"Feet...c...cut...feet...c...cut...feet...c...cut..."

Sanneken bends down and picks up the shattered calf, brushing off dirt and shriveled rootlets. Deep, filthy cracks spiderweb across the purple plastic. Blaster holes. A blackened section where fire had blazed. She knows it's not the same as her stepsister, not quite. But it was part of her once, wasn't it? 

She unwinds the recording, slides the silent piece of plastic into her pack and scans the landscape for a moment. Her fingers ghost across the handle of the shovel stuck in the ground at her side. A canyon of dry red rocks and sand stretches between her and the glittering palace in the distance. 

The sky's fading to a green so dark it's almost black now that both suns are setting. Blue stars come out one by one, sparkling through the clouds. A bitter wind moans through the canyon.

This is no place for a broken young girl to die. 

A crackle comes through the cobbled implant in her hard-of-hearing ear. "Keep an eye on those clouds." 

"Yeah." 

Wizard pauses. Her breathing through the link is the noisiest thing around Sanneken. Everything else has gone eerily silent in anticipation of the storm. 

"You holdin' up all right?"

"Mm."

Two purple dots flicker on the holotracker, blinking out shaky coordinates. Sanneken glances at the canyon below her feet. The other pieces are down there somewhere. Familiar rage burns in her chest, ugly and sour. 

"We can call it a night, Goldie." 

"'M fine." 

She ties the shovel onto her pack and starts down a couple of boulders that've fallen together. Could've rappelled, if she'd had the patience to bring her ropes and gear. If she'd had the time. 

"Watch for the virava. They'll be coming out to hunt soon."

Sanneken grunts in reply. Down below she imagines she can already see their yellow eyes, winking softly in the twilight. She jumps from the boulders to the canyon floor. Her footsteps are quiet across the sand.

Cameras perch on the edges of the canyon like starving birds of prey. They turn in shaky fits and starts, worn down by the sand and storms. She ducks them easily. 

"You're coming up to a fork," Wizard crackles in her ear. "You'll want to turn–"

The link goes static. 

Panic and Sanneken have long been strangers to one another, but she is still on speaking terms with dread. She turns in all directions, squinting into the gloom, tilting her head to the right. There's no sound but the howling of the wind. Storm clouds float weightlessly across the stars. 

Then a quiet clanking, the hum of smooth machinery. Sanneken shakes her head to herself. They only keep cams and virava down here, don't they? Wizard had said they did.

Wizard has been wrong before.

Sanneken isn't risking it. She's got nothing to fight a bot with and everything to lose. She dashes for the nearest boulder, crumbled against the canyon wall. There's a tiny crevice, big enough for a slim-boned child to barely squeeze through. She tosses her pack in through the crack and winces when the shovel blade sings loudly off the rock face. 

The quiet clanking pauses. 

Sanneken scrambles up the side of the rock. Her hands slip, frantically seeking a hold, but she launches herself over with her legs and tumbles through an opening at the top. 

Hard rock glances off her arm, sandstone scrapes her cheek. She slams onto the dirt floor and sucks in a shaking breath. Too loud. Dust swirls through her nose. She clamps a hand over her mouth and feels her lungs scream. 

The clanking is louder now, loud enough that Sanneken can hear the whine that lies beneath it. Gunmetal gleams in the gloaming through the crevice. It's coming right up to her hiding place.

The green lights on the top of the protocol bot wash over the boulder, flashing across the crack. Sanneken winces at the sudden bright glow but bites her tongue. Clacking noises. A deep metallic groan. The hum of machinery. She presses herself back against the rock, as far back as she can. Green light trickles over her boots, twinkling on the buckles. 

She squeezes her eyes shut. 

A thunderous rumble sounds in the bot's massive frame, and then it slowly turns away, clanking back down into the canyon. Sanneken waits until she can't hear it anymore before she slowly peels her hand from her mouth to exhale. No breath comes out. 

"GOLDIE! DO! YOU! READ! ME! TURN ON YER DAMNED LINK!"

Wizard's voice is blistering. Sanneken curses and turns the volume nearly all the way down, her ear buzzing. 

"Protocol bot."

"Sorry! Sorry! Thought you'd turned me off again, didn't know there was a bot in the area. Y'know, it don't show up at all on my radar."

"Maybe it's new."

"Forget the bot. I've got an idea. Try those newfangled goggles I slipped you."

"Wiz."

"Just give 'em a whirl! It's gettin' dark. You won't be able to see worth a damn out there soon." 

Sanneken climbs out from behind the boulder first, throwing her pack over and following as quietly as she can. Her pulse is jumping all over the place, and she can still feel the hum of the protocol bot under her skin. Her fingers shake when she digs around in her stuff. The goggles are near the top.

She slips them on and watches the world go bright purple. "Now what?"

"Should be able to find a trail real easy. Go north towards the palace, stop when you come to a bent arch lookin' thing, and then head left." 

With the goggles on, Sanneken can see everything in impressive detail up to ten feet away, but beyond that, no luck. Lucky she's always had a head for navigation. 

She turns her implant volume up again as she trudges across the canyon. Wizard's strange goggles aren't good for anything but tracking. If the protocol bot is still around, she won't know until it's too late.  

It's a long time walking through a bright purple landscape after that. Sanneken can feel a headache threatening. She's about to tell Wizard where she can stick her newfangled goggles when something pink catches her eye. A stain, on the edge of a downward slope. 

She pulls the goggles up off of her left eye. Nothing. On the right eye, it's clear as day.  A spattering trail of pink splotches snakes down into the dark. 

Sanneken doesn't want to guess at what they are. Blood, guts, motor oil... Dornicka left her a path to follow. Like she'd told her to. Her eyes sting, and she snaps the goggles back in place.

The sky goes completely dark almost as soon as Sanneken finds the end of the trail. She drops to a crouch, hoping there are no working cams around. The first moon is barely rising, so it's hard to see much of anything, but her eyes catch the telltale glow of plastic, and her fingers brush across the curve of a hand. 

There's a faint whine coming from the jagged purple stump. Sanneken lifts the arm from the dirt as carefully as she can and brings it to her ear. 

"F...fingers...broke...f...fingers...broke...f...fingers...broke..."

She slips the arm gently into her pack, tucking the dangling fingers in before she snaps it shut. The recording coil goes in her pocket.

Faraway virava howls echo through the canyon. The pink starts again on the curve of a nearby boulder. She tugs up one half of the goggles to see if there's cams or something else to worry about, but it's so dark out she can't see a thing.

The trail winds down, down into the deeper part of the canyon. Rock towers loom over her, blocking out patches of starry sky. The wind whistles overhead. Every now and then there's a long stretch of purple without any pink stains at all, and Sanneken's heart squeezes in her chest until she finds the next one.

She's so intent on the trail that she nearly walks over the end of it when it abruptly stops. She drops to a crouch again, reaches out, and feels nothing. Thin air, even. Sanneken frowns.

"Found it yet?" 

She pulls the goggles down around her neck and swears quietly. A deep pit yawns before her feet like an open mouth. She kicks a small rock off the edge. After a long moment there's a faint clack down in the darkness. 

"I found it."

Now she really wishes she'd brought her rappelling gear. All she's got is a rope, which she ties around the closest rock arch and drops down slowly with, hand over hand, into the pit.

The air around her is so quiet it feels like the pit is holding its breath. Sanneken pauses on her descent, one hand and a leg tangled in the rope, and fishes in her coat pocket for her night vision goggles. She manages to pull them over one eye.

Long stalactites cluster around her like teeth. Rusted gears and wires line the walls, running down to the floor. She pushes the night vision goggles up, pulls Wiz's goggles on again. A thin pink line leads away into the dark. 

Her lungs clench. She has to force breath into them, staggeringly loud in the silence. Dornicka was here, Dornicka fell from the lip of the canyon down down down–

She lands with a soft thud. Sand grits beneath her boots. There's a faint, clicking hum from beyond the clustered stalactites. Sanneken looks to the walls, but those gears haven't turned in a long time. Dread prickles at the back of her neck. 

At her feet, the pink line has turned into a faded pink smear. She kicks at the smear, and smells a faint aroma of dried blood. Sick anger coils in her stomach. She pushes it back. 

The trail of smeared blood lurches in a strange zig-zag across the pit floor. Sanneken experiments with holding the night vision goggles in front of Wizard's goggles, but it doesn't make a lick of difference. She settles for switching every now and then.

The electric hum fades as Sanneken moves deeper into the pit, which is quickly becoming a cave. The implant in her ear is nothing but fuzzy static. She smacks it a couple times. 

Wizard's voice rasps through. "...good look at yer location, Goldie. Be careful...bot...big'un..."

"Do you read me?"

"Gold– no– careful–"

It cuts out again and won't work after that. Sanneken doesn't dare curse, glancing around the silent ceiling of the cave, dripping with stalactites. Logically no bot could have made it down here, but she's no fool. 

Stalagmites sprout from the cave floor the further Sanneken follows Dornicka's fading trail. She almost crunches the last piece under her boot, since the pink keeps going on and on and...Sanneken's fists clench, but she forces herself down to a squat. 

A pair of spheres brush against her fingertips, and the recording is so faint she can't hear it at all beyond a rasping whine. She palms both eyes, cranks her implant up to full volume, and holds them right next to her ear.

"S...anneken...S...anneken...S...anneken...S...ave meee..."

Her implant cuts out on the last part of the word, and the ensuing static drives pain straight to Sanneken's temple. Wizard was right. 

A telltale clanking sound echoes from her left. She scoops up poor Dornicka's eyes, clambers in among the stalagmites, and a massive mecha foot crunches down on the place she was just crouching in. 

All the air leaves Sanneken's body in a hoarse gasp, but the whirring of the bot covers it. A bot? No, it's much too big to be a bot, but what else could it be? Its massive metal head brushes the ceiling, knocking off stalactites here and there, and its lights sweep the cave in a gigantic ray of eyewatering green. The electric whine drills down into the base of her head. Her heart beats a triple tattoo so fiercely it feels like it's set to leap out of her ribcage. 

She crouches back against the cave wall when the bot's light swings over to her hiding spot. Her elbow cracks off the top of a thin stalagmite. The sound is like a blaster shot in the cave.

Sanneken's mouth goes dry. The massive protocol bot turns slowly to her, as loud as thunder. She drops to the floor, pressing herself as flat as she can, curling around the stalagmites like a patch of moss. A massive blade on the bot's arm slices six feet deep into the rock where her body had been. 

It waits for a moment, clicking and whirring. Sweat runs stinging past Sanneken's eye. She forces her breath to hold. Its blade scrapes out of the cave wall at a snail's pace. The green light flashes over Sanneken's prone form, and for a moment she can't breathe, or move, or think. The bot slowly pivots and thunders on down into the next cavern.

Her heart won't stop racing after that. A trickle of air finds its way down her throat. Chunks of crumbled rock dust her shoulders and hair from the bot's blade. Her implant crackles in a burst of Wizard-sounding static. Sanneken closes her eyes in relief. 

"Goldie! You there? Sweet Medusa, I've got this monster of a bot on my map- a damned jailer! I didn't know they still made 'em!"

"How'd it get down here?" Sanneken whispers. Too loud. She turns down the volume on her implant. 

"The dungeon lets out into this cave of yours, kid. You found the back way in!"

"Good."

"Didja get the last piece yet?"

Sanneken uncurls her hand, revealing the two twinkling plastic eyes. Her palm shakes, and she hurriedly closes it again. If those clatter onto the cave floor the bot will kill her for sure. "Yeah."

"All right. Follow me!"

It takes her longer than it should to find the small metal door at the opposite end, but every click and clatter sends Sanneken to the side of the cave, watching. The bot is so massive her implant is always crackling with static, but she makes it to the dungeon stair. 

The lock hasn't been opened in years. Sanneken snaps the chain in half and shoulders her way in. A hinge breaks in a scream of rust and disuse, and she races up the mildewed stairs before the bot's sword arm can impale her on the door. From here she can hear laughter floating from the cell block. 

"Always the wicked stepmother!" someone shrieks, and the laughter starts up again in full force. 

She finds her mother in the smallest cell, curled in a shivering pile, and pulls the hinges off the cell door. Her mother startles awake. Her face is hollowed out with grief. 

"Hey," Sanneken says, and staggers back at her mother's fierce embrace. 

"We can't let him have Zlata," her mother whispers, eyes big and angry, like Sanneken has to be convinced. "We can't let him have her too."

"We won't," says Sanneken, and draws a hasty summoning circle on the floor. Wizard appears in a hazy cloud of static and hot air, all her white hair standing on end.

"You look lovely, Bea," she says to Sanneken's mother, who smiles. 

"Thank you, sweet." 

It's quick work to get into the palace. Guard bots are stupider than cams, and the dungeons aren't more than glorified cellars. The corridors are empty, polished to a blinding silver sheen. Blue lights flicker like candles, casting the three of them in a strange glow. 

More bots cluster in front of the banquet hall doors, brandishing blasters and stun spears. As soon as Sanneken gets her hands on one of their spears, she makes hash of the rest and stabs the control panel on the wall, hidden by a decorative curl of metal. 

The intertwining locks snake all the way up the doors, unlocking joint by joint by joint until they swing open on silent hinges. 

Bright golden light and music pour out from the banquet hall. A vast white table stretches the width of the room, covered with food and surrounded by guests. 

At the center of the table sits the king and his ravishing young bride. He offers her a forkful or tender meat and she jerks her head away, tears streaming down her cheeks. A long chain stretches out from underneath the tablecloth.

Sanneken leans over to the herald. "Introduce me as Dornicka's sister."

The herald does so, and the king's head snaps up. Guard bots surge forward, but he holds up a hand. 

"You enter my court uninvited."

"I have a message for you," says Sanneken. "The truth." 

"Truth is rarer than any treasure," the king replies. His left eye glows blood red. "What is your message?" 

Sanneken produces the three recordings, coiled into Wizard's hands, and begins pulling them through her fingers like thread. A young woman's scream splits through the air and the wedding guests startle. Zlata's face crumples.

Then comes a shaky, sobbing voice– Dornicka's voice, taut with pain and fear. "First he took my feet, my feet. He cut them with his knife. He broke my fingers and he cut my arms. He cut my throat. He drank my blood and ate my body. Next my eyes. Oh, sister mine, I know he will take my eyes. I know he will take my eyes. I know he will take my–"

Zlata jumps to her feet. "Sanneken, save me!" she screams. The king pulls her back down to his side.

"Guards!" he barks, but as soon as they circle round the banquet table, electricity leaps from Wizard's silver fingers, and the bots go down one by one. The banquet erupts into a panic, guests trampling one another in their hurry to escape, screaming and shoving. The king rises slowly from his table with Zlata's chain in his hand.

"You are a brave one. I'll give you that," he says. Zlata stumbles weeping behind him. "I did not know there were three of you. I'll give you that. But you cannot hope to triumph, girl. I take whoever I want for whatever purpose I choose. I have seven secret names written on the foundations of the world. I can pluck the lightning out of that spear, and the heart out from your chest. I can live and live and never die. What power can you possibly turn against me?" 

Sanneken smiles.

***

Beneath the battlements, the virava tear him to pieces.

About the Author:

V. K. Bloodgood  @vkbloodgood tries her best to write fantasy adventure stories, but everything always ends up being about pirates instead. Her favorite things in a book, whether she’s reading or writing it, are low fantasy, religious-themed horror, lots of action, and LGBTQ+ characters. Her ongoing medieval fantasy Little Brother won an award, but she can’t remember which contest it was for. 

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