But that day, I finally saw how things really were. This was an arena, and we were a pair of dogs thrown in to see which would blood the other first. I wanted nothing to do with it.

So I walked away.

“What is this?” Chief Let-mere asked me as I passed.

“You’ll have to make an alliance with the metal being, chief,” I said, waving my hand. “I’m not interested.”

“But—”

“Afraid, little emperor?” the metal being called after me.

“Yes,” I said, turning back, though it wasn’t him I was afraid of. It was the frailty of my ego, perhaps. I could pretend, I had to pretend, so long as I was in my own State. Traveling to another, particularly one as contrived as this . . . no, that I could not do. Not yet.

“It’s yours,” I said. “Unless the third Liveborn has already been alerted. You can fight them. Dance for the Wode. Be their little puppet. Not me.”

“I’m no puppet!” the robotic shell shouted. “Hear me, fantasy man? I am no puppet!”

“I’m pretty sure,” I said, puffing as I descended to the next landing, “that he was offended I wouldn’t fight him. I let him have the Border State, and he just pillaged it—stole their resources, murdered most of the people there. I had to reopen my side and send aid to recover the remaining natives.

“About ten years later, he attacked another Border State near me, and that time my conscience wouldn’t let me ignore him. We’ve been sparring off and on ever since. Twenty years now, thirty since our first meeting. Lately he’s even started to invade my State, though his robots never work properly there.”

“Huh,” Sophie said. We were nearly to the bottom of the stairs. “You realize that fighting him here is madness.”

I said nothing.

“His robots will work in this State,” she said, voice echoing in the stairwell. “Maltese has wristwatch phones and things that the real world didn’t have during the equivalent era. Those science fiction seeds will be something your friend can expand upon, fool the program into letting his machines function. I’d bet anything that that machine will be dangerous, truly dangerous. The Wode’s fail-safes won’t apply to it.”

I nodded, reaching the third floor. Only a little ways to go.

“So tell me why we’re still planning to fight?” Sophie demanded from just behind. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Look,” I said, spinning on her. “I’m doing this because I have to know, all right? If what we’ve been talking about is true, and if everything before now has been done with a safety net set up . . . then I don’t know, can’t know, who I am. Facing another Liveborn here is a way that I can.”

She paused in the stairwell, water pooling on the step at her feet. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I sure as hell am. Wait here. I’ll lead him someplace less populated.”

“Wait here?” she asked, following me as I turned back down the steps. “Wait here? I’m not one of your soft-headed fantasy maidens with the chain mail undies, Mr. Emperor. I’ve ruled a world too, I’ll have you know, and I didn’t need absolute dictatorial power to do it. I—”

“Fine. Can you fight?”

“Not well.”

“Then what are you going to do?”

“Hack.”

That would be useful. “What can you do?”

“I can make guns work here. Obviously.”

“We need something more,” I said. “Can you make my magic function?”

“That’s a big-time hack, kiddo,” she said. “This is a very non-magical State. Like I said, even the robot is far more natural than magic would be.”

“Yes, but can you do it?”

“I can try, I suppose. Let’s get to where the robot first entered the State.”

“Why does that matter?”

“It shouldn’t,” she said, rounding a banister behind me, our shoes snapping on the uncovered stone. “Technically, this is all code, and there’s no such thing as proximity. But the nature of the system is such that if we’re close to the entry point, we’re ‘close’ to where your friend broke through the State’s defenses. The fabric will be weak there, and odds are that he didn’t cover his tracks very well. Sloppy coding will make it easier for me to piggyback a few other hacks.”

“Okay.”

“I might as well be speaking to a caveman, eh?”

“Fantastical does not mean primitive.”

“Uh-huh. And have you ever actually seen a computer?”

I could imagine them. Glowing light, energy—like lightning—flashing as it gave power to the machine.

“I’ll keep this simple,” she said. “If I can get your magic to work, it will have to happen where the robot broke in. Then you can summon your talking horse or whatever and fly over to blast that overcompensatory machine with your magical rainbows.”

We finally reached the ground floor, and I pushed out onto the rain-slicked street. Sophie followed. I started jogging toward the robot, but she dashed to the side, heading to one of the self-driving vehicles. There were a lot of them parked and unoccupied there.

Feeling foolish, I dashed back after her. We got in, and she made the thing growl. It trembled like an animal coming awake.

“So it is alive,” I said.

“Sure, just keep thinking that, kiddo,” she said, shaking some of the rain from her hair. She made the vehicle move. Quickly.

I yelled and hung on to whatever handholds I could. We tore down the street, far faster than a horse could have galloped. But we also had—in my opinion—far less control. “Things in these States are so uncivilized!”

“Uncivilized?” she shouted.

“The handgun that destroyed the chain, now this. There’s no elegance, just brute force. Watch out for those people! Lords!”

She pushed us around a corner at a ridiculous speed. A good horse would never have let us get this far out of control, and my flying chariots were wonderfully precise. We skirted to the side of the robot, which was crunching its way through the city, still moving toward the building where we’d been dining. It didn’t see us passing.

He can’t track me directly, I thought. Something must have tipped him off to where I was.

Well, with the dinner reservation—and my face on the approved list to get in—I probably hadn’t been difficult to track. I pulled the handgun from its pocket inside my coat. “Can you make this work?”

“I don’t know that I want to be anywhere near you firing one of those,” she said.

“I’m not going to point it at your head, Sophie,” I said dryly. “Make it work.”

She reached over, touching it with her finger. I had a chance to regret distracting her as we almost plowed through a group of people fleeing the robot, but she turned the vehicle just in time.

“Done,” she said, removing her finger. “It is reloaded and fires real bullets now. A simple hack.”

“Yeah, well, someone noticed anyway,” I said.

The robot had turned its massive, red-eyed head our direction. This was by far the largest one Melhi had ever sent after me.

“Damn,” she said. “Your friend is probably monitoring this State for irregularities. Anything I do will alert him.”

I pushed my hand against the glass window on my side of the metal carriage. “Can I . . .”

“Lever on the door,” she said. “Turn it.”

The glass moved down as I turned the lever. Ingenious. I leaned out and pointed the handgun toward the robot, then took three shots in quick succession, my mental boosts kicking in on the first, slowing time for me.

Sure enough, the creature started to trudge after us, its eyes tracking our movements. Firing my weapon let it locate me; the weapons weren’t supposed to fire real bullets in this State, so shooting made a mark on the State’s fabric.

“What was that for?” Sophie demanded.

“I want it following us.”

“What the hell for?”

“Because if it’s coming back this way, it’s moving through the region it already passed, doing less damage,” I said. “Besides, I’ll need it close if I’m going to defeat it.”