4-5
To their credit, Ruthven’s guards at least knew enough about Pretenders to make sure that Sara’s mouth was covered. More than once she’d escaped from prison by entering her first Pretension and letting her hands fall off with the cuffs still on them, so this escape was going to be at least mildly tricky. Once her mouth was covered, Sara got the wonderful experience of listening to an argument over whether the slash wounds in her upper chest should get any treatment or not. After a few pints of bleeding, it was determined that a living prisoner was better than a dead one, and one of the guards pulled out a box of bandages.
Once a sufficient amount of cloth had been applied to Sara’s entire upper half, the vampire and her minions took Sara directly down seven flights of stairs, past the ballroom. By the sound of it, the guests had noticed her botched break-in attempt, and were getting nervous. At least she’d have that much satisfaction.
Below the ballroom was the underground portions of the palace. Here, all pretensions—ha—of this being a grand, ancient palace like the kings of old was dropped. Bare concrete was the rule of the day, only sometimes bothering to carpet itself, let alone add anything visually interesting. The escort group passed by the laundry room, currently unoccupied, before arriving at the dungeons.
They, too, lacked a certain degree of panache. In her years traveling around Scrapyard, Sara had, in fact, run into more than one proper medieval dungeon, complete with skeletons still chained to the walls and various baroque instruments of torture. Despite the cheesiness, there was a genuine intimidation factor to seeing such a thing with one’s own eyes, the understanding that your jailers knew you as less than human. By comparison, Castle Ruthven’s dungeon looked more like a small-time county jail. A single row of cells ran down one flank of the room, each with just enough of a gap to prevent prisoners from physically reaching into the cells of their neighbors. The other side of the room was for the guards, kitchenettes and various time-passing implements placed so as to most effectively tantalize the prisoners.
Sara’s cell was one of the holding ones, roughly at the middle of the row. Still handcuffed and still gagged, she was tossed inside, and the door locked shut behind her. If she knew anything about the prison-guard psyche, and she did, Sara was fairly sure that she wouldn’t see anything for at least thirty-six hours, her keepers trying to wear her down with isolation and thirst before the interrogation started. She could break out before then.
Not that she had much to work with. The cell really was quite empty, sans even a bucket for biological needs; all the better to increase the humiliation factor. In fact, about the only thing of note besides the concrete on one side and the bars on the other was the mannequin. It was to-scale with a normal human, its body made up of dark wood carved into distinct segments held together with tightly knotted strings. Its face was roughly carved, two hollows of eyes, a peg nose, and a slit mouth, all angled towards the ground as it slouched in the corner with its legs crossed. It, too, had a pair of manacles around its wrists.
Sara was on the ground, and without the use of her hands the only way she could move was awkward inchworming. That was enough to make it across the cell and give the mannequin a firm shoulder-check. When that failed to work, she grumbled at it, saying profanities and whatever other harsh words came to mind through the cloth shoved in her mouth.
The mannequin promptly sat up and gave Sara the finger. As much as the mannequin might have been trying to imply otherwise, Sara wasn’t stupid enough to not recognize a fellow Pretender with a weird pretension form when she saw one. All of a sudden, Sara’s odds of escaping, and doing so quickly, felt much higher. Through a series of simple gestures, Sara conveyed her plan, step one of which was for the mannequin to turn around and pull the gag down to Sara’s neck.
It didn’t pay off. Muffled noises and wriggling were simply incapable of conveying the basic information Sara needed the mannequin to know. That they were under heavy guard, one of Ruthven’s soldiers patrolling by about once every minute, didn’t help. Sara was left with nothing but hands that had fallen asleep and a gag now soaked in saliva. Hopefully someday she would start salivating more explosives, but that day had not yet come.
The mannequin, meanwhile, had fallen still again, this time sitting upright, its head turned to watch Sara’s awkward flopping. Was it enjoying this? Had they met before, and Sara had somehow pissed it off really badly and then forgotten about it? Did the mannequin want to get out of this cell or not? These were the sorts of questions that Sara would have asked her cellmate if she had been able to speak instead of grunting. Once it was clear that nothing was going to happen, Sara settled on glaring directly into where the mannequin’s eyes would be, daring it to be useful.
At least she’d lost the fake mustache somewhere in all the chaos. That would have crossed a threshold of sheer embarrassment from which she could never recover.
Then, all at once, the mannequin did some sort of elaborate acrobatic maneuver, instantly taking it up onto its feet without the use of its hands. It waited a second, looking out at the passageway where the guards patrolled, before giving Sara a spinning heel-kick to the face.
Sara had just enough time to think about how absurdly showy of a kick that was before the impact reminded her that it was still quite effective. Her vision blurred, and the force knocked her fully onto her side, leaving her vulnerable to a series of followup kicks to the stomach. A series of kicks that were not one-tenth as damaging as they should have been, coming from someone who clearly had experience in unarmed combat.
Faking a fight was far from Sara’s preferred method of escape, but at least that meant they were both on the same page. She did her best to play up the blows, writhing in agony—not even entirely faked, the first kick had hurt quite a bit—and screaming as loudly as she could while still gagged.
“Bloody hell… you get off her right this instant, you hear? No violence in the cells! You have until the count of three, or you’ll get a beating!”
The mannequin fully ignored the monologue, as well as the countdown that followed. A few seconds after that, the door unlocked, letting in two guards brandishing batons. Sara rolled part of the way onto her back to see what happened next: as the two guards approached, the mannequin bull-charged them. What followed was a clumsy brawl, the mannequin moving less like a trained fighter and more like a drunk sea-snake. It took a relentless beating over the head and arms, but that did little to slow or injure a body made of solid wood.
After several seconds, the mannequin stumbled back against the wall of the cell, its head swaying drunkenly. This was still a ruse, but it took several seconds for Sara to notice what the plan was. As the guards turned around, though, something in the light changed, and she saw it. The threads were almost invisible, like spiderwebs trailing off of their torsos. As Sara leaned up off the floor, she was able to follow the threads, not quite taut but far from loose, all the way into the back wall of the cell.
Under her gag, Sara grinned.
The mannequin clicked its heels together, and the strings instantly shrank, pulling tight. The guards both froze where they were, held in place not just by the torso, but by the arms and head as well: the mannequin must have been able to plant the strings during the melee without them noticing. Worse, most of the strings were attached in the front; as the strings attached to the guards’ faces pulled tighter and tighter, their necks were placed under an increasing torsion. It wouldn’t take much at all for the mannequin to break both of their necks.
It skipped merrily across the cell, placing itself in front of where the guards were stuck, then made a half turn to emphasize the manacles still keeping its hands behind its back.
“Unlock me, if you would?”
Instantly, a shock of horrified recognition passed through Sara’s body. She had heard that voice before, though not emanating from this wooden body.
The cell guards couldn’t close in to attack, but they could scream for help. Which they did. Almost immediately, though, one of the guards learned the cost, as he was suddenly yanked back, all of the strings attached to his body shortening at once, sending him hurling backwards into the concrete wall, narrowly avoiding crashing into Sara in the process. The sound of bones crunching reverberated through her.
“The key, asshole! Do you want your neck broken or not?”
The other guard, still struggling against the strings but realizing just how little of a chance he stood, relented. He took the keys off of his ring and held one out, though he was prevented from actually reaching far enough to touch the mannequin. It finished the job, lowering the keyhole on the manacles into the outstretched key. One fluid movement later, and the manacles dropped to the floor.
The mannequin spun, palm-striking the guard in the temple and dropping him in an instant; the strings must have vanished somewhere along that process, but Sara couldn’t have identified when if someone had asked. The mannequin then relieved the guard of his baton and his keyring, before finally flickering out of their Pretension form.
The default form—some called it a Zeroth Pretension—of Sara’s cellmate was less dissimilar to the mannequin shape than one might have expected. The face-plate was much more subtly constructed, complete with eyes that could blink or widen, and the joints were hyper-technological systems of overlapping grey ceramic instead of crude metal. But seeing how much Qi Zhen of the Sublime Titanium Sect looked like a puppet did make Sara grin.
“You’re wondering whether or not I’m going to leave you here, informant,” Qi Zhen said. “And while I am still quite furious with the overeagerness of your previous bodyguard, I have nonetheless sworn myself to the path of justice and righteousness. Roll over.”
Sara did so, and within a few seconds her hands were free—albeit asleep—and her mouth un-gagged. “Do you seriously still believe that I’m the informant you’ve been looking for?”
“I will make that judgement for myself once we are both free from here,” they said. “And speaking of freedom…”
Drawn by the shouts and the thunderous noise of a human body being slammed into a concrete wall at bone-breaking speed, several more guards had arrived. Qi Zhen sprang into action. Keys in hand, they unlocked the door with superhuman speed, then proceeded to thoroughly dismantle all of the men outside. Wooden batons were even more useless against Qi Zhen’s ceramic shell than they had been against their mannequin body, and none could contest that the machine was a master of unarmed combat. Four men hit the floor, unconscious or writhing in pain, in about six seconds.
Sara finally got enough circulation into her hands to stand up, and took a second to examine the bodies. They were all still alive, despite all the bone-crunching sounds. One of them had a revolver, which was going to have to do for the time being; while she searched every pocket available for bullets, a question occurred.
“So how did a robot like you become a Pretender? I thought Sublime Titanium wasn’t in the business of hiring us.”
Qi Zhen folded their arms, turning up their nose even as they made sure to give Sara the time to arm herself.
“The same as you,” they said. “I was chosen by a Bearer.”
“Yeah? Which one.”
“The mantis spirit.”
Sara had filled both of her pockets with loose revolver shells, though considering she didn’t have any speed loaders, it wasn’t like she was going to get to use them. This was going to be one of those Pretension-form-only kind of fights.
“Mantis spirit? There’s not a fucking mantis spirit, that’s not one of the Bearers.”
“Really? Then which one chose you?”
Sara felt like she was watching her family die all over again. “Chosen is not the word to describe it,” she growled.
“Well, the mantis spirit chose me. It was how I knew that this quest was righteous, even as my creators denied me from its pursuit. I will find the informant, and she will tell me what she discovered!”
“So you’re saying that Sublime Titanium didn’t even sanction all of this random violence you’ve been doing?”
Qi Zhen, being a machine, did not show their emotions as a human might. Their neck did turn a few degrees further away from Sara, though.
“How did you end up down here?” Sara asked.
“I was overpowered,” Qi Zhen said, as casually as if Sara had asked if he had a pair of scissors to borrow. “No xia is omnipotent. And then I was left in here to molder until such time as my overzealous handlers could come and pick me up.”
“So you either go home to Qinglong, or you let yourself be cut off from Sublime Titanium entirely.”
Sara was starting to get a very devious idea. “But of course, an honorable xia would never give up on a quest so easily.”
“Of course not. Sometimes we must sacrifice the approval of our families in exchange for righteousness. How does the saying go? Do first, seek forgiveness later.”
Sara’s plan was definitely going to work. “Well, I might not be the informant you’re looking for—”
“That is yet to be decided,” Qi Zhen said.
“—but I can help you find her, and stay out of jail while doing it. I’ll need a favor, though.”
“Hmph,” said Qi Zhen. “You seek to place me in your debt? I don’t need your help to stay out of jail, thank you very m—”
It was at that moment that Qi Zhen was shot in the chest. Their smooth breastplate instantly developed a heavy dent as the impact knocked them to the floor with a shout of alarm. They’d been talking for too long; the dungeon guards had regrouped, and some of them had brought rifles this time. This, at least, was something that Sara knew well how to handle.
“First Pretense: Watch the World Burn.”
Sara peeled out of the cell, finding herself in a straight hallway with a firing squad at the end of it, out of range for her to deactivate their guns. That was fine. She detonated the soles of her feet, propelling herself forward and up with bullet speed, until she careened off the ceiling, increasing her speed even further by detonating portions of her back.
When she arrived at the guards, it was less like a fighter charging into a brawl, and more like a hundred and twenty kilogram cannonball slamming right through them. The two men Sara hit both went down for the count (dozens of broken bones apiece), leaving her in the middle of a group of men holding onto useless wooden sculptures.
It was all shockingly easy. These were the men who had kidnapped Zahra, so Sara could fight with absolutely no hesitation. A few of them had the presence of mind to try clubbing her over the head with their rifles once they realized they were no longer working, but most of them went down confused. Some of them probably died; unlike Qi Zhen, Sara wasn’t strong enough to be taught how to pull her punches, and she didn’t particularly care, either. She twisted arms out of sockets, grabbed skulls and slammed them against walls, let her thick, doughy arms slam again and again into ribcages until they cracked. Without any weapons to cut into her, there was so very little that any of the soldiers could do.
Except for running, of course. By the time any of the guards even realized that this was a losing battle, there was only one still intact enough to make a break for it. With a scream, he turned and fled toward the stairs back up. Sara blasted herself after him, but he was a small target, and agile enough to evade. She was sent slamming into another wall, and the man continued his sprint towards the exit.
Qi Zhen, on the other hand, was both fast and agile. Using the same trick they’d used to maneuver through the forest canopy outside of Carlisle, they bounded up the length of the hallway, then sprang halfway up the stairs in a single leap. There, they fell into their clawed-hand stance, and as the guard tried to sprint by, caught his arm. Sara couldn’t follow the exact move that they did next, but whatever it was, it ended with the guard screaming in pain and flat on his back with his arm twisted into a painful spiral.
Sara flickered back to human. “So, are you feeling more like you might want to consider that favor?”
“No concern for my health?” they replied, dropping the guard out of the lock and into a long barrel roll down the stairs.
“Oh, I’m sorry. Are you alright, Qi Zhen? Do you need a bandage? A snack for your strength?”
“Tch.” Qi Zhen looked down at the enormous dent in their solar plexus. “A few conduits misaligned, and I’ll be stiff in the midsection until I can get repairs. Unlike you humans, I am built to last. Steel alloy and ceramic-graphene composite.”
“Good. We can keep going, then.” Sara rolled her shoulders. She was bruised and sore, not to mention still feeling the blood loss from all the knife injuries, but ready to fight regardless.”
“What was the favor you wanted?”
“Lord Ruthven has my sister. She’s eight years old, and I think he intends to marry her.”
Qi Zhen’s eyes irised wide. “Then I shall help you.”
They both started up the stairwell, but stopped simultaneously, after about three steps. There was a noise, faint with all the intervening concrete, but impossible to ignore.
“Why,” Qi Zhen asked, “do I hear gunfire from up above?”
“Don’t know. We’ll just have to find out when we get there.”