She swings at me, and Kristoff parries the blow, turning her sword aside. When the flat of her blade hits my arm guard, the screen flashes and a red mark appears on a little stickman in the bottom corner. She damaged my suit.
That makes me irrationally mad, so I punch her in the face. My fist rings with the impact, and it sends her reeling. She swings her blade again but I’m inside her arms, and and catch her in a bear hug.
I don’t know how this thing works, so I just run straight into the wall with her. The concrete buckles and cracks in a spiderweb from the impact, and then she pummels the side of my head with her fist.
The crackling blade comes down toward my face. I throw my arms up then roll away as Kristoff’s blade guards me from the impact.
I get to my feet, springing up easily as the suit reads my movements. Dizzy, I stumble back.
We have her flanked, he and I on different sides. She sweeps her sword from side to side, waving the tip at us. Kristoff feints at her.
“We have you,” he says, edging closer, limping. “You can’t take us both in that old armor. Give up, Cassandra.”
She laughs, tinny and echoey in her armor. “The moment I lower my guard you’ll kill me.”
“I swear, I will grant you clemency. I want an end to this. I want it to be over. I grant you safe passage if you surrender your armor and swear never to set foot in my lands again.”
“You want an end to this,” she snarls, “you shall have it.”
She charges at him, bats his blade aside, and drives hers straight at his chest.
I scream, wordless, and throw myself at her.
I do…something. It feels like I just jumped off a ten-story building and my feet hit the ground heels first.
Before I even know what happened we hit the ceiling, and drop down. The walkway buckles under the weight of the suits as we roll, locked together. I jam my fist into her faceplate, kick at her, and she dents in the side of my armor with a hammer blow.
I kick and my armored talons scrape across her faceplate. She falls.
Straight into the shredder.
It catches her foot and she screams high and loud, the sound amplified into a piercing wail by the speakers in the helmet she wears.
I roll off the platform, land hard on the concrete, and grab the remote as she screams obscenities and tries to drag me in with her.
My finger hits the speed control and breaks the remote.
Not before it turns all the way up. Her curses turn to screams and then to a high-pitched wail that blends with the shriek of the machine. My prince seizes me and spins me around.
“Don’t look. Don’t look.”
His sword clatters to the ground and he sags to his knees.
“Are you hurt?”
“We have to go. Now!”
He rises and pulls me along. I use the suit’s power to lift and carry him out of the building. Behind me there’s a wild, almost animal shriek and the shredder blows apart with a whump and the high-pitched wail of an engine uncoupled from the machine it drives.
Outside we stagger to our knees.
“I’ve summoned help,” he says.
The Kosztylans arrive first, on his heels, almost.
“How did you find me?”
He yanks the helmet off his suit and drops it. “I put a tracking device in your shoe.”
“Help me get this thing off, damn it.”
Opening it piece by piece, I drag myself out of the armor. The two suits crouch there side by side as we sit on the dirty ground next to each other.
“Would you have let me go, if I wanted?”
“Yes. I only… I would let you go, but I would not let you come to harm. Always I would watch over you, keep you safe. You are my life, even if I must set you free.”
I rest my hand on his.
“I want to go home.”
“Yes, home,” he sighs, “I understand. It is much to ask for you to give up everything you’ve ever owned to—”
“I mean our home. Back to our castle.”
His face lights up and he leans over and gently kisses my cheek, leaning his forehead against mine. His people are quickly lifting the suits into a truck, carrying them piece by heavy piece.
“When you went out before, you were fighting her.”
“Dozens of times,” he says sadly. “Never could I simply end it. The temptation was there… But there was a line I could not cross. I will never hurt a woman, no matter what sort of monster I become.”
I smooth the hair away from his face and he winces as my hand brushes a knot on his head.
“My prince,” I whisper.
He takes my hand. “When we are home again I will destroy these things. All of them. I will tear down the assembly line, destroy the schematics, all of it. As long as it exists there will be the threat that someone will use it. It is too great a power for anyone to have, me most of all. It must end with us.”
I squeeze his hand.
“There will be many changes. We will make a better world…for our children.”
“Yes,” I sigh. “Yes, we will. Take me home, my prince.”
“As you wish, Penny.”
11