Blood Vivicanti (9781941240113) by Becket Page B

introspective examination was startlingly
wibbly-wobbly.
     
     
     
     
    The heart of the Locomotive
Deadyards started to feel like a new home.
    I think Red felt that way
too.
    He and I instinctively
began rearranging the joint, making it livable, making it our
own.
    There was already a large
tin roof over the Locomotive Deadyards. We left that alone as we
lifted the cars over our heads with super-human strength. We
arranged the cars into a fort. The design came naturally to us.
Oddly, it bore a striking resemblance to a labyrinth.
    We called it, “The
Labyrinth Fort.”
     
     
     
     
    Passenger cars were
passageways leading from one boxcar to another. We connected them
together, lining them up, so that there was no open space between
them. We cut out passageways and doorways between the connected
cars. We could go from one car to another the way we might go down
a hallway, or go from room to room.
    We created rooms out of the
railroad cars. Each room served a different function.
    Most were quite narrow and
snug.
    For taller rooms, we
stacked hopper cars on top of each other, the lowest right side up,
the highest upside down, since the hoppers had no roofs.
    One room was where we slept
– separately, of course.
    Another room was where we
created machinery and other devices.
    Another was where we made
weapons for the day when we would attack Lowen and his Sleeper
Devils.
    And another room was where
I went to scream my lungs out whenever I missed the bad habits of
my girlhood. And I did miss my old habits on occasion.
    And I did scream quite
loudly too.
     
     
     
     
    Red and I then went a step
further and we made the Locomotive Deadyards a gauntlet of snares
and deadfalls, preparing for the day when Lowen and his Sleeper
Devils might come to attack us. We did not know if they would ever
find us, but we did not want to be caught off guard.
    We had a lot of scrap. Red
and I put our heads together and we came up with all sorts of
interesting ways for defending our hiding spots in the tortuous
warrens of our Labyrinth Fort.
    He made the Kharetie
version of a lightsaber. The difference was that the saber part
wasn’t light. It was sonic. And it turned out to be astoundingly
sharper than a Ginsu knife.
    Me? What did I make? Why of
course my own attachable Wolverine claws.
    Snickety-snick goes my berserker rage.
     
     
     
     
    I was getting used to Red.
He was getting used to me. We were beginning to enjoy one another’s
company greatly.
    And one time, very briefly,
I thought I caught him smiling at me.
     
     
     
     
    We made a list of all the
important components that could not be found in the Locomotive
Deadyards, things like hard drives and processors and
motherboards.
    We planned a trip back to
the mansion, to look for Wyn and Ms. Crystobal, and to loot the
mansion for everything we needed.
    We were Earth’s most alien
cadgers.
     
     
     
     
    Red was sleeping in his
spacecraft.
    He didn’t have a bed. He’s
never had one. He sleeps standing up with his legs keeping perfect
balance.
    The first time I saw this,
it scared the dickens out of me!
    I hadn’t been able to sleep
that night. I kept worrying about Wyn and Ms. Crystobal. My mind
would not shut down.
    So I snuck from my railcar
room and I crept inside Red’s spaceship. The sight of him made me
jump, but then it made me giggle. I tried tipping him over as if he
were a cow.
    His spacecraft saw me as a
threat and then launched me into the stratosphere.
     
     
     
     
    Three weeks finally came
and went.
    Red and I still had not
heard from Wyn or Ms. Crystobal. So we made plans to return to
Idyllville and to the mansion on the following week. A month of
waiting was long enough.
    I spent that week preparing
myself for battle.
    I still had the gadgets
that Wyn had given me when we freed Red from the Black
Building.
    I did not know how some of
them worked. Lowen’s Sleeper Devils had broken the others when they
attacked my eighteen-wheeler. Those little