The nose does not lie,” Cho said. He was still holding out his hand, but Aunt Temperance had yet to take it. Ozzie knew that his height, along with the scar on his cheek and the two missing fingers on his left hand, could make him seem intimidating.

  “Captain, may I inquire . . . are you okay?” Aunt Temperance asked, the beam of her flashlight wandering over the captain’s body from head to toe.

  Cho dropped his hand and chuckled because, well, that’s what Cho always did. Pain, disaster, dire predicaments—it didn’t seem to matter; he faced all situations with a sprinkling of mirth. “This is a dangerous realm, madam,” he said. “But I didn’t lose my fingers here. This is an old injury, from when I was a lad in my home world of Ru-Valdune.”

  Aunt Temperance’s face contorted as if several emotions were competing for real estate all at the same time. “Madam?” she said sourly. “I’m pretty sure I’m younger than you.”

  Cho chuckled again, his dark brown eyes glinting in the beam of her flashlight. “That’s most likely true. Though I’m not as old as you think. Being stranded here all these weeks has taken its toll.”

  Aunt Temperance gasped. “You’ve survived here for weeks?! How—”

  A loud clang broke through the
rain, causing everyone to instantly freeze.

  “That’s the motos catching up,” Cho whispered, and Fidget wrested the blender back from Aunt Temperance’s hands. “They never hurry, but they always come. We can’t linger here any longer.” He turned into the darkness of the pipe and beckoned everyone to follow.

  “Wait a minute.” Aunt Temperance balked. “Where are we going?”

  “To my hideout,” Cho answered. “Now, hurry!”

  He led them deeper into the pipe, which let out on the other side of the junk heap. Once through, they darted into the rain, crossing the rubble to reach the mouth of another gigantic pipe half-hidden in a pile of scrap. Cho moved confidently through the tunnel—he knew the way by heart, Ozzie realized. The end of the second pipe jutted out over a wide canal of sludge. Ozzie guessed it had once been a proper river, but now it was gray, thick, and oozing like wet cement. On the opposite side were more hills of abandoned metal, stretching into the haze of rain, as far as Ozzie could see. Black garbage bags pockmarked the heaps like painful sores.

  “The motos don’t recycle or reuse,” Cho explained, gesturing at the pitiful landscape. “They simply dump whatever they can’t use anymore into this ever-expanding scrapyard. Maybe this was once the center of the city, but now it’s dormant and dead. Which means it’s the safest place in this desolate realm. My hideout’s just on the other side of the river.”

  The mire was bubbling in certain spots, issuing plumes of yellow smoke. It was one giant toxic soup. Ozzie gave it a dubious look. “How do we cross?”

  “We swing,” Cho replied.

  He grasped a heavy metal chain that was dangling down in front of the pipe. The other end of the chain was attached to the arm of an ancient crane perched on the opposite side of the sludge.

  Aunt Temperance threw the captain a reproachful glare. “Are you sure it’s safe?”

  Cho chuckled. “Nothing in this world is safe, my lady. If you’re scared, perhaps Tug can fly you over.”