Mean Streets

I backed up as far as I dared, herding Liza behind me, and fired up my gift. My inner eye snapped open, and immediately my Sight found just the right places for me to stand, and where and when to dodge, so that the robots couldn't touch me. Their blocky hands reached for me again and again, but I was never there, already somewhere else, one step ahead of them. Except the more they closed in, the less room there was for me to move in. I managed to be in the right place to trip a few and send them crashing into one another, but all I was doing was buying time.

I knew what was happening to Dead Boy, but there wasn't a damned thing I could do. One robot aimed an energy weapon at me. I waited till the very last moment, and then sidestepped, and the energy beam seared past me to take out the robot on my other side. It exploded messily, bits and pieces flying across the room. They ricocheted off the other robots harmlessly, but one piece of shrapnel passed close enough to clip off a lock of my hair. Liza didn't react at all.

The robots had discovered they couldn't hurt Dead Boy, so they decided to pull him apart. They grabbed him by the arms and legs, stretched him helpless in midair between them, and did their best to tear him limb from limb. He struggled and cursed them vilely, but in the end, they were powerful machines and he was just a dead man.

Liza darted suddenly forward from behind me, grabbed up the robot arm that Dead Boy had torn off, and used it like a club against the nearest robot. She swung the arm with both hands, using all her strength, her eyes wide and staring, lips drawn back in an animal snarl. She wasn't strong enough to damage the robot, but I admired her spirit. We weren't in her world anymore, but she was still doing her best to fight back. But she still couldn't hope to win, and neither could Dead Boy, so as usual it was down to me.

I concentrated, forcing my inner eye all the way open, till I could See the world so clearly it hurt. I scanned the robots with my augmented vision, struggling to understand through the pain, and it didn't take me long to find the robots' basic weakness. They had no actual intelligence of their own; they were all receiving their orders from the same source, through the same mechanism. I moved swiftly among the robots, dancing in their blind spots, yanking the mechanisms out, one after another. And one by one the robots froze in place, cut off from their central command, helpless without orders. They stood around the metal room like so many modern art sculptures… and I sat down suddenly and struggled to get my breathing back under control, while my third eye, my inner eye, slowly and thankfully eased shut.

I have a gift for finding things, but it's never easy.

Dead Boy pulled and wriggled his way free from the robots holding him, looked in outrage at what they'd done to his purple greatcoat, and kicked some of the robots about for a bit, just to ease his feelings. Liza looked about her wildly, still clutching her robot arm like a club. I got up from the floor and said her name a few times, and she finally looked at me, personality and sanity easing slowly back into her face. She looked at what she was holding, and dropped it to the floor with a moue of distaste. I went over to her, but she didn't want to be comforted.

A voice spoke to us, out of midair. A calm, cultured voice, with a certain amount of resignation in it.

"All right, enough is enough. We didn't think the security bots would be enough to stop the famous John Taylor and the infamous Dead Boy… or should that be the other way round… but we owed it to our patrons to try. You might have been having an off day. It happens. And the bots were nearing the end of their warranty… Anyway, you'd better come on through, and we'll talk about this. I said Liza Barclay would come back to haunt us if we just let her go, but of course no one ever listens to me."

"I've been here… before?" said Liza.

"You don't remember?" I said quietly.

"No," said Liza. "I've never seen this place before." But she didn't sound as certain as she once had. I remembered her earlier premonition, just before the robots appeared, when she'd known something bad was about to happen. Perhaps she'd known be-cause something like it had happened the last time she was here. Unless she was remembering something else, even worse, still to come…