After some minutes Kalea had a small metal pot full of hot water, and poured it into a tin cup with a metal tea infuser.

  “So,” I said. “My brother. Matt. He’s north at the MIT campus. I need to rescue him.”

  “Ah, I can see how that would be your greatest priority,” Kalea said, taking a sip of her tea, and then wincing at how hot it was. “Emma’s probably pretty mad she can’t do it herself. Word in the Order was she was the first to rush into a mess, and pull people out. Your aunt is a legend.”

  It was amazing to hear someone’s perspective on my aunt from her time in the war. I always dreamed of how she was in the Knights, but I’d never thought I’d hear stories of her exploits first hand.

  Kalea stood and walked to me, grabbing my arm to inspect my injury.

  I looked too. There were flecks of blood around the gash under my pauldron, but it seemed as if the medical gel kept it well plugged up.

  “Looks fine,” she said, dropping my arm. “How do you feel?”

  “Better,” I said.

  “Good,” she said with a laugh, moving back to her armor to return some of her supplies to a compartment in her suit.

  I wondered what, besides water, that they drank. The tea was interesting, because it seemed a little sacrilegious to drink dehydrated plants, what with you know, the flowers on their heads. But we ate meat.

  I shook the thoughts away for now.

  “So,” I said, “what happened?”

  “Here?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her eyes grew distant, as if she was trying, with difficulty, to parse her words. She took another sip from her tin cup.

  “We were expecting something to go down, but not a full invasion, not a full tear.”

  A tear. I had expected, if there was an invasion, for the robots to have hoofed it over from one of the tears to the west. But if a tear had opened in Boston, that meant we had only seen a fraction of their force. And they wouldn’t stop coming until the tear closed on its own. They could potentially take the entire New England area before the Dreadnaught had time to send any backup.

  That was assuming that they had any backup to spare. The internet was obsessive about tracking the identity and number of knights, but the Dreadnaught, outside of the few they had out doing media and outreach, kept as many a secret as they could. Our best guess was that, even after decades of heavy recruitment, there were only a hundred or so knights. Even less of those were veterans. Most were on the front lines out west. A few would be on black ops missions like Aunt Em.

  In days, there could be a million robots in Boston.

  I wasn’t sure what to say, so I said nothing.

  “Yeah, after seeing you, Pau and I headed straight for the heaviest fighting —” Kalea took another sip of her tea — seemingly running out of words — eyes hard off into the deepening purple, and grey of twilight. She seemed to have forgotten what she was saying, or was lost in thought. I decided it was wise not to push.

  “How many Knights are they sending to back us up?” I asked.

  “Knights? Just us,” Kalea’s face was wild, like she wasn’t expecting me to ask her something like that. She laughed, something short, bitter and almost deranged. It was kind of scary. “Just me and you, right now. Hopefully they send someone to bail us out soon. If not well —” Kalea saluted me with her tin cup, and took another sip before setting on the edge of the roof.

  What about the Massechusets Militia?”

  “The Army? Ha!”

  “Well, that makes sense. So, what happens if this is the big one?” I asked. The Somnifer on TV had been adamant that the tears we’d already seen were just an expeditionary force. And they were already over five million strong.

  “We run. We run as fast as we can.”

  “Okay,” I said. This was nuts. But if I was going to rescue my brother, I needed her support. “If we survive tonight, you’ll help me rescue my brother, right?”

  It had taken her a while, but she’d eventually convinced me that I wasn’t in shape to fight more today. As much as I didn’t want to admit it, I couldn’t make it from South Boston, across the river to Cambridge, without tripping half a dozen ambushes.

  Even if I wasn’t as hurt as I was, I’d pushed myself to the limit of my endurance in those first two engagements.

  “Sure,” she said. It was hard to tell if she meant that or not. “And we’ll survive tonight. They won’t move on us just yet. The clankers like ambushes with overwhelming force. It’s probably time to check that wound. You can get on out.”

  Morrigan split open, and Kalea helped me out of my armor. She took some time to examine my wounds. The shoulder was fine, but would need stitches. My ribs were probably just bruised. But something was seriously wrong with my whole lower body. It wasn’t just my hip. I think I’d also messed up my knee.

  I was self conscious about being so exposed in front of another girl, or impossibly old Alien woman in this case. The lights she had coming from her suit shone bright against the full dark of the roof. I’d never really had sleepovers as a kid — or at least not after Reily George had thrown milk at me — and wasn’t used to walking around in what was essentially sleepwear, but she used humor to make me feel more at ease.

  The gash in my shoulder throbbed. She gave me some pain medication, plucked it from one of the flowers in her culture, and put it under my tongue. Then, she washed the wound with some rubbing alcohol from her med kit. She sutured my shoulder quickly, and evenly, making jokes to help keep my attention from it.

  I’d never gotten stitches before. I wasn’t that kind of kid growing up. I’d spent a lot of time at the piano, and distance running wasn’t especially hazardous.

  It was well into the night, by the time we were done.

  Kalea set up a tent she’d pulled from the large compartment on the back of her suit. She’d given up her only pillow so that I could hold it against my chest, and that helped some.

  I don’t know how long I slept, but when I awoke my chest hurt, bad. I sat up, and coughed. Some motion outside the tent drew my attention. I wasn’t sure I could stand.

  I grabbed the pillow to hug, and took some time to catch my breath. Then, I crawled to the exit of the tent to get a look at the outside world.

  Moving aside the tent flap, I felt the open air on my face. The morning shone bright and grey. The sky hadn’t cleared yet, but some of the smoke and debris from the day before had dissipated. I’m not sure how long I slept.

  Kalea sat on the ledge with her back to me. I didn’t register it at first, but more than just her back was bare. She’d peeled her underlayer down to her waist. A long scar snaked its way from her mountainous shoulders to mid-back. I coughed involuntarily, pain shooting through my body.

  Kalea glanced over her shoulder. She didn’t seem startled, or embarrassed. But now that I knew her better, maybe she just had a good poker face.

  “Just a sec,” she said, grabbing a white T-shirt from the ledge next to her, and pulling it over her head. She was wet. Could she have taken a shower? “I was just drying off. I gave our suits a rinse,” she continued, motioning to our suits across the roof. There was a water hose next to our suits, the sheen of water across the roof a testament to its use. “And did a bit of a rinse off myself. I could take down the tent and set up a partition for you if you’d —”

  This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

  “No. Thank you,” I replied. And to cover up my embarrassment I added, “And I’m not sure I can stand for long anyway.”

  “Oh, shit,” she said, “that’s bad.”

  Kalea frowned and walked over to the compartment in her suit and rummaged around. The way her shirt stuck to her skin in places made me uncomfortable. There was also a wild incongruity in the alienness of her skin, her floral body, and the familiarity of the T-shirt she wore.

  I tried to shake the feeling. This wasn’t too different from the locker room back at school. But even then, I had always been awkward around that stuff.

  It was still weird.

  Kalea produced a Zither. Wait, what? Why did she have a Zither stowed in her war machine? Or maybe it was a dulcimer.

  “What’s that for?” I asked.

  Kalea replied with a noncommittal sound. The musical instrument looked a lot like a thin guitar, but it had two fretboards, and the body ran the length of the frets.

  Kalea brought the instrument to me and sat down next to me in the dim tent.

  “This is an Appalachian Dulcimer,” she said, “and well, we’ll get to what we’re gonna do with it in a sec. My people have a similar instrument, but it was the best I could find before deployment.”

  “Okay,” I replied, apprehensive.

  “What do you know of the Bardic Traditions we have in the Knights?”

  “I know that all of the Knights have some kind of training in music, leftover from Alien traditions. And Aunt Em told me some stuff about the Song. Maybe it helps with the suits, somehow?”

  Kalea laughed, and continued.

  “That tracks. Anyway, the suits can be essential for war,” she said. “But that isn’t what makes us Knights. What makes us Knights are the Bardic Traditions. People like Dara and Captain Parker are a force all on their own outside a suit. How they can do it is… well through the stories and songs.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  Kalea worked with the dulcimer, turning a key here, and plucking a string there, tuning it as we talked. She had also brought out a small semi-spherical device I couldn’t place.

  “You saw the application I made in our fight, right?”

  My mind went back to the shimmering wall that had given us cover.

  “Yeah.”

  “That was a Non-Newtonian Anti-Ballistic Suspension, spun out of nanites on the fly to give us cover. It’s a standard field application. Most Knights know it.”

  “Wow.”

  “But how did the nanites know where and how to build the NNABS wall?”

  “You sang to it?” I guessed. This was all bizarre.

  Kalea hummed a tune softly. The mysterious device shifted and a dark mist trickled out, slowly.

  “Woah,” I said, “is that the—”

  “Nanites? Yeah,” Kalea briefly wafted her hand through the mist, and it twirled around her fingers. “We call it the Black Serum. It’s old technology. From even before our people discovered The First Ones.”

  The First Ones. This is the first I’d heard anything more specific than Pre-Somnifer. I waited for her to continue. Kalea plucked a string, and the mist seemed to shift in a different direction.

  “So the First Ones,” Kalea continued, “that developed most of the technology we use, the Black Serum and the crystals, and so on, they believed in the Song too. The Serum is an instrument, and we play it with music. If I sing a song of fire,” here she plucked a chord and the mist sparked dramatically. I gasped.

  Just as quickly, It returned to a harmless mist.

  “You see what I mean?” she asked.

  “See? Sure. Understand?” I made an ‘I don’t know’ sound with my mouth.

  “As powerful as the Serum is, it isn’t the nanites that are important. It’s the song. And once you start to recognize the song in the world — the song in time — you can see events that haven’t happened yet. Or events that are hard to see, somehow. It's why the robots can’t beat us. It’s how we know which planets they’ll target next.”

  I thought back to the battle, how I could read ahead to see where the robots were coming from, even with the smoke, how I could understand instinctively what was happening through the change in music. It was starting to make sense. Or maybe I was delirious.

  “I’m sort of getting it. But why can’t just anyone with a singing voice see the future?”

  “They do. Or at least that’s what I’ve been told.”

  Yeah that sounded pretty far-fetched. On the Intranet, the way we talked about this kind of stuff was just to use the terms they did, ‘field application,’ but some others called it ‘magic that isn’t magic.’ The idea of messing with this kind of stuff at all scared me, but it’s also what we’d built Morrigan to do. I had to learn this stuff sooner or later.

  “So,” I said, “you want me to sing with you?”

  “Yes,” Kalea replied, “we are going to fix your arm and your chest with the Serum.”

  “What about my hip?”

  “It’s probably too messed up for my expertise. But your suit will help, if we need to move before we find a way to fix it.”

  I tried to tell her that sounded like a bad idea, but my words became a series of painful coughs that sent pain lancing through my whole body.

  Kalea gave me a sympathetic frown.

  “Okay,” I said. “This sounds pretty wild, but with everything I went through yesterday, I’m willing to trust you.”

  Kalea nodded solemnly.

  “So how does this work?” I asked. “Do I drink it?”

  “You breathe it in. When the time comes.”

  “I can sort of play guitar. I’m supposed to play this thing, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  Kalea spent some time showing me the dulcimer, and it was relatively easy to pick up. My callouses were not very thick, but the strings were pretty easy to depress. My familiarity with violin, and guitar meant that it wasn’t too outside my expertise.

  When I thought about what we were about to do, I became nervous. Kalea explained that we would sing a song that described my injuries both from her perspective, and from mine. The nanites would take root in my chest. When we change the song to one about how my body should be whole, the nanites would resolve the injury in moments. Kalea didn’t say this, but I realized that if we got this wrong, and sang the song for fire for example, I could set myself ablaze from the inside out.

  And that would be bad.

  It was about harmony and visualization, she explained. She had familiarity enough with how this worked that it was safe. Supposedly. She needed me to sing with her because Kalea wasn’t a medic. She needed me to better describe, through song, how the pain made me feel.

  “You ready?” Kalea asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Well, time’s running out.”

  I nodded.

  “Okay,” I said. “How do we start?”

  “You start with a familiar melody and with intention on the Serum. I will harmonize, and then I’ll lead from there.”

  The dulcimer sat between us, the nanite pod right next to that. The wind blew soft, and cool. Kalea looked at me, and smiled reassuringly showing her white teeth, and dark gums. Her eyes were kind — the irises a dark black with the smallest traces of purple at the edges. They shined like a pool that had frozen over. I felt like I could trust everything I saw in them, like she couldn’t lie with her eyes even if she wanted to.

  I started a piece I often used to warm up. Just some scales. Kalea focused on her hands, and plucked chords that mirrored my own.

  It sounded nice.

  I visualized the pain in my chest. It was like a giant metal blade midway through my abdomen. I closed my eyes, and took a deep breath in. I could feel something, like cold mist traveling through my nostrils.

  I tried not to freak out.

  I breathed.

  My body relaxed. I could feel it in my lungs. It wasn’t unpleasant. Just strange.

  Kalea started to sing. The lyrics were alien, but something the spores couldn’t translate. Her voice had a rustic charm, but was not beautiful. I played a chord in an attempt at harmony. There was something like a laugh hidden in her voice. I liked it.

  As we played, I tried to focus on the strange, swirling feeling in my chest. There was something else there, too. Something like butterflies, like falling in love. Like gunning the engine down a steep hill. Like the rush of newfound friendship.

  Was it the music? Was it healing?

  I was lost in the feeling.

  There was something behind it. Sadness. Deep sadness.

  Was it mine? Or Kalea’s?

  I saw flashes, people’s faces in my mind. A man, young, scruffy faced with stern, brown eyes. Dark circles in his pale skin. He had a scowl like a german shepherd. All business.

  A Somniferian woman, with light green skin. Her floral culture piled on top of her head, and spilling down around her ears. Beautiful, sparkling blue eyes.

  Run, she said. Alarea. I saw her fall.

  Pau, the woman I said I’d protect. I didn’t do anything to save her. It hurt. Bad. And she was the strongest person I knew.

  No, I didn’t.

  This wasn’t my pain. This was someone else’s. And the pain for Logan, for Alarea, for Pau, were just wounds on top of something deeper.

  I changed the song. I could feel the pain in her chest. She had to let it go. It would destroy her.

  Kalea stopped singing. But she kept playing, as if in a trance. I could feel the pain in my chest lessen.

  I breathed out. The mist left me.

  I opened my eyes.

  Kalea stared at me, her eyes hard. The music had stopped.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Kalea said. But her eyes still looked at me like something was wrong.

  “I feel much better,” I said. We hadn’t worked on my leg. So, that still hurt like a mofo. But I could breathe again! I took a deep breath, then let it out in a happy sigh.

  Kalea stood, and walked away. I let her go.

  She stopped at the tent flap.

  “Give me a sec,” she said. Several moments passed. I wondered what was wrong. “You didn’t know,” Kalea said.

  “Know what?” I asked.