Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“I’m worried about her,” Sister said. She winced as Caleb continued changing her dressings, carefully swabbing the cuts and nicks with alcohol to keep infection from setting in.

“I think she’ll actually keep folks away for now,” Caleb replied. “And thanks to this switching she gave you, knocking you out of a pine tree and hitting every branch on the way down…well, we don’t have to think of a punishment for you sneaking out and leading Tory on a darn fool adventure now, do we?”

Sister yelped at the next alcohol swab, confirming what Caleb said without uttering an intelligible word.

“You going to stand there in the doorway, Trace, or are you going to come in and tell me what’s on your mind?” Caleb said.

Trace stepped in, red-faced. “How’d you know I was there?” he said. “I was quiet.”

“Bright light from the door in Sister’s eyes, of course,” Caleb said with a chuckle. “I’d know that silhouette anywhere, and it’d be visible for miles if we were outside.”

“Let me finish patching her up,” Trace said. “You’ve shown me how to do it, I need the practice. And-”

“And?”

“And I want to. I kinda owe her. For, you know, saving my life.”

“Don’t make me regret it,” Sister moaned, her eyelids fluttering.

Caleb scooched his stool around so he was face to face with the boy. “Tell it to me straight, Trace,” he said. “How much of you wanting to help out is real genuine gratitude, and how much of it is wanting to see Sister squirm and yelp?”

“Well, this is one time when helping her and hurting her…well, they’re one and the same,” Trace grinned. “I’d be dumb not to try getting in on that, y’know?”

Caleb rose and handed over the alcohol and the swabs. “All yours,” he said. “Should just need a dash here and there where I haven’t already replaced the bandages.”

He walked away, following the gentle slope up to the surface. A smile crossed his face as he heard Sister and Trace beginning to go at it behind him:

“OW! Stop it!”

“Do you wanna die? Cuz if you keep doing that, you’re gonna die and I’m gonna get blamed for it!”

The great mechanical colossus with Tory at its heart was resting on the edge of the settlement. Once they’d gotten the repairs done, Tory found herself able to control the machine much better, and able to hear and speak from it. She’d learned how to set it down, forming a rough staircase of knees and arms, that allowed the other children–and Caleb himself–access to the head where she was ensconced. When Caleb came upon her, all the doors were open, and Tory was letting the cool air and the last rays of sunset wash over her.

“How was it?” Caleb said, clambering up to get face-to-face with the girl without spoiling her view. “The hard ground at the Sandeval Rocks is a much better match for this thing than that soggy forest mud, eh?”

Tory looked up. “It’s nice to be able to run a bit without worrying about sinking or falling,” she said. For all that she resembled Sister physically, Tory was the opposite: gentle, deferential, contemplative. “I took Switch with me this time. He said he wanted to see how it worked, so he could get a circuit diagram going.”

“I saw him working on it just now, before I had to tend to Sister,” Caleb said. “Don’t you worry, Tory. We’ll work out how this big toy of your grandfather’s works sooner rather than later, and have you popped out of there. Maybe there’ll even be a new pair of arms and legs in it for you.”

“How is she?” Tory said. “I feel so bad about scaring her, and almost…almost…”

“She’s whining, complaining, and fighting Trace like a cornered badger with pups,” said Caleb. “And telling me how to treat her besides. So I’d say she is well on the mend.”

“Caleb…I think this thing might be why Grandfather had my bits the way they were,” Tory said haltingly. “Why they were all weak, and they came off so easily. I think he meant to put me in this thing sometime and never had the chance.”

“Maybe he did,” Caleb said. “This thing is a darn sight more impressive than a Harvester. But guessing what a dead man might have been thinking is a fool’s game, if you ask me.”

“Caleb…” Tory said again, quieter. “Am I a monster?”

Recoiling as if he’d been slapped, Caleb shook his head. Realizing how inadequate that looked, he gently laid a hand on Tory’s shoulder. “No,” he said. “I’ve know people who were real monsters, and most of them were handsome folks. This thing here? This is just a special talent of yours, like Sister’s smarts or Trace’s adaptability. Once you–once we–figure it out, you’ll be able to use it to do great things. Imagine you, with some of your sibs on your shoulders, and a spare set of arms and legs stashed away for yourself, striding across this big old ruined land looking for adventure. No one would stand in your way.”

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“Trace! Trace, get down here!” Caleb bellowed. His rifle barked again as he tried to lead the dark, menacing form of the mechanical beast away from the tree where Sister lay unconscious.

“I can do it!” Trace shouted back. With the superhuman strength and dexterity of his mechanical arm, he had already monkeyed his way nearly to the waist of the colossus. “It’s just a machine! I can handle them! I’m like part machine already!”

“No, dammit, no!” Caleb shouted, forgetting in his anger and terror his pledge never to curse around the children. “I can lead it away! It will follow me! You need to get your sister to safety.”

Trace was still climbing, finding handholds and toeholds among the mechanical monstrosity’s many wires, crevasses, hollows. “I can do it. I can stop it!”

“Will you get down here and let me lead it away, boy?” Caleb shouted. His rifle clicked empty, not that he dared aim at the thing anymore with Trace clambering all over it. “I can’t lose you!”

“And you think I want to lose you, you old grouch?” Trace screamed back, from his perch amid the thing’s chest. It didn’t seem to notice the tiny parasite on its surface, focusing instead on its single-minded pursuit of Caleb. “I’ll take this thing apart one piece at a time if I have to.”

Upon reaching the beast’s head, Trace was shocked to find that it had no face–instead, there was an arrangement of handles and levers that looked more like a door, or an airlock, than anything a being might actually need to see or smell or speak. Grandfather had been an enthusiast, a devotee, a slavish disciple of the lever and the handle in his experiments to merge the hard and the soft, the fleshy and the steely, and Trace knew all too well how those components worked.

He grabbed the handle, and pulled hard. With a frenzies squeal of metal on metal, the door to the colossus opened wide and the spring daylight poured in.

“S…Sister?”

Trace had to blink his eyes to realize that it wasn’t Sister at all–it was Tory, her twin. She was pale, sweaty, and somehow cocooned into the monster at her shoulders and hips. But she immediately smiled, and shouted joyously.

“TRACE! You figured it out! Oh, I was trying to figure out how to tell you and Caleb it was me, but…” her joy fell to sadness, and within a moment she was weeping. “…but I messed everything up.”

The colossus stopped, rocking back on its heels. Then, as Tory wept, it pantomimed a little girl sniffling and trying to rub her nose.

Trace moved in close and put his arms around Tori. “It’s okay now,” he said softly. “It’s okay. We’re here.”

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Sister could see a stream of tracers from Caleb’s automatic rifle streaming upward like avenging fireflies, but the colossus shrugged them off as if the impacts were meaningless. It continued advancing toward Caleb, arms out, a bantam skyscraper closing in on the wings of tremblors.

Trace’s tree was one of the casualties of the titan’s advance; the ground was pulverized, roots were snapped, and the trunk began to topple as the rain-sodden ground beneath liquefied and bubbled away. Trace was blubbering in helpless fear when Sister reached him; despite every inch of both arms screaming in pain, she still was able to hook her one leg over a branch and grab Trace by the shoulders.

What was it that Caleb had said? It didn’t matter if you felt like an adult, or even acted like one all the time. So long as you could do what you had to when the time came. “Trace. We’re going to jump to the next tree. It’s going to hurt, and we’re gonna get scraped up, but we’ll make it. You with me?”

“I…I…I…” Trace stammered.

“BROTHER. I NEED YOU WITH ME.” Sister said, in her most Caleb-like affect. She didn’t feel the confidence; it was a total lie. But her brother, scared and about to die, needed someone with confidence, and there was no one else handy.

Sister’s feigned assurance seemed to calm Trace. “All right,” he said. “All right. Just tell me when and where.”

The tree was toppling now; both Sister and Trace felt the cool spring wind rushing by their faces even as the bottom fell out of their stomachs. Plummeting to the forest floor after a hundred years, the old pine would pass within a few feet of another, briefly entangling branches. Sister waited for that moment, when branches that looked like they could support the weight of a pair of partly-metal children were at hand, before calling for the jump.

“NOW! NOWWWW!”

Trace, with both his legs working, kicked off the falling trunk and launched himself into the branches of its twin. He landed roughly but not painfully, with a few minor scratches. Sister, with only a single leg, belly-flopped astride a branch, winding her and leaving her hanging like a rag doll, oozing blood from a dozen cuts and scrapes.

Trace, his fear broken, spidered himself over to Sister and dragged her, gasping, to a nook in the branches where she could lean against the main trunk. “Are you okay?” he said, alarmed at the blood on his hands.

“I am…oaky dokey…” Sister said with a weak smile. She pointed to her shin, where several pieces of bark were embedded into a nasty scrape. “See…?”

Trace laughed despite himself, despite the colossus and the rife fire. “It’s a pine, you huge dork,” he said.

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Darkmoor Manor was sited by George D’Arkham, the first Lord Darkmoor created by Henry VII in 1489, in a cool moist valley for maximum fogginess. In addition to being reflective of D’Arkham’s dour countenance—Henry himself was known to call him “old Sir Peatbog—the location suited his dislike of sunshine and he saw it as a potent defensive measure. The victory that his knights had at Bosworth Field, switching sides and charging out of a bank of fog to cut off Richard III, certainly played a part.

After his father died of drowning in his own bedroom, the second Lord Darkmoor was distressed to find that there was already a Darkmoor Castle in Yorkshire. This discovery, during construction, is why the proposed fortifications were never built. Darkmoor Manor would be among the earliest stately purpose-built country estates but for the gloomy atmosphere that led historians and architects alike to thoroughly ignore it.

The third Lord Darkmoor was a nephew of the previous holder, and took over after his uncle’s sudden death from an attack of defenestration in the manor kitchen. He was responsible for the library, which was a major consumer of funds. Much of the estate was squandered on maintenance on the manor, which tended to mold, replacement of library books, which tended to mold even faster, and keeping up food stocks, which molded so fast as to make the manor and books appear to be somewhat mold-resistant in comparison.

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Trace staggered backwards, snickering madly and desperately trying to keep Caleb’s order to be quiet. Sister, for her part, angrily wiped away enough mud that it wasn’t in any danger of slipping into her mouth.

“Aww, c’mon, sis,” Trace said as she glared at him. “It was just a little joke, huh? Have a sense of humor.”

“Oh, I do. I do have a sense of humor. You know what would be really funny right now? EATING SOME MUD PIES!” Sister swept her synthetic leg, knocking Trace’s lanky limbs from beneath him like ninepins. Like an expert wrestler, Sister had Trace pinned in a moment, despite his greater height and longer reach, and was forcing a double handful of mud into his face.

Trace flailed about; his cybernetic arm gave him the strength to flip Sister away after a moment, and he doubled over, gagging.

“You got my mouth all dirty,” he spat.

“Your mouth was dirty already,” Sister snapped back. “I just put mud in it. You should think next time you play a mean joke on someone.”

“Hmph,” scoffed Trace. “Grandfather didn’t mind. He used to encourage me. Thought it was funny.”

“And now he’s dead,” Sister replied. “Just like you’ll be if yo get me all dirty again.”

They were about to go at it again when they noticed Caleb had returned. He was leaning on a tree, nonchalantly observing them while quietly cleaning his rifle.

“If this is quiet,” he said, “I’d hate to see noisy and squabbling.”

The kids had already begun to point at each other, and accusations were already on their lips, when Caleb held up a hand.

“We’re being tracked,” he said. “Something big, something fast. We’re moving now, and unless you want to walk home by yourself, looking over your shoulders the whole way, we’d better get moving.”

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“Grandfather told us never to come to this place, but Tory thought we might find something to fix her here,” said Sister. “So we came here. I had to help her on account of her parts.”

Caleb nodded. Tory had been having considerable difficulty with her “parts” of late. While Sister just had one artificial leg, Tory had a complete set, two arms and two legs, and their construction was considerably more sophisticated than any of the others. The old Harvester Prime, “Grandfather,” had probably been using her as a prototype or test bed for a more thorough integration of the taken children into their rambling, thieving exoskeletons.

“You came even though Grandfather said not to? Even though he smacked us around for even asking about it?” said Trace, incredulous. If he had looked rather grown-up before, in the shadows of the abandoned laboratory he looked like a small, scared child–enough so that Caleb had to tell the boy to sling his gun, lest he trigger a panicked discharge by mistake.

“Caleb said to forget everything Grandfather said,” replied Sister, defiantly. “I wanted to help Tory.”

“He also told us to breathe sometimes, so better start holding your breath,” Trace snapped. “It’ll be nice and quiet ’til you pass out.”

“Trace. Sister. Let me ask you something. Could you talk about Grandfather back home, in your rooms, or around the campfire?”

“Yeah, I guess,” Trace said.

“Can you help find Tory around the fire?”

“Of course not!” said Sister.

Caleb folded his arms and looked at them both.

“Okay,” Trace said, sullenly.

“All right,” Sister added, getting the message a moment later.

“Now,” Caleb said. “Show me the room where the ‘robot tentacles’ took your sister.”

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