Foundryside (The Founders Trilogy #1) - Robert Jackson Bennett Page 0,165

yes if it did?>

She swallowed, relieved. Of course, she thought. Because asking about phonetics, not words, doesn’t break the rules.

<…Yes,> said the shackles.

She took a breath. So the password starts with an “m.” Now I just need to keep guessing—as fast as I can.

“And the girl?” said the guard.

“Dispose of her,” said Estelle. “However you like. She is of no consequence.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He saluted as Estelle turned and left, leaving him alone in the room with Sancia.

Shit! thought Sancia. She started guessing, faster and faster—and she realized then that she could communicate faster with rigs than she could with people. Just like when there’d been a sudden, impenetrable burst of messages between Clef and a rig, she could focus her thoughts and ask dozens if not hundreds of questions at once.

Her mind became a chorus of noes with the occasional yes. And slowly, steadily, she assembled the password in her mind.

The guard walked over and looked down at her. His eyes were small and watery and deep set. He looked her over with the air of a man reviewing a meal and wrinkled his nose. “Hm. Not really my type…”

“Uh-huh,” said Sancia. She shut her eyes, ignored him, and focused on her restraints.

“You praying, girl?”

“No,” said Sancia. She opened her eyes.

“You going to make any noise?” he asked. He thoughtlessly pinched the fabric of his trousers, just next to his crotch, and started kneading it back and forth. “I don’t mind that, honestly. But it’d be a bit inconvenient, with the boys in the hall…”

“The only noise I’m going to make,” she said, “is mango.”

“Is wha—”

With a pop! all of Sancia’s shackles swung open.

The guard stared, and said, “What in the h—”

Sancia sat up, snatched his hand, stuffed his wrist into the shackles, and snapped them shut.

Stunned, the guard stared at his hand and heaved at it. It didn’t budge. “You…You…”

Sancia jumped off the table and smashed the listening needle in the cage. “There. Now you’ll stay put.”

“Clemente!” he bellowed. “She’s loose, she’s loose! Send everyone, everyone!”

Sancia punched the guard in the side of the head as hard as she could. He staggered and slipped, his hand still stuck in the shackles. Before he could react, she knelt and unsheathed his scrived rapier.

She looked at the blade, alight with commands. She could see it was made to amplify gravity, to believe it’d been hurled through the air with inhuman force.

Then there were footsteps in the hallway—lots of them. Sancia took stock of the situation. The hallway beyond was the only exit, and it was rapidly filling up with guards, from the sound of it. She had just the sword on her—and, given her new talents, that gave her a considerable advantage. But probably not enough to take on a dozen men with espringals and the like.

She looked around the room. The far wall was made of stone, and her talents allowed her to glimpse the commands on the other side. These were fainter and more difficult to read, probably due to the distance—but she could see that one rig was scrived to be unnaturally dense, almost unbreakable, a thin, rectangular plate seemingly set in the wall…

A foundry window, she thought. And she’d had recent experience with those.

She addressed the rapier:

the sword bellowed back promptly.

said the sword.

The guards were close now. Sancia put the sword on the ground and stood on it with both feet. Then she picked it back up, took a few steps away from the far wall, and lifted the blade.

She aimed carefully. Then she hurled the sword forward, dropped to the floor behind the table, and covered her head.

It had been a stupefyingly easy thing to do, really. The sword’s weight had been essentially undefined, so she’d just stood on the blade and told it that this new weight it was experiencing was the sword’s actual weight.

But this definition only mattered when its scrivings were activated—specifically, when