I’m a dedicated Intranet scholar, remember?

  So I knew that If we managed to catch Tex, we’d have four Knights, basically a full squad. Typically a squad was arranged in a slightly different configuration than our current set up — ideally one unit of each School of Combat. Currently we had two Runic — me and Mabel — one Boss class, which was Kalea — and one Scout if we managed to rescue Tex.

  This left us short a Dragoon, the mobile combat focused member. We’d have to figure out a way to rectify this in the future.

  Oh, right! Tex was currently falling out of the sky, and we needed to catch her.

  We ran the ten blocks to her nav point in 24 seconds. Not sure how fast that was — you’d have to do the math on that — but it was cooking. We were not, unfortunately, the only ones to have deduced where Tex would land.

  Kalea fired two rounds from her railgun into the crowd of robots, and I hacked with my sword.

  “Mabel! Make us some room!”

  “Yes-sir!” She said, shooting two arrows at once, that pierced two robots and buried themselves into the ground a dozen or so feet from us.

  “Kat!” Kalea growled, shoving some kind of cylinder into her gun that drenched it in steam, then racking it and ejecting the cooling cylinder in two well trained movements.

  “Yessir!”

  “Spin up a crash pad for Tex.”

  “Affirmative!”

  “You got less than a minute!” she said.

  “Robin says 40 seconds!” Tex reminded me, over comms.

  “Who’s Robin?” I asked.

  “My suit!”

  Morrigan put a counter on my HUD.

  “I got you!” I said, cutting down a robot, sheathing my sword, and beginning to wave my hands. Grey, shimmering mist emitted from the tanks on my hips, and I started flinging it up into the air with frantic movements.

  “Would a NAABS wall work? That’s all I know how to do.”

  “Minor key!” Mabel advised. Then she snapped her fingers, and the dozen arrows she’d sunk into the pavement arced with lightning, exploding scores of robots caught in the net of electricity, and sending burning oil into the air.

  “Got it!” I said.

  I started humming the song in a minor key. I could feel Morrigan's song pitch to match it. I waved my arms more, throwing more and more mist into the air. I clapped my hands, and the mist solidified into a shimmering yellow wall, hanging horizontally in the air above us.

  The counter said 24 seconds.

  “One’s not enough!” Tex said. “Hurry!”

  Kalea pointed her gun in the opposite direction of me, and fired twice again, the muzzle flash roiling out of the weapon like the breath of a dragon.

  I hummed the song again, threw more and more of the mist into the air above us.

  Mabel cursed, dropped her bow, and put her hand on the emitter on her left hand, funneling serum into my Field Application. Kalea kicked and butt-stroked robots left and right. I felt bullets ping from the plates on my armor.

  The counter said 12 seconds. I clapped my hands. The second wall lay above the first.

  Morrigan updated my HUD, and showed Tex’s trajectory. I saw her shining against the sky like some kind of girl-shaped cruise missile. Because of the angle, she was only going to hit the second wall.

  The HUD read 6 seconds.

  I’d failed.

  I cursed.

  “Move the damn thing!” Kalea said.

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  Mabel picked up her bow, and fired another arrow.

  A motif through the song. Morrigan sang me my solution.

  I hummed the motif. I flailed my hands. The wall began to move in the air, slowly, ever so slowly. I pushed, and angled it up slightly.

  One second.

  Tex screamed, and crashed into the first wall, shattering it. Then she hit the second. She tumbled end over end, something flashing from her boots.

  Bubbleboots! She was a scout!

  She righted herself in the air, and just before she would have hit the ground, the boots stabilized her, bending spacetime under her feet in a small spray of rainbow color. She floated half-a-foot off the ground, and pulled pistols from plates at her hips.

  They were tri-guns, centrifugal powered pistols that spun tiny pieces of metal up to dangerous speeds, like a Newtonian softball pitcher. She pointed them both at the robots and they chirped, flashing, tearing through two at a time.

  “Yeehaw, baby! Let’s go!”

  “Support Tex!” Kalea said.

  “Yessir,” me and Mabel said simultaneously.

  I pulled my own pistol, and fired. A dozen robots exploded into shrapnel.

  “What the hell is that?” Kalea asked.

  “Do it again!” Tex yelled.

  I fired again. Another explosion rolled through the street, shattering windows and flattening robots.

  “Put that damn thing away!” Kalea yelled. “Before you get us all killed.”

  Tex swerved to the right, floating and firing at the same time. Kalea sent another round down the street. Mabel fired an arrow that sent a trail of lightning off into the distance.

  In moments, it was over.

  Tex hit the ground, fell back on her butt, and popped open her mask to drink in real air. Her face shone with a dazzlingly lopsided smile.

  “Now wasn’t that something!” She laughed.

  I sat down too, on a pile of asphalt, opened my clear mask bubble and breathed the air in too. The wind pushed the smoke in front of us down the ruined street, but it still smelled of burnt oil and rubber. Ozone permeated the air.

  “Katherine,” I said, introducing myself. “You can call me Kat.”

  Kalea did not open her suit, but sat as well. Mabel knelt demurely on her knees.

  A spitcurl of red hair fell on Tex’s brow, and the sides of her head seemed recently shaved. Her eyebrows almost seemed to disappear, along with her freckles, and her eyes sparkled hazel.

  “People don’t bother with my real name. Soon as they learn I’m from Texas, well… I’m happy to represent is all.”

  “Kalea.”

  “Mabel.”

  “Well, ain’t that nice! We’re all acquainted! Excuse me, as I lay down and die!”

  She put her gauntleted hands behind her head, and lay back on the street.

  “We need to move soon,” Kalea said. “I count two minutes.”

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “Tex?” Kalea started. “You get overwatch from the sky? Where can we fall back too?”

  “Most of them are across the river. Just some scouts, fanning out to make sure we can’t get comfortable. Lucky for me, I was stationed here for a couple months. We head down a block, and get into the subway system, it should put us on a train that goes parallel to the river. They won’t be guarding it, since we can't get behind their lines with it.”

  “Head into the underground?” I clarified.

  “Head into the underground,” Kalea acknowledged.

  I was entranced by the armor Tex wore. I knew a bit about her already. She was new, like the rest of us, but was also something of a poster girl for the new knights. She seemed willing, or empowered, to give interviews, and she was quick to fire off an opinion or folksy wisdom. She certainly leaned into the backwoods yokel schtick, and it had done wonders for her reputation.

  ‘I ain’t bothered,’ was something of a RII meme at this point. As was her penchant for deploying what she called 'double barreled justice' in the form of her pistols.

  Her armor had a mostly light grey and dark blue coloring, with what seemed like very few tanks for the serum. She had the two pistols, and what looked to be some kind of carbine on her back. A nasty hooked axe-head jutted from the bottom of the gun.

  Then, of course, she wore the boots. The boots of her armor had two large, clear bubbles on them that bent spacetime so she could hover. They called them bubbleboots, both because of the shape, and because of the bubble the wearer rode on. The boots couldn’t really propel, but once you got up to speed you were essentially ice skating on top of that spacetime bubble with nothing but air friction to hold you back.

  “Two minutes up,” Kalea said.

  We stood, and hoofed it to the nearest underground access stairs. Tex skated ahead.

  “So,” she said, “who are you, Kat? Knights are a small group, and I ain’t seen you at the Dreadnaught.”

  “Emma Galegher is my aunt.”

  “No shit?”

  “Yep,” I said. “We made Morrigan, ah my suit, in a barn and I was forced to take it into Boston because my kid brother is across the river.”

  “Huh.”

  “Paula Martinez said she’s the Prophesied Knight,” Mabel said.

  “Oh yeah? What does the Alien think?” Tex asked.

  “The Alien,” Kalea replied, “thinks we have more pressing concerns than the future.”

  “Wait,” Tex asked, “was that crash pad your first major work?”

  “It was.”

  “Damn, kid,” Tex murmured in awe, “took me three weeks to get the hang of a crash pad. Wait, you two just let her try that without any idea it would work? What if she messed up?”

  “I didn’t though,” I said, rather too defensively.

  “And they say I’m the daredevil. Y’all are crazy.”

  Tex turned her boots off to walk down the stairs to the underground. We followed.

  She was right. Why did they let me make the crash pad for Tex? Why did they trust me so implicitly?